54 lines
4.8 KiB
Markdown
54 lines
4.8 KiB
Markdown
---
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category: "Technologists"
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aliases:
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- "Max R. Levchin"
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tags:
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- Person
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- PayPalMafia
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- PayPal
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- Affirm
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- PeterThiel
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summary: "Co-founder with Peter Thiel of Confinity, PayPal's chief technology officer, and founder, chairman and chief executive of the lender Affirm, whose 2020 filing listed Founders Fund among its backers."
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relations:
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- type: founded
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with: "[[PayPal]]"
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role: "co-founder of Confinity"
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start: 1998-12
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fn: 1
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- type: employed_by
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with: "[[PayPal]]"
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role: "chief technology officer"
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start: 2000-03
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fn: 1
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- type: founded
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with: "[[Affirm]]"
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role: "founder, chairman and chief executive"
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start: 2012
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fn: 4
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- type: partner_of
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with: "[[Peter Thiel]]"
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role: "co-founder of Confinity"
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start: 1998-12
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fn: 1
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created: 2026-09-22
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updated: 2026-10-14
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---
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Max R. Levchin co-founded Confinity, Inc., with [[Peter Thiel]] in December 1998 and was its chief technology officer and a director until March 2000, when Confinity merged with [[Elon Musk]]'s X.com Corporation; he was then chief technology officer and a director of the merged company, renamed [[PayPal]], Inc., in February 2001. Before Confinity he founded NetMeridian Software, a developer of security applications for handheld computers, which he ran from January 1996 to December 1998, and co-founded SponsorNet, a web advertising service. PayPal's registration statement of September 2001 named Thiel and Levchin as the two executives on whose continued work the company depended to a significant degree, and disclosed that a fraud episode between July and October 2000 had cost it 5.7 million dollars in unauthorized charge-backs and that MasterCard had fined it for excessive charge-backs.[^1] In September 2001 Levchin held 2.6 percent of the company's stock. [[eBay]] completed its acquisition of PayPal, valued at about 1.5 billion dollars, on October 3, 2002.[^1][^2]
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A [[Newsweek]] article by [[Brad Stone]] published July 16, 2001 quotes Levchin, then chief technology officer: "We came to realize that we would either defeat fraud or fraud would defeat us."[^5] The article reports that PayPal reached this conclusion after its rate of rejected credit-card transactions passed one percent, and that Levchin and Thiel "reduced the maximum payment users could make from $500 to $250."[^5] The article says the company's antifraud team numbered 75 and that it had designed an internal program that "sniffs the 180,000 transactions made every day, looking for abuse."[^5] The article says the team named the software "Igor," "after a Russian mobster who plagued the system last year." The registration statement of September 2001 calls the same system "PayPal's proprietary IGOR system."[^6]
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He is counted among the [[PayPal Mafia]], the network of PayPal founders and early executives whose members went on to found or lead [[LinkedIn]], [[Palantir Technologies]], [[Founders Fund]], [[Tesla]] and [[SpaceX]].[^3]
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### Affirm
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Levchin is the founder, chairman and chief executive of [[Affirm]], a consumer lender founded in 2012. Under its registration statement of November 2020, its Class B shares carried fifteen votes each and would convert to ordinary shares on the seventh anniversary of the offering or earlier if Levchin and his wife, Nellie Minkova, left the company, fell below half their holdings, or died. Its Series E investors included entities affiliated with Founders Fund, whose partner [[Keith Rabois]], formerly an executive at PayPal and a lawyer at [[Sullivan & Cromwell]], sat on Affirm's board, and Jasmine Ventures Pte Ltd, which put in about 150 million dollars; Levchin himself bought 4.5 million dollars of the Series E.[^4]
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### Footnotes
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[^1]: PayPal, Inc. Form S-1 registration statement, filed September 28, 2001, SEC file no. 333-70438, "Risk Factors," "Management" and "Principal Stockholders." https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1103415/000091205701533855/a2059025zs-1.htm
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[^2]: PayPal, Inc. Form 8-K, October 4, 2002, exhibit 99.1, "eBay Completes PayPal Acquisition." https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1103415/000091205702037693/a2090698zex-99_1.htm
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[^3]: Cameron, Dell, and Yulia Almazova. "Leak Exposes Members of Peter Thiel's Secretive 'Dialog' Society." *WIRED,* June 16, 2026. https://www.wired.com/story/leak-exposes-members-of-peter-thiels-secretive-dialog-society/
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[^4]: Affirm Holdings, Inc. Form S-1 registration statement, filed November 18, 2020. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1820953/000110465920126927/tm2026663-4_s1.htm
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[^5]: Stone, Brad. "Busting the Web Bandits." *Newsweek,* July 16, 2001. https://www.newsweek.com/busting-web-bandits-154463
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[^6]: PayPal, Inc. Form S-1 registration statement, filed September 28, 2001, "Business," subsection "Risk Management." https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1103415/000091205701533855/a2059025zs-1.htm
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