Founders - Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Yu Pan Russel Simmons, Elon Musk

First location - Palo Alto, CA

PayPal was first established in December 1998 as Confinity, a company that developed security software for handheld devices.Confinity was founded by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Yu Pan and Russel Simmons.

PayPal was developed and launched as a money transfer service at Confinity in 1999.

In March 2000, Confinity merged with X.com, an online banking company founded by Elon Musk. Musk was optimistic about the future success of the money transfer business Confinity was developing.

In October of that year, Musk made the decision that X.com would terminate its other Internet banking operations and focus on the PayPal money service. The X.com company was then renamed PayPal in 2001, and expanded rapidly throughout the year until company executives decided to take PayPal public in 2002.