PayPal was the online payment company created by the 2000 merger of X.com and Confinity.
Elon Musk founded X.com in 1999 as an online financial-services company. Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek, had developed a money-transfer service that became more popular than its original security software. The companies merged in March 2000.
The combined business eventually adopted the PayPal name. Musk served as chief executive of the merged company for a period, but was removed as CEO in 2000 while remaining an important shareholder. eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, and PayPal later became an independent publicly traded company again.