PayPal was founded by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Max Levchin.
That answer is accurate in the broad founder-history sense, although PayPal grew out of two companies rather than appearing fully formed under that name. Max Levchin and Peter Thiel helped establish Fieldlink in 1998; it became Confinity and developed a digital-wallet and money-transfer product called PayPal. Elon Musk founded X.com in 1999 as an online financial-services company.
Confinity and X.com merged in 2000. The combined company eventually concentrated on the PayPal payment service, adopted the PayPal name in 2001, and went public in 2002. Peter Thiel led the company as chief executive during its final pre-acquisition phase, while Levchin was central to its engineering and anti-fraud technology.
A common mix-up is treating Musk as the sole founder or assuming that PayPal began as X.com. Musk co-founded X.com, but PayPal’s early product and Confinity roots came from Levchin, Thiel, and their colleagues. Other early founders and executives—including Luke Nosek, Yu Pan, Ken Howery, and Reid Hoffman—also played important roles, which is why historical founder lists may be longer than the three names in this quiz.