eBay agrees to buy PayPal for $1.5 billion
The sale of PayPal, which grew out of Musk's X.com, gave him the funds to start SpaceX and invest in Tesla.
Archive entry. This article looks back at an event from July 2002. It was drafted with AI assistance from public records and is being fact-checked. See our About page.
PayPal came out of a 2000 merger between X.com, which Elon Musk had founded, and Confinity, a payments company co-founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. The combined company took the PayPal name.
In July 2002, eBay announced it would buy PayPal for about $1.5 billion in stock. Musk was PayPal's largest shareholder and reportedly received about $175 million before taxes.
What he did next
Musk put much of that money into new companies. In 2002 he founded SpaceX, and in 2004 he led Tesla's funding round and joined as chairman.
