National Bestseller * New York Times Editors? Choice * Financial Times ?Books to Read in 2022? ?A gripping account of PayPal?s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible? (The Wall Street Journal)?including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. Today, PayPal?s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry?s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they?re as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media?s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world?s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s.
