Meet the PayPal Mafia

An inside look at the hyperintelligent, superconnected pack of serial entrepreneurs who left the payment service and are turning Silicon Valley upside down.

By Jeffrey M. O'Brien, Fortune senior editor
November 26, 2007

A door opens, and a blond man appears in a white jacket with large buttons. "Good morning," he says. "Peter's in back. Make yourself comfortable in the dining room. I'll be serving breakfast shortly."

Holy cannoli. Peter Thiel has a butler. The 40-year-old entrepreneur runs a $3 billion hedge fund. He's the founder of a new venture capital firm that's the talk of Silicon Valley. He's got an early $500,000 stake in Facebook that's now worth about $1 billion on paper. The man has bankrolled everything from restaurants to movies and is lauded by many as some kind of free-market genius. He drives a half-million-dollar McLaren supercar. And now a butler.

Just back from a morning run, Thiel emerges into the dining room of his home in the shadow of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts. Wearing a powder-blue T-shirt wet with sweat, he displays the relaxed self-confidence of Michael Corleone. Perhaps it comes with the butler. "I'm Peter," he says, extending his hand and smiling before thanking me for agreeing to such a late breakfast meeting. It's 7:30 A.M. "It was nice to sleep in."

The doorbell rings, and in walks a scruffy, sleepy-eyed Max Levchin, 32, who has trekked over from his new $5 million-plus home a few blocks away in Pacific Heights. Every garment on Levchin's unwashed body is a freebie - University of Illinois zip jacket, mismatching shorts, bright orange T-shirt with some Hebrew lettering.

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