PayPal is an American digital-payments company, founded in 1998 and headquartered in San Jose, California, that lets people and businesses send, receive, and hold money online through one of the world's largest payment networks.
PayPal traces to the 1998 startup Confinity, whose money-transfer product merged with Elon Musk's X.com in 2000; the combined company adopted the PayPal name, went public, and was acquired by eBay in 2002. It operated as an eBay subsidiary until 2015, when it was spun off as an independent, publicly traded company (Nasdaq: PYPL).
PayPal runs a two-sided digital-payments platform spanning consumer wallets, online and in-store checkout, peer-to-peer transfers, and merchant processing, serving hundreds of millions of active accounts worldwide. Beyond its core brand it owns 📝Venmo for peer-to-peer payments, Braintree for merchant processing, Xoom for international remittances, and Honey for deals and rewards, and it has expanded into buy-now-pay-later lending and cryptocurrency.
Alex Chriss became chief executive in September 2023, succeeding Dan Schulman. As one of the pioneers of online payments, PayPal now competes with a wave of digital-wallet, fintech, and checkout rivals while leaning on the scale of its network and family of brands.