Who Owns PayPal?

Who is the owner of PayPal?

PayPal is a public company owned by its shareholders, but its ownership history is more eventful than that simple answer suggests.

The company traces its roots to 1999, when Elon Musk founded the online payments startup X.com, while Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Max Levchin were building a similar service called Confinity. The two companies later merged, with Musk exiting before the end of 2000. Confinity was renamed PayPal and went public on the Nasdaq in February 2002, with shares jumping 50% on the first day of trading.

PayPal didn’t stay public for long. Just months after its IPO, eBay (EBAY -1.52%) acquired the company for $1.5 billion and took it private, relying heavily on PayPal to power its checkout experience. Over time, PayPal expanded beyond eBay, added services like Venmo, and ultimately spun off as an independent public company again in 2015.

Who are the largest shareholders?

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires public company insiders and beneficial owners to disclose their share positions. Insiders are usually company executives who are privy to corporate details before they become public knowledge. Beneficial owners hold more than 5% of a class of stock.

According to SEC filings, the largest insiders and beneficial owners of PayPal include the following.

1. Pierre M. Omidyar is the founder of eBay. In 2018, he reported owning 58 million shares of PayPal. Based on PayPal's current outstanding share count, that amounted to a 5.2% ownership stake in early 2024. At a stock price of roughly $62, Omidyar's position was worth about $3.6 billion. Omidyar is no longer actively involved in eBay or PayPal.
2. Daniel H. Schulman was CEO of PayPal from 2015 until he retired at the end of 2023. As of his last filing in December 2023, Schulman owned 597,883 PayPal shares. His position amounted to a 0.05% ownership stake, worth about $37 million.
3. Aaron Karczmer is executive vice president and chief enterprise services officer for PayPal. As of March 2024, Karczmer owned 142,442 PayPal shares worth almost $9 million.
4. John Joseph Donahoe is CEO of Nike (NYSE:NIKE) and is the chairman of PayPal's board of directors. Donahoe owned 83,553 PayPal shares as of January 2024, valued at about $5 million.
5. David Wyatt Dorman, also a PayPal director, owned 66,405 shares as of January 2024. Dorman's PayPal position has added roughly $4 million to his net worth.

The largest institutional investors in PayPal are as follows.

1. Vanguard Group owns about 8% of PayPal. The mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) powerhouse has 90 million shares worth $5.6 billion in total.
2. BlackRock (BLK -4.35%), one of the world's largest asset managers, has 72.5 million shares of PayPal, or 6.5% of the company. The shares' cumulative value of $4.5 billion is a tiny sliver of BlackRock's $10 trillion of assets under management.
3. State Street Corp. (STT -1.88%), another fund manager, owns 4% of PayPal, with 45.3 million shares. The position is worth about $2.8 billion.
4. Comprehensive Financial Management, a California-based financial advisory firm, holds 28.6 million PayPal shares. That is a 2.5% ownership position, worth about $1.8 billion.
5. Geode Capital Management is an asset manager and Fidelity spinoff. Geode owns 21.2 million PayPal shares. The position is worth $1.3 billion and amounts to a 1.9% ownership stake.