A former PayPal executive has bought the rights to a movie about Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, who led Silicon Valley’s legendary PayPal mafia in their pre-billionaire days.
Jack Selby, who sold his stake when eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, worked with his former colleague and former PayPal COO David Sachs to create The Founders: The Story. of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped. According to Silicon Valley, bloomberg.
The film will be an adaptation of the book of the same name written by former Huffington Post editor-in-chief Jimmy Soni.
Selby told Bloomberg that “all kinds of versions” of telling the story of PayPal’s origins are being considered, adding that he is still considering whether to make a “feature film, serialized version or documentary.”
“I just want this story to be told properly,” added Selby, who worked as a senior vice president at a payment processing company before founding venture capital firm AZ-VC.
As told in the book The Founders, Musk, Thiel and Hoffman each founded Tesla, joined the board of Facebook parent company Meta, and clashed over PayPal before founding LinkedIn. did.
In a biography of Mr. Musk published last year, author Walter Isaacson called the trio key members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia,” although Mr. Musk reportedly said that he was involved in a “coup d’état.” He was fired from his position as CEO of PayPal and reportedly disbanded in 2000. ” It was planned by Thiel, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, co-founder Max Levchin, then-board member Hoffman, and Sachs, then PayPal’s COO and product leader.
Three years later, Musk founded Tesla, which established itself as the world’s largest electric car maker and propelled the 52-year-old CEO to the top of the world’s richest list.
As of this writing, Musk remains the richest person, with a fortune of $199 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
More than 20 years after Musk’s partnership with PayPal, which began when he merged electronic payments company X.com with PayPal’s parent company Confinity, Selby wants to bring the story to the big screen. I believe.
This is not Selby’s first time producing a film. In addition to working as a managing director at the Selby Thiel family office, she co-founded the production company High Frequency Entertainment in 2011.
The independent film production company has since focused on producing films with budgets under $10 million, according to Bloomberg.
“Our two recent films, “His Three Daughters” and “Memory.”,” were both screened and sold at the Toronto Film Festival last year. “They’ve been very successful, especially given the challenges in the industry,” Selby said, according to Bloomberg.
Selby, whose net worth is reported to be around $50 million, added, “Making movies keeps me humble.”
In October, High Frequency sold “His Three Daughters,” starring Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen, to Netflix for about $7 million.
“By movie standards, this is a Peter Thiel-Facebook kind of investment, but not 10,000 times the original capital,” Selby told Bloomberg.
It’s unclear whether The Founders will also be made for less than $10 million, but Selby said he is currently in “a number of discussions with Sachs about director candidates and other aspects of the project.”
According to Bloomberg, the two have already approached famous rapper Drake’s entertainment company DreamCrew to produce the film.
Representatives for High Frequency Entertainment did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
