There are a handful of big dates that stand out for PayPal — one of which hasn’t happened yet, but will soon be marked down in PayPal’s timeline of big events.
That date, of course, is July 20, 2015: when PayPal officially splits from eBay and begins trading again as PYPL.
For this week’s Throwback Thursday, PYMNTS wanted to take you through a brief history tour of big days for the payments network, and share what else was going on in the U.S. during PayPal’s big moments.
The tone has been set. Peter Thiel and Max Levchin met just a month prior, and they soon would launch Fieldlink, which PayPal described on its blog as “a security focused company which allowed users to store encrypted information on Palm Pilots and other PDA devices, enabling their handheld devices to become digital wallets.”
Digital wallets, the duo claims at the time, are safer because money can’t be stolen the same way as cash can be from a physical wallet.
In a town called Palto Alto, California, it was the year 1998. The vision that PayPal’s founders — Max Levchin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery — formed was finally coming together. Initially, Levchin and Thiel launched Confinity, which later merged with the online banking company X.com. PayPal eventually become the main focus and later was used as the name of the company. X.com changed its name to PayPal in June 2001.
PayPal as we know it has marked a new era and consumers learn how they can make payments using email.
PayPal logos slowly made their way to eBay’s marketplace, so PayPal saw a business opportunity and made it so eBay shoppers could pay on the marketplace via PayPal. eBay agrees and PayPal’s account base jumps to 100,000.
On Feb. 15, 2002, PayPal joined the world of publicly traded companies. And according to a CNN Money report from the day, it did quite well for itself on Day 1.
According to the report, PayPal’s stock went up close to 55 percent on NASDAQ, making it the year’s best first gain for a newly issued company. Shares of PayPal hit a high of $22.44, which was up significantly from its $13 IPO price. And when PayPal went public the first time, CNN called it “a leading maker of interfaces, or ‘touch pads,’ for notebook computers.”
PayPal raised $70.2 million for its IPO.
It didn’t take long after PayPal went public for eBay to see the value in the company that already had 1 million users. eBay announced in July 2002 that it would be acquiring the payments network for $1.5 billion, and it was made official in October.
News of the spinoff broke. eBay and PayPal no longer would be one after the company finally gave in to the demands from eBay’s largest shareholder, Carl Icahn. It was announced at the time that the spinoff would occur some time in the second half of 2014, and we now know that date will be July 20.