Company Overview
Highlights
An eBay company since October 2002.
100 million account members worldwide.
Available in 55 countries and territories.
PayPal, formerly X.com, offers customers a way to send money electronically to anyone with an email address. Transactions are charged to the user’s bank account, credit card, or PayPal balance. X.com Corporation was founded in March 1999 by Elon Musk, who in 1995 founded Internet media company Zip2, which he subsequently sold to AltaVista. In March 2000, X.com merged with PayPal, another company offering Internet-based person-to-person payment services, largely for settling online auction transactions. PayPal was acquired by online auction site eBay toward the end of 2002. It is facing a new source of competition from Google, which in 2006 launched its own online payments business, GBuy. Also in 2006, PayPal agreed to pay $5.2 million to settle charges that it was insufficiently clear to consumers about its fraud-protection practices.