00:00Peter Thiel became very rich as a result of this.
00:03In fact, in February of 2002, PayPal went public.
00:08It was one of the hottest IPOs in history.
00:10On the first day of trading, their stock price increased by 169%.
00:15When this happened, Peter Thiel became a billionaire overnight.
00:19In fact, he became the seventh richest person in the world.
00:23But while PayPal was doing really well, another company was doing even better, and that was
00:29eBay.
00:29As you probably know, eBay was one of the biggest websites on the internet.
00:34It was one of the biggest places where people were buying and selling things.
00:38And if you bought or sold anything on eBay, you likely used PayPal.
00:43But even though PayPal was doing really well, eBay was doing even better.
00:47In fact, in 2002, eBay acquired a large stake in PayPal, and they basically told them that
00:55if they wanted to continue growing, they needed to be acquired by eBay.
00:59So PayPal agreed to be acquired by eBay, and it was one of the largest acquisitions in corporate
01:05history.
01:05So in July of 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay.
01:11For $1.5 billion, this meant that Peter Thiel would no longer be CEO of PayPal because eBay
01:17already had an existing CEO.
01:19But before we get into who that was, I want to mention that Thiel actually asked the judge
01:24to allow him to keep the PayPal com domain name because he thought it was a cool name.
01:30So he asked the judge to allow him to keep it.
01:32But the judge denied his request and said that the domain name belonged to the new merged company.
01:38So Thiel actually owned the PayPal com domain name for a few months after the acquisition
01:44...until he finally gave it up.
01:46Anyway, after the acquisition, Peter Thiel became the president of eBay.
01:51.
