PayPal  PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American company operating a worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like checks and money orders. The company operates as a payment processor for online vendors, auction sites, and many other commercial users, for which it charges a fee in exchange for benefits such as one-click transactions and password memory. Established in 1998 as Confinity, PayPal had its initial public offering in 2002. It became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay later that year, valued at $1.5 billion. eBay spun off PayPal in 2015 to eBay's shareholders. The company ranked 204th on the 2019 Fortune 500 of the largest United States corporations by revenue. PayPal was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Confinity, a company that developed security software for handheld devices. It had no success with that business model, however, so switched its focus to a digital wallet. The first version of the PayPal electronic payments system was launched in 1999. In March 2000, Confinity merged with X.com, an online banking company founded by Elon Musk. Musk was optimistic about the future success of the money transfer business Confinity was developing. Musk and Bill Harris, then-president and CEO of X.com, disagreed about the potential future success of the money transfer business and Harris left the company in May 2000. In October of that year, Musk decided that X.com would terminate its other internet banking operations and focus on PayPal. That same month, Elon Musk was replaced by Peter Thiel as CEO of X.com, which was renamed PayPal in 2001 and went public in 2002. PayPal's IPO listed under the ticker PYPL at $13 per share and generated over $61 million. Shortly after PayPal's IPO, the company was acquired by eBay on October 3, 2002, for $1.5 billion. More than 70 percent of all eBay auctions accepted PayPal payments, and roughly 1 in 4 closed auction listings were transacted via PayPal. PayPal became the default payment method used by the majority of eBay users, and the service competed with eBay's subsidiary Billpoint, as well as Citibank's c2it, Yahoo!'s PayDirect, and Google Checkout. In 2005, PayPal acquired the VeriSign payment solution to provide added security support. In 2007, PayPal announced a partnership with MasterCard, which led to the development and launch of the PayPal Secure Card service, a software that allows customers to make payments on websites that do not accept PayPal directly.