WHO owns PayPal and what other companies do they run?

       PayPal is an internet money transfer company and was first established as Confinity in 1998.

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       PayPal started off as Confinity and changed names before it went public in 2002 Credit: PA

       Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength and was ranked 204th on the Fortune 500 of the largest US companies by revenue in 2019, taking in $209m that year.

       The company operates in countries that have an online money transfer platform.

       PayPal is lauded for its sophisticated security arrangements.

       Who owns PayPal?

       PayPal is listed on the US stock exchange, which means it's owned by private investors and institutions.

       It was established in 1998 as Confinity and by 2002 was opened up to outside investors under the name PayPal.

       It was bought by eBay a year later for $1.5b and in 2015 it was spun off into an independent company again.

       The money transfer company was founfed by Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Mac Levchin, Yu Pan and Tesla boss Elon Musk.

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       Thiel is a German-American billionaire who established his own venture capital in 1996 that invested in PayPal's baby company, Confinity.

       He was introduced to the business by friends and co-founders Levchin and Nosek, and became its Chief Executive until it was sold in 2002.

       Nosek, a Poland-born American entrepreneur, is a computer engineer who worked on a range of software projects before coming PayPal's Vice President of Marketing and Strategy.

       Like Nosek, Levchin also worked on a range of projects and created a company that allowed users to store encrypted data in a "digital wallet", and eventually developed PayPal.

       Pan was the first employee at YouTube and is one of the original six who started PayPal.

       Musk co-founded the online bank X.com, which merged with Confininty in 2000 to form PayPal.

       What other companies are owned by PayPal?

       PayPal owns a number of online money transfer companies.

       The most well known are iZettle - a mobile credit card payment service - Braintree, Venmo and Xoom Corp.

       It also owns online coupons and discounting company Honey Science Corp, which it bought for $4bn in 2019.

       How did PayPal start-up?

       The company was established by Levchin, Thiel and Nosek in December 1998 as Confinity, which developed software for handheld devices.

       When that failed, it turned towards building the first "digital wallet" and later merged with Musk's x.com online bank in 2000 to form what is now known as PayPal.

       How did PayPal get its name?

       Levchin and Thiel named their first mobile money transfer startup Field Link but when that flundered, changed it to Confinity - a merging of "confidence" and "infinity".

       That soon changed to PayPal: an abbreviation of "paying your pal" through peer to peey money transfers.

       The idea was that PayPal would enable the electronic transfer of money among handheld devices.

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       Elon Musk is a PayPal founder Credit: Reuters