Silicon Valley sells in Hollywood. In the last decade, there’s been a whole roster of motion pictures or limited series about tech companies that have appeared on the big screen: From WeWork and Theranos to Uber and Facebook.
One of the storylines you can expect to see next is PayPal. Jack Selby, one of PayPal’s original employees who now runs Peter Thiel’s family office, and David Sacks, another member of the “PayPal Mafia” who runs the VC firm Craft Ventures, purchased the film rights this year to one of the books about PayPal, and are in the early innings of planning the production. Both of them have a background in film, with Sacks coproducing Thank You for Smoking, and Selby behind titles like Bernie and Silk Road.
“I’ve been trying to figure out which characters we want to focus on the most,” Selby told me on stage yesterday at the Midcon VC Summit in Bentonville, Ark. “People like Elon [Musk] and Peter and Reid [Hoffman] and David himself—these are people that are really well known in the tech world. So we’re trying to figure out which characters we want to tease out and really run with.”
Selby said he “make[s] films to make money,” so he’s trying to gauge whether there’s room in the “Silicon Valley genre” for a success story, rather than the rise-and-fall storylines that have performed so well—and what pieces of the story they’ll need to focus on to keep things interesting. He also openly questioned on stage whether the genre is too saturated now, and whether people are “tired of hearing about Silicon Valley people.”
PayPal is a story of lore within tech circles—a group of twenty- and thirty-somethings that built a global payments startup and sold it to eBay for more than $1.5 billion in less than four years. Of course, there’s a lot of drama to the story, too. Elon Musk, while on his honeymoon in Australia, was famously pushed out of the company in a “coup” and replaced by Thiel.
But part of what makes PayPal’s story most intriguing—the success that its cast of characters went on to experience afterward—won’t easily translate on screen. Hoffman went on to cofound LinkedIn and later joined VC firm Greylock. Thiel cofounded Palantir and opened Founders Fund. Sacks cofounded Craft Ventures. Max Levchin, another PayPal original, founded Affirm while yet another, Roelof Botha, now runs Sequoia Capital. All of this was pointed out in a historic Fortune story in 2007 that coined “PayPal Mafia” for the first time.
The book Sacks and Selby bought the rights to is The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, written by former Huffington Post managing editor Jimmy Soni and published in 2021. Selby says that Soni spent five years interviewing people close to PayPal and that it is “very true” (Elon “definitely sat with Jimmy probably more than any of us,” Selby added).
But a question I have is whether its producers are too close to the story and its cast of characters to tell it like it was—rather than how they hope it will be remembered. I also wonder what Elon Musk will ultimately think of the finished product. His ouster at PayPal (which Selby said on stage he was not involved in) was contentious. Musk’s relationships with many of the people seem to have been repaired over the years (Founders Fund has backed Musk’s SpaceX to Neuralink, for example). But it’s hard to believe Musk is fully over it when, just last year, he renamed Twitter after the name he had lobbied for PayPal all those years ago: X.
Right now, Selby said that he and Sacks are working with musical artist Drake on the film and that they’re considering three different routes: A scripted series that would appear on HBO or Netflix, a full-length motion picture, or a documentary. As for who will star in it, and when it will actually run—if it runs at all—is still in the works.
“I have literally no idea,” Selby said of the timing.
More news below.
Jessica Mathews
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The rest of today’s Data Sheet was written by David Meyer.
NEWSWORTHY
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$29 billion down. SoftBank’s Vision Fund, the investment company’s venture capital arm, has sold off or written down $29 billion in assets since 2021 to prepare for a move into AI and AI-related hardware, Bloomberg reported. Softbank founder Masayoshi Son is said to be seeking up to $100 billion to produce chips that run AI technologies.
Trouble at Oracle Health. Oracle, which spent $28 billion in 2022 to acquire health tech company Cerner, has lost at least 12 major clients, Bloomberg reported. Oracle’s health business sought to revolutionize health care technology, but employees are said to be busy upgrading legacy systems instead of creating new and innovative products.
Jassy broke law. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy broke federal labor law by telling the media in 2022 that, if his employees unionized, they would become less empowered and their workplace would become slower and more bureaucratic. This was the finding of a National Labor Relations Board judge yesterday, based on the prohibition against companies threatening to punish workers for organizing. Amazon intends to appeal, the Seattle Times reports, but the Amazon Labor Union—the complainant in the case—said the ruling “sends a clear message that attempts to dissuade workers from exercising their right to organize and bargain collectively will not be tolerated.”
More Google layoffs. Google is laying off at least a couple hundred of its core engineering staff, with some roles going to India and Mexico, CNBC reports. The layoffs—affecting Google’s Python developer team as well as many in security, app platforms, and so on—come a couple of weeks before Google’s annual I/O developer conference.
IN OUR FEED
“Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create.”
—Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey told Pirate Wires about why he left Bluesky, the social platform he helped create and hoped would become a decentralized alternative to Twitter. The Bluesky team is “literally repeating all the mistakes we made” at Twitter, he added.
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