What if Elon never sold his Paypal shares?

I’ve always been amazed about Paypal, not just the mafia but also the incredible value creation it has achieved since being bought by eBay in 2002 and being run by none of the co-founders, neither Thiel nor Musk.

As a reminder, eBay bought Paypal for $1.5B in 2002. Ebay then spun it off again in 2014 as a public company. Paypay’s market cap today is roughly $125B.

$125B / $1.5B = 83.3X

All that 82.3X value growth without Thiel or Musk!

Another question is how much would Elon be worth if he had not sold his shares to eBay.

According to Wikipedia, Elon was the largest shareholder (more than Thiel) before the sale, owning 11.7% of Paypal, which netted him $165M from eBay, all of which he in turn “famously” invested in Tesla, SpaceX and Solarcity.

That 11.7% would have been worth:

$125B * 11.7% = $14.6B

a remarkable sum of wealth, which however is still less than the reported net worth of $24.1B as of today, mostly through his ownership in Tesla (which merged with Solarcity in 2016) and SpaceX.

That said, as was widely reported recently, the $24.1B that Elon currently owned is largely not liquid, while $14.6B worth of Paypal shares is way more liquid.

In other words, at least he wouldn’t have been “short on cash”.