Boycott Dispatch #20: Paypal
Ok, maybe they have not been in the headlines lately directly bending to Trump, but trust me, they are in the wings, just waiting for that big ask.
And if Trump wants something? Whatever it is, they’ll hand it over the second it boosts profits.
This is where figures like Thiel, Trump, David Marcus, and plenty of other opportunists sharpened their knives.
Maybe fewer people use it now—and honestly, with the stolen funds, withheld accounts, and mystery fees, that might be for the best—but symbolism matters too.
Our money is power.
And some institutions have done more than enough to prove they’ll follow greed wherever it leads. So even on principle alone, it may be worth keeping your money somewhere else.
This is from our big boycott guide, entry #20:
20. PayPal — The Orchard That Grew the Oligarchs
PayPal helped invent the modern digital economy.
But it also planted something else.
Think of it like a kind of corporate Johnny Appleseed story — except instead of apple trees, the founders scattered the seeds of the modern tech-oligarch class.
The so-called PayPal Mafia didn’t just build a payments company. They used that fortune to grow an ecosystem of surveillance firms, financial platforms, and political influence that now shapes the world we live in.
They planted the orchard.
Now we’re living in the forest.
Peter Thiel (co-founder) took PayPal money and built Palantir, the data-mining company feeding on government contracts to track immigrants, surveil populations, and power the modern security state. He became one of Trump’s earliest tech backers and the political patron who launched JD Vance.
Thiel has said openly that democracy and freedom are incompatible.
His version of freedom looks a lot like billionaire rule.
Elon Musk (early PayPal leadership) took the same worldview — centralize power, destabilize institutions, profit from chaos — and scaled it across multiple platforms and industries.
David Marcus (former PayPal president) pushed the company toward crypto libertarianism before attempting Facebook’s failed global currency experiment. He now runs Lightspark, still evangelizing Bitcoin as the future of money.
And PayPal itself helped normalize a world where a handful of tech companies sit between people and their own money.
The ideology that grew out of that orchard — billionaire power, financial platforms without oversight, surveillance as a business model — is now everywhere.
PayPal may no longer dominate the tech headlines, but the ecosystem it helped create is thriving.
And that ecosystem is deeply hostile to democracy.
What To Do
Delete your PayPal account.
Remove linked cards and bank accounts.
Move your money to credit unions, community banks, or payment systems that aren’t tied to the tech-oligarch pipeline.
Every dollar you leave there feeds the machine they helped plant.