Happy Tuesday. What a week, eh?

Today I have three nuggets of reporting about three members of the famed PayPal Mafia, the set of Silicon Valley visionaries who in the two decades since founding PayPal have reshaped politics, media and culture. Below, I’ll take you into my latest reporting on Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel.

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Teddy

Of course, Elon Musk didn’t do it alone. His public takeover of Twitter was facilitated in part thanks to the quiet efforts of Jared Birchall, the intentionally low-profile chief executive of Elon’s family office, Excession LLC. Family office heads can control billions in deployable capital, but they often remain totally anonymous. And given that they are investing the fortune of some larger-than-life figure, they tend to have Scottie Pippen alpha-adjacent personalities. Many family office employees don’t even identify where they work—not that it is actually a secret to anyone in finance, but the culture of wealth management is rooted in discretion. (You’ll see “UHNW Family” or just “Family Office” as their employer on LinkedIn.)...