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PayPal started trading as an independent company on Monday, following its spin out from eBay last week - and it's already worth more than some of the biggest tech companies.
According to this chart put together by Statista, as of early Monday, PayPal had a market cap of $49.5 billion, which is higher than that of Netflix, eBay, and Twitter. That means the market is giving PayPal a much higher value than its former parent company, eBay - the company that previously acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion back in 2002 - before splitting it out due to pressure from activist investors like Carl Icahn.
As an independent company, PayPal is a digital payment juggernaut, with more than 169 million users worldwide. The in-app payment technology provider Braintree and the peer-to-peer payment app Venmo are both under PayPal's umbrella, while global money transfer service Xoom was also acquired earlier this month.
eBay, meanwhile, has seen its value decline following the spin off of PayPal and the $925 million sale of its enterprise business last week. In fact, PayPal was eBay's largest growth engine, contributing roughly 82% of eBay's annualized revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2014.
Statista