This image was lost some time after publication, but you can still view it here.

Seen here, in YouTube founder Jawed Karim's Facebook profile page, the current Stanford grad student (and former PayPal engineer) dressed in disco-era gangster gear. The reason? Karim comments:

lol — yes there is a story. basically a magazine is doing a story about the "PayPal mafia" — a group of ex-PayPal people who have worked together to create companies after PayPal. they took a group photo of us posing as mafia guys, so everyone underwent a full transformation for the photo ;)

Why Karim? We've heard that YouTube's better-known founders, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, were missing from the shoot. We're sure that the magazine wanted at least one representative from last year's $1.65 billion acquisition — a purchase price, some have noted, that seems carefully calibrated to be 10 percent higher than the $1.5 billion PayPal went for. We bet Google's unimaginative PR drones nixed the gangster-gear appearance.


While the PayPal Mafia's an old story online, it's hilarious that a print magazine would pick up on the meme and actually get some PayPal alumni to don costumes for it. We're wondering, which other PayPal alum underwent the Donnie Brasco treatment? Are there pictures floating about of Yelp founders Jeremy Stoppelman and Russell Simmons clutching tommy guns? Or a shot of PayPal founder Peter Thiel looking like Al Capone? Please send them in.