Credit Card Killer

Millennials were shunning plastic and supposedly wary of consumer debt. AFFIRM ’s MAX LEVCHIN saw a way to repackage buying now and paying later for younger folks—and it’s made him a billionaire.

- Jeff Kauflin

On April 26, 1986, 10-yearold Max Levchin and his family were living in Kiev, Ukraine—90 miles south of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. While the Soviet government scrambled to cover up the scale of the disaster, Levchin’s mother, a physicist, understood the radiation risk and immediately packed Max and his brother offto live with his grandmother in Crimea, hundreds of miles away. Five years later, the family arrived in Chicago as Jewish refugees with just $700; the ruble had collapsed and the government had limited how much money people could take out of the country.

“Part of the experience coming to the U.S. from a socialist country is that I just wasn’t prepared for a lot of the things that existed here, good and bad,” Levchin says. “I got my first credit card a couple years after coming to America and promptly destroyed my credit, because I had no idea how to use this power tool.” He’s speaking on January 13, the day Affirm Holdings—the buy now, pay later fintech Levchin cofounded and runs as CEO—went public. Its shares doubled that day to $96, making the company worth $24 billion and his stake worth $2.5 billion.

Code Cracker

Levchin says he taught himself to program computers at age 10 to help his mom, a physicist, who had been instructed by her Soviet state employer to learn the new skill.