Bin night leads to $5bn payday for Afterpay’s Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen after $39bn deal with Jack Dorsey’s Square

The ‘buy now, pay later’ pioneers are among Australia’s wealthiest tech billionaires following a big merger just seven years after founding their company.

Anthony Eisen and Nick Molnar from technology company Afterpay will share in a $5bn payday after the Square deal.

Afterpay co-founders Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen are in for share-based payday of more than $5bn after agreeing to merge with Jack Dorsey’s digital payments giant Square.

The all-share deal is worth about $39bn and cements the places of Mr Molnar, 31, and Mr Eisen, 49, among the wealthiest on The List – Australia’s Richest 250.

It also comes slightly more than five years after the duo floated their “buy now, pay later” business on the ASX.

Mr Molnar‘s current stake of 6.87 per cent in Afterpay means the deal is worth $2.68bn for him, while Mr Eisen’s 6.72 per cent stake equates to a $2.62bn payday in Square shares, which are listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

The duo also sold about $60m worth of Afterpay shares each earlier this year, after exercising about 1.5m in share options at $1.00 each. Those parcels of shares alone are worth more than $150m each now.

Monday’s announcement of the Square deal, which the Afterpay board has recommended its shareholders accept, comes only about 18 months after Afterpay shares were hit hard in the early days of the Covid pandemic sharemarket selldown in March last year.

Afterpay’s share price dropped by about 90 per cent in three days of trading and Mr Eisen wrote to shareholders to reassure them of the company’s financial positions.

The company’s share price has since surged in value, though while the shares are worth about 45 per cent more than a year ago they have actually fallen by almost 19 per cent since January 1 as Afterpay faces increasing competition in Australia and around the world.

But the Square deal caps one of the biggest rises of an Australian business in recent years, with Afterpay only founded seven years ago.

And Afterpay’s rise is also due to some fortuitous timing and Mr Eisen putting the bins out at his former Sydney home late at night, when he would notice a light on at the house across the road and someone working into the small hours.

That was a young Mr Molnar, who was selling jewellery over eBay from his home, including packaging the goods and taking them to the post office the next morning, and was so good at it that he was selling more jewellery on the website than anyone else in Australia.

The duo, separated by almost a couple of decades in age, would strike up a friendship and Mr Molnar would share his idea of what would become Afterpay, basically allowing debit cards to be used as virtual credit cards by providing instalment payments.

The idea has a been a huge hit with millennial shoppers with an aversion to credit cards, and Afterpay has come on to become one of the most valuable Australian tech companies.

Another big shareholder in Afterpay is the estate of the late Adrian Cleeve, which holds a stake that would be worth more than $2bn. Mr Cleeve died in 2016 and was the CEO of Touchcorp, which merged with Afterpay in 2017.

Square, established by Twitter founder Mr Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009, plans to integrate Afterpay into its existing Seller and Cash App business units, which would “enable even the smallest of merchants to offer BNPL at checkout” and give Afterpay consumers the ability to manage their instalment payments in Square’s Cash App.

Mr Eisen and Mr Molnar will lead Afterpay’s merchant and consumer businesses which will be part of Square’s ‘Seller’ and ‘Cash App’ businesses.