Affirm was initially supposed to be an alternative credit rating system based on social signals, and I believe credit ratings are highly regulated, so they pivoted to money lending, which is not as nice of a business. Levchin seems pretty desperate to be a successful serial entrepreneur and compares himself to other ex-Paypal people who have gone on to do big things[1]. This is despite having made a ton of money via investing in Yelp. He did manage to exit Slide to Google, but I don't know how successful of an acquisition that is considered within Google. There was that Sarah Lacy book called "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" in which he was pretty prominently profiled, so successful serial entrepreneurship must be a prestige thing for him. I agree with you that retail money lending seems a bit desperate and unseemly, and definitely not on the same level as SpaceX or LinkedIn. It feels a bit like Square getting into payday loans to gin up revenue.

[1] https://pando.com/2013/08/08/with-another-6m-glow-is-max-lev...