Jeff Skoll

Skoll was born January 16, 1965, in Montreal, to a Jewish family that moved to Toronto in the late 1970s; his father ran a small chemical company, and Jeff worked at a gas station to help pay his way through the University of Toronto, where he earned an engineering degree in 1987. After several years running his own small businesses, he went to Stanford for an MBA, finishing in 1995, and met a French-Iranian immigrant programmer named Pierre Omidyar who was building an online auction site called AuctionWeb out of his apartment. Omidyar hired Skoll in 1996 as the company's first employee and full-time president, and Skoll wrote the business plan, the actual paper document, that turned a hobby site into eBay.

Skoll stepped back from eBay's presidency in 1998 when Meg Whitman arrived to run day-to-day operations, staying on as vice president for strategic planning until back problems pushed him out entirely; his stock, cashed out around and after the company's 1998 IPO, was worth roughly two billion dollars. He put most of it into the Skoll Foundation, founded in 1999 to fund what he called social entrepreneurship, organizations trying to solve large problems with business-style discipline rather than charity alone, and in 2004 founded Participant Media, a film company built to make movies about issues rather than just stories, producing An Inconvenient Truth, Spotlight and Roma before closing in 2024. A 2009 fund aimed at climate change, pandemics and nuclear risk grew into a nonprofit called Ending Pandemics, and in 2020 alone he gave 120 million dollars toward COVID-19 response.

Skoll built his fortune and his philanthropy on the same bet, that markets and storytelling could be redirected toward social outcomes rather than simply profit, and both halves have had mixed results. Participant's films won 18 Academy Awards and moved public conversation on subjects from climate change to clergy abuse, but the company itself never became self-sustaining and closed after two decades of subsidized losses. The Skoll Global Threats Fund's warnings about pandemic risk, issued years before COVID-19, proved prescient in a way that did little to change how prepared the world actually was when the pandemic came. He has given away roughly a billion dollars in eBay stock through his foundation, money still trying, by his own foundation's account, to prove its theory of change works at scale.

Skoll remains active through the Skoll Foundation and Capricorn Investment Group, the impact-investing firm he founded that now manages more than five billion dollars, and continues signing checks toward pandemic preparedness and climate mitigation into his sixties. Whether social-entrepreneurship philanthropy of the kind Skoll pioneered actually outperforms traditional grantmaking, or whether it just repackages the same giving in more market-friendly language, is a live argument in the philanthropy world that his own record, a shuttered film studio, an early pandemic warning system, a foundation still funding entrepreneurs decades in, has not settled either way.

Jeff Skoll's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• eBay business plan other
  Wrote the founding business plan as the company's first employee 1996
• Skoll Foundation company
  Endowed with roughly one billion dollars in eBay stock to fund social entrepreneurship 1999
• Participant Media company
  Produced An Inconvenient Truth, Spotlight and Roma; closed 2024 2004
• Skoll Global Threats Fund other
  100 million dollar fund on pandemics, climate and nuclear risk; became Ending Pandemics 2009

• January 16, 1965 aged 0 Born in Montreal, Quebec
• 1987 aged ~22 Graduates from the University of Toronto in engineering
• 1995 aged ~30 Completes his MBA at Stanford
• 1996 aged ~31 Hired by Pierre Omidyar as eBay's first employee and president
• January 1998 aged 32 Steps back as Meg Whitman takes over as eBay CEO
• 1999 aged ~34 Founds the Skoll Foundation
• 2004 aged ~39 Founds Participant Media
• 2020 aged ~55 Gives 120 million dollars toward COVID-19 response
• April 2024 aged 59 Closes Participant Media after two decades

• Pierre Omidyar b. 1967
  eBay founder whose Omidyar Network supports entrepreneurship, human rights, and governance reform. eBay's first president, hired by
• Meg Whitman b. 1956
  Former CEO of eBay and HP who helped build e-commerce and enterprise technology giants. succeeded as eBay president
• Al Gore b. 1948
  Vice president and 2000 presidential candidate who became a leading advocate for climate policy. produced his climate documentary
• Bill Gates b. 1955
  Co-founder of Microsoft who, through the Gates Foundation, has donated billions to global health and education. fellow Giving Pledge signatory