Pierre Omidyar

Pierre Omidyar was born Parviz Morad Omidyar in Paris to Iranian parents, his mother a Sorbonne-trained linguist descended from an Imperial Iranian general, his father a urologist, who moved the family to the United States when his father took a position at Johns Hopkins. He grew up partly in Hawaii and Virginia, studied computer science at Tufts, and worked on Apple's MacDraw II software at Claris before co-founding a startup called Ink Development in 1991. It became eShop, an early online-storefront company, and Microsoft bought it in 1996 for under fifty million dollars, a sale that netted Omidyar roughly a million dollars, money and experience, but not yet the thing he would be known for.

Omidyar coded an online auction site over a Labor Day weekend in 1995 and put it live as AuctionWeb — the first sale was a broken laser pointer, and he was surprised anyone bought it at all. Traffic outran him fast, a quarter million auctions within a year, two million a month by early 1997, and he renamed the service eBay after his first choice, echobay.com, turned out to belong to a Canadian mining company. Jeff Skoll joined in 1996, and Meg Whitman took over as president and CEO in 1998, the year of an IPO that made Omidyar and Skoll billionaires before either turned 35. The company folded in PayPal in 2002 and spun it back out in 2015, keeping Omidyar a stake in both — he left eBay's board in 2020 but stayed on as director emeritus.

The company's own founding myth is not quite true. For years journalists repeated the story that Omidyar built the site to help his fiancee trade Pez dispensers — eBay's own historians eventually confirmed the tale was invented by a public-relations manager in 1997 to make a dry story about an auction website more interesting to reporters. The sharper contradiction sits elsewhere: having built his fortune on one of the internet's first dominant platforms, Omidyar has since spent much of it funding people trying to check the platforms that came after his, bankrolling antitrust research through the Open Markets Institute, backing Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, and criticizing the market power of technology companies he once competed alongside.

Omidyar Network, the philanthropy he runs with his wife, Pam, has committed nearly a billion dollars since 2004 to causes from property rights to digital-governance reform, and the couple signed the Giving Pledge in 2010. His journalism ventures show a mixed record: Honolulu Civil Beat has run since 2010 as a local investigative outlet, while First Look Media's Intercept, launched in 2014 on the momentum of the Snowden disclosures, has narrowed since. Forbes has put his net worth near nine to thirteen billion dollars, built almost entirely on a company he no longer runs. His identity has shifted from dot-com founder to funder, backing journalism, antitrust research and causes he now picks rather than the platform he built.

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

• AuctionWeb (later eBay) company
  Launched September 4, 1995 — renamed eBay in 1997 1995
• Omidyar Network company
  Philanthropic investment firm run with his wife, Pam 2004
• Honolulu Civil Beat company
  Nonprofit investigative news outlet covering Hawaii 2010
• First Look Media / The Intercept company
  Launched after the Edward Snowden disclosures 2014

• June 21, 1967 aged 0 Born in Paris, France
• 1988 aged ~21 Graduates from Tufts University with a computer science degree
• 1991 aged ~24 Co-founds Ink Development, later eShop, acquired by Microsoft in 1996
• September 4, 1995 aged 28 Launches AuctionWeb, the site that becomes eBay
• 1997 aged ~30 Renames the site eBay
• September 1998 aged 31 eBay's IPO makes him a billionaire
• 2004 aged ~37 Founds Omidyar Network with his wife, Pam
• February 10, 2014 aged 46 Launches The Intercept through First Look Media
• 2020 aged ~53 Steps down from eBay's board, remaining director emeritus

• Meg Whitman b. 1956
  Former CEO of eBay and HP who helped build e-commerce and enterprise technology giants. hired as eBay's president and CEO in 1998
• Jeff Skoll b. 1965
  eBay's first president whose Skoll Foundation supports social entrepreneurs solving global problems. eBay's first president, joined in 1996
• 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