Pierre Morad Omidyar is a French-Iranian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist, who is the
founder and chairman of the eBay auction site.
He became a billionaire at the age of 31 with eBay's 1998 Initial Public Offering.
Omidyar and his wife Pamela are well-known philanthropists who founded Omidyar Network
in 2004 in order to expand their efforts beyond nonprofits to include for-profits and public
policy.
Since 2010 Omidyar has been involved in online journalism as head of investigative reporting
and public affairs news service Honolulu Civil Beat.
In 2013, he announced he would be creating and financing First Look Media, a journalism
venture to include Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.
Biography Personal life
Omidyar was born in Paris, France, to Iranian immigrant parents who had been sent there
by his grandparents to attend university.
His mother Elahé Mir-Djalali Omidyar, who did her doctorate in linguistics at the Sorbonne,
is a well-known academic.
His father was a surgeon.
The family moved to the U.S. when Omidyar was a child.
Omidyar's interest in computers began while he was a student at The Potomac School in
McLean, Virginia, in the ninth grade.
He was graduated from St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, in 1984.
Omidyar was graduated from Tufts University in Medford/Somerville, Massachusetts, with
a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1988.
Shortly after, Omidyar went to work for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary, where he worked
on the team upgrading MacDraw to MacDraw II.
In 1991, he co-founded Ink Development, a pen-based computing startup that later was
rebranded as an e-commerce company and renamed eShop.
eBay and later career In 1995, at the age of 28, Omidyar began to
write the original computer code for an online venue to enable the listing of a direct person-to-person
auction for collectible items.
He created a simple prototype on his personal web page, and on Labor Day, Monday, September
4, 1995, he launched an online service called, Auction Web, which would eventually become
the auction site eBay.
The service was hosted on a server Omidyar had created for information on the ebola virus.
The first item sold on the site was a broken laser pointer.
Omidyar was astonished that anyone would pay for the device in its broken state, but the
buyer assured him that he was deliberately collecting broken laser pointers.
Similar surprises followed.
The business exploded as correspondents began to register trade goods of an unimaginable
variety.
Omidyar incorporated the enterprise; the small fee he collected on each sale financed the
expansion of the site.
The revenue soon outstripped his salary at General Magic and nine months later, Omidyar
decided to dedicate his full attention to his new enterprise.
By 1996, when Omidyar signed a licensing deal to offer airline tickets online, the site
had hosted 250,000 auctions.
In the first month of 1997, it hosted two million.
By the middle of that year, eBay was hosting nearly 800,000 auctions a day.
In 1997, Pierre Omidyar changed the company's name to eBay and began to advertise the service
aggressively.
The word "eBay" was made up on the fly by Omidyar when he was told that his first choice
for his web site, "echobay", had already been registered.
Not wanting to make a second trip to Sacramento, he came up with "eBay".
The frequently repeated story that eBay was founded to help Omidyar's fiancée trade Pez
candy dispensers was fabricated by a public relations manager in 1997 to interest the
media.
This was revealed in Adam Cohen's 2002 book, and confirmed by eBay.
Jeffrey Skoll joined the company in 1996.
In March 1998, Meg Whitman was brought in as president and CEO, and continued to run
the company until January 2008, when she announced her retirement.
In September 1998, eBay launched a successful public offering, making both Omidyar and Skoll
billionaires.
As of July 2008, Omidyar's 178 million eBay shares were worth around $4.45 billion.
Omidyar is also an investor of Montage Resort and Spa in Laguna Beach, California.
In 2010, Omidyar launched online an investigative reporting news service, Honolulu Civil Beat,
covering civic affairs in Hawaii.
The site has been named Best News Website in Hawaii for three consecutive years.
On September 4, 2013, Honolulu Civil Beat started a partnership with The Huffington
Post, launching the weblog's latest regional addition, HuffPost Hawaii.
In 2013 Omidyar announced the creation of First Look Media, a journalism venture that
was launched on February 10, 2014, with The Intercept, and includes journalists such as
Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, Dan Froomkin, John Temple, and Jay Rosen.
Omidyar Network
Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of
markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives.
It was established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam.
The organization invests in and helps scale innovative organizations to catalyze economic,
social, and political change.
To date, Omidyar Network has committed more than $270 million to for-profit companies
and nonprofit organizations that foster economic advancement and encourage individual participation
across multiple investment areas, including property rights, government transparency,
and social media.
In 2010, he and his wife established, along with Richard Branson and the Nduna Foundation,
Enterprise Zimbabwe.
Wealth According to Forbes, Pierre Omidyar is worth
$8.5 billion as of September 2013, making him the 123rd richest person in the world.
Awards and honors Honorary degree, Doctor of Public Service,
Tufts University See also
List of billionaires Iranian diaspora
Iranian American Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund
Footnotes
References
External links The Omidyar Group
Omidyar Network Pierre Omidyar's Blog
Tufts Microfinance Fund Further reading
"An Interview With Pierre Omidyar".
New York Times, October 20, 2013.
Accessed October 21, 2013.
"Pierre Omidyar Ready To Spend $250 Million On Glenn Greenwald's News Startup".
Forbes, October 16, 2013.
Accessed October 21, 2013.
"Snowden Journalist’s New Venture to Be Bankrolled by eBay Founder".
New York Times, October 16, 2013.
Accessed October 21, 2013.
"The extraordinary promise of the new Greenwald-Omidyar venture".
Columbia Journalism Review, October 17, 2013.
Accessed October 21, 2013.