Pierre Omidyar

Parviz Morad Omidyar was born on June 21, 1967, in Paris, to Iranian parents who had immigrated to France for higher education. His mother, Elahé Mir-Djalali, was an academic in linguistics, while his father, Cyrus Omidyar, was a surgeon. His maternal grandfather was General Mahmud Mir-Djalali, a former Vice Chairman of the General Staff of the Imperial Iranian Armed Forces, and was widely regarded as the "father" of Iran's military industries and tank forces.

Omidyar's family immigrated to the United States when he was a child. He attended Punahou School in Honolulu for two years, and now serves on the school's board of trustees. His interest in computers began while he was a ninth-grade student at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia. He graduated high school in 1984 at St. Andrew's Episcopal School, in Potomac, Maryland, and then entered Tufts University, where he graduated with a degree in computer science in 1988.

Shortly after studying at Tufts, Omidyar started working for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary. He worked with the team that upgraded 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 Inc.

Microsoft acquired eShop on June 11, 1996, for less than $50 million, and Omidyar earned $1 million from the deal.

Founding eBay

In 1995, at 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 web page. On Labor Day, Monday, September 4, 1995, he launched an online service called Auction Web, which would eventually be developed as the auction site eBay.

The service was originally one of several items on Omidyar's website eBay.com. His website also had a section devoted to the Ebola virus, among other topics.

The first item sold on the eBay site was a broken laser pointer. Omidyar was astonished that anyone would pay for a broken device, but the buyer assured him that he was deliberately collecting broken laser pointers. Similar surprises followed. The business exploded as correspondents began registering a wide variety of trade goods.

Omidyar incorporated the enterprise; his small fee on each sale financed the site's expansion. 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 hosted nearly 800,000 auctions daily.

In 1997, Omidyar changed the company's name from AuctionWeb to eBay and began advertising the service aggressively. The name "eBay" was his second choice. His first choice was registered to a Canadian mining company, Echo Bay Mines. He originally wanted Echo Bay, the name of a recreational area near Lake Mead, Nevada, because it "sounded cool". When he learned that echobay.com was taken, he dropped the "cho", and ebay.com was born. 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 The Perfect Store, and confirmed by eBay.

Omidyar and his wife Pamela own properties in Henderson, Nevada and Honolulu, Hawaii. According to Forbes, his net worth was US$13.1 billion as of January 2019. He is a major donor to Democratic Party candidates and organizations. Omidyar is a follower of the Dalai Lama. In 2010, he joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as a signatory of The Giving Pledge, and has declared his intention to give away most of his wealth during his lifetime. In 2019, he donated approximately $500 million to charitable causes.

He has bankrolled groups like the anti-monopoly think tank Open Markets Institute and the digital rights group Public Knowledge Project, in the fight against the big tech companies, which he criticizes as overly powerful and destructive to democracy.

His advocacy and philanthropic investment firm the Omidyar Network, distributed widely read papers laying out the antitrust cases against Facebook and Google. In February 2021, his network hosted a series on whistleblowing, and is now providing financial support to Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Omidyar has given funding to the Center for Humane Technology, whose head of public affairs is Haugen's top PR representative in the US.