Pierre Omidyar

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Pierre Morad Omidyar (born June 21, 1967) is an American billionaire, computer scientist, and philanthropist.

He is the founder of eBay, where he served as chairman from 1998 to 2015.

With eBay's 1998 initial public offering (IPO), he became a billionaire at the age of 31.

Omidyar and his wife Pamela founded Omidyar Network in 2004 in the hope of expanding their efforts beyond non-profits to include for-profits and public policy. Since 2010, Omidyar has been active in online journalism as the head of investigative reporting and public affairs news service Honolulu Civil Beat.

In 2013, he revealed that he would create and fund First Look Media, a journalism venture that would feature Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.

Early life and education

Omidyar was born in Paris and the son of Iranian parents who had immigrated to France for higher education. He was named Parviz. Elahé Mir-Djalali Omidyar, a Sorbonne scholar who earned her doctorate in linguistics, is an academic. Cyrus Omidyar (born in 1934) completed medical school and apprenticeship in France and is a surgeon.

Since immigrating with his family to the United States as an infant, Omidyar served as a urologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He now lives in Aliso Viejo, California.

For a few years, Omidyar attended Punahou School in Honolulu. (He now serves on the Board of Trustees) Since he was a ninth-grade student at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia, his curiosity in computers began. He graduated from St. Andrew's Episcopal School, Potomac, Maryland, in 1984.

He studied at Tufts University, graduating with a B.S. Berkeley University of California, 1988, and the University of California, Berkeley, were both interested in computer science.

Personal life

In Henderson, Nevada, and Honolulu, Hawaii, Omidyar and his wife Pamela own real estate. According to Forbes, his net worth as of January 2019 was US$13.1 billion. He is a major contributor to Democratic Party candidates and organizations.

Omidyar, a Buddhist follower of the Dalai Lama who joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as a signatory of The Giving Pledge in 2010, has confirmed his intention to give away a substantial portion of his income during his lifetime. In 2019, he gave nearly $500 million to charitable causes.

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Career

Omidyar started working for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary, less than a year after studying at Berkeley. He worked with the MacDraw II crew, which later changed MacDraw to MacDraw II. In 1991, he co-founded Ink Development, a pen-based computing startup that later was rebranded as an e-commerce firm and renamed eShop Inc.

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

In 1995, Omidyar began to write the first computer code for an online platform in order to enable the listing of a person-to-person auction for collectible items. On his website, he built a simple prototype. On Labor Day, September 4, 1995, he launched Auction Web, a web service that would eventually be integrated as the auction website eBay.

The service was originally one of many items on Omidyar's website, www.edu.com. Among other things, his website had a section dedicated to the Ebola virus.

A broken laser pointer was the first item on eBay's website. Omidyar was stunned that anyone would pay for a defective unit, but the purchaser assured him that he was intentionally collecting broken laser pointers. Similar surprises followed. As correspondents began to register trade items of an unprecedented variety, the company exploded.

The company was formed by Omidyar; the little fee he collected on each sale funded the site's expansion. The income soon outstripped his job at GM, and nine months later, Omidyar decided to devote his whole attention to his new venture.

The website had hosted 250,000 auctions by 1996, when Omidyar signed a licensing agreement to sell airline tickets online. It attracted two million people in the first month of 1997. eBay was hosting over 800,000 auctions a day by the middle of the year.

Omidyar changed the company's name from AuctionWeb to eBay in 1997 and began to market the service more widely. He second selected the term "eBay" for his second name. Echo Bay Mines, a Canadian mining company, was his first pick. He started with Echo Bay, the name of a recreational area near Lake Mead, Nevada, because it "sounded cool." He dropped the "cho" when he heard that echobay.com had been taken, and ebay.com was born. A frequent occurrence is that eBay was created to assist Omidyar's fiancée trade Pez candy dispensers, which piqued the media. This was revealed in Adam Cohen's 2002 book and confirmed by eBay.

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Awards and honors

• Honorary doctorate, Tufts University (2011)
• 1999 EY Entrepreneur of The Year National Winner
• 2000 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Quincy Jones.
• 2018's Third Most Influential French Entrepreneur by Richtopia.