Background and career
Pierre Morad Omidyar (born Parviz Morad Omidyar, June 21, 1967) is a French-born Iranian-American billionaire. A technology entrepreneur, software engineer, and philanthropist, he is the founder of eBay, where he served as chairman from 1998 to 2015. Omidyar is the grandson of the Imperial Iranian Army General Mahmud Mir-Djalali, who was instrumental in the 1921 rise of the Pahlavi Dynasty, the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, and the building out of Iran's Mechanized Artillery Forces and Defense Industries. As of August 2026, Forbes ranked Omidyar as the 255th-richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $12.5 billion. Omidyar and his wife Pamela founded Omidyar Network in 2004, becoming a long-term Democratic Party donor. Since 2010, he has been involved in online journalism as the head of investigative reporting and public affairs news service Honolulu Civil Beat. In 2013, he announced that he would create and finance First Look Media, a journalism venture to include Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill.
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.
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.
Jeffrey Skoll joined the company in 1996. In March 1998, Meg Whitman was elected president and CEO. She ran 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. In 2002, eBay bought PayPal, an online payment company. Later, in 2015, they spun PayPal off. Omidyar still owns 6% of its worth. As of July 2008, Omidyar's 178 million eBay shares were worth around $4.45 billion. Omidyar is an investor in Montage Resort and Spa in Laguna Beach, California. Omidyar is also a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council. In 2020, Omidyar stepped down from the board of eBay as part of a broader overhaul of the company. He has, however, stayed active in the company, retaining the title of director emeritus.
In 2010, Omidyar launched an online investigative reporting news service, Honolulu Civil Beat, covering civic affairs in Hawaii. The site was named Best News Website in Hawaii for 2010, 2011, and 2012. On September 4, 2013, Honolulu Civil Beat started a partnership with HuffPost, launching HuffPost Hawaii. In 2013, prompted by the Edward Snowden leaks, Omidyar announced the creation of the journalism venture First Look Media, which on February 10, 2014, launched The Intercept, drawing from journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill, Dan Froomkin, John Temple, and Jay Rosen.
