Pierre Omidyar | |
---|---|
Born | Parviz Morad Omidyar June 21, 1967 Paris, France |
Citizenship | Iran [1] [2] [3] France [4] United States [5] |
Education | University of California, Berkeley (BS) |
Occupation(s) | Founder of eBay Founder of Honolulu Civil Beat Founder of Ulupono Initiative Founder of Omidyar Network Founder of First Look Media |
Board member of | eBay |
Spouse | Pamela Kerr |
Pierre Morad Omidyar (born Parviz Morad Omidyar, June 21, 1967) is a French-born Iranian-American billionaire. A technology entrepreneur, software engineer, and philanthropist, [6] he is the founder of eBay, where he served as chairman from 1998 to 2015. [7] [6] Omidyar and his wife Pamela founded Omidyar Network in 2004. As of 2023 [update] , Forbes ranked Omidyar as the 245th-richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $8.7 billion. [8]
Omidyar is a long-term Democratic Party donor. [9] Since 2010, he has been involved in online journalism as the head of investigative reporting and public affairs news service Honolulu Civil Beat . [10] 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. [11] [12] [13]
Parviz Morad Omidyar was born on June 21, 1967, in Paris, the son of Iranian parents who had immigrated to France for higher education. He was named Parviz. [14] His mother, Elahé Mir-Djalali Omidyar, who earned her doctorate in linguistics at the Sorbonne, is an academic. [15] His father, Cyrus Omidyar (born c. 1934), completed medical education and training in France and is a surgeon.
The family immigrated to the United States when Omidyar was a child; his father worked as a urologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He now practices in Aliso Viejo, California. [15]
Omidyar attended Punahou School in Honolulu for two years. (He now serves on its board of trustees). [16] His interest in computers began while he was a ninth-grade student at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia. He graduated in 1984 from St. Andrew's Episcopal School, Potomac, Maryland.
He started his undergraduate degree at Tufts University, and finished it at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. in computer science in 1988. [17] [18] [19]
Shortly after studying at Berkeley, Omidyar started working for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary. He worked with the team that upgraded MacDraw to MacDraw II. [20] 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. [21] [ page needed ]
Microsoft acquired eShop on June 11, 1996, for less than $50 million, and Omidyar earned $1 million from the deal. [22] [23] [24] [21] [ page needed ]
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. [25]
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. [26] [27]
The first item sold on the eBay site was a broken laser pointer. [28] 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 trade goods of an unimaginable variety.
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. [25]
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. [29] 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, [30] 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. [31] Omidyar still owns 6% of its worth. [32]
As of July 2008 [update] , Omidyar's 178 million eBay shares were worth around $4.45 billion. [33] 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. [34]
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. [35]
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. [36] On September 4, 2013, Honolulu Civil Beat started a partnership with HuffPost , launching HuffPost Hawaii.
In 2013, prompted by the Edward Snowden leaks, [37] 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. [12] [38]
Omidyar has been part of the executive producer team for the following films.
Omidyar Network is a philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunities for people to improve their lives. [41] It was established in 2004 by Omidyar and his wife, Pam. [42] The organization invests in and helps scale innovative organizations to catalyze economic, social, and political change. Omidyar Network has committed more than $992 million to for-profit companies and nonprofit organizations that foster economic advancement and encourage individual participation across multiple investment areas, including Property Rights, Governance & Citizen Engagement, Education, Financial Inclusion and Consumer & Internet Mobile. [43] In 2010, he and his wife established, along with Richard Branson and the Nduna Foundation (founded by Amy Robbins),and Enterprise Zimbabwe. [44]
Established in 2018 to provide an information platform whose declared mission is to ensure that everyone, even the least able has the information to influence the decisions that affect their lives and the power to assert their rights. [45] Its vice-president Felipe Estefan, is associated with Omidyar Network's Governance & Citizen Engagement initiative and was is formerly a CNN journalist and an Open Government Strategist at the World Bank. [46] [47] [48]
Omidyar and his wife Pamela own properties in Henderson, Nevada, [49] and Honolulu, Hawaii. [50] According to Forbes , his net worth was US$13.1 billion as of January 2019. [32] He is a major donor to Democratic Party candidates and organizations. [51] Omidyar is a follower of the Dalai Lama. [52] 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. [53] In 2019, he donated approximately $500 million to charitable causes. [54]
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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. [55] His advocacy and philanthropic investment firm the Omidyar Network, distributed widely read papers laying out the antitrust cases against Facebook and Google. [55] 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. [55]
It is possible to begin to discern Omidyar's motivations with a little online surveillance.
eBay Inc. is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that brokers customer to customer and retail sales through online marketplaces in 190 markets worldwide. Sales occur either via online auctions or "buy it now" instant sales, and the company charges commissions to sellers upon sales. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in September 1995. It has 134 million yearly active buyers worldwide and handled $74 billion in transactions in 2022, 49% of which was in the United States. In 2022, the company had a take rate of 13.25%.
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Punahou School is a private, co-educational, college preparatory school in Honolulu, Hawaii. More than 3,700 students attend the school from kindergarten through 12th grade. Protestant missionaries established Punahou in 1841.
Omidyar Network is a self-styled "philanthropic investment firm," composed of a foundation and an impact investment firm. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, Omidyar Network has committed over US$1.5 billion to nonprofit organizations and for-profit companies across multiple investment areas. According to the OECD, Omidyar Network's financing for 2019 development increased by 10% to US$58.9 million.
Jeffrey Stuart Skoll, OC is a Canadian engineer, billionaire internet entrepreneur and film producer. He was the first president of eBay, eventually using the wealth this gave him to become a philanthropist, particularly through the Skoll Foundation, and his media company Participant Media. He founded an investment firm, Capricorn Investment Group, soon after and currently serves as its chairman. Born in Montreal, Quebec, he graduated from University of Toronto in 1987 and left Canada to attend Stanford University's business school in 1993.
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The Iranian diaspora refers to Iranian citizens or people of Iranian descent living outside Iran.
eShop Inc. was an American computer software company founded on May 10, 1991. It was originally founded in San Mateo, California in 1991 to develop products for Go Corporation's PenPoint operating system. In later years, it developed software for the Windows for Pen Computing and Magic Cap platforms.
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Ulupono Initiative is a Hawai‘i-based and -focused organization that uses impact investing, non-profit grant-making, and advocacy with the stated goals of "increasing the amount of locally produced food, renewable energy and clean transportation, and improving water and waste management."
Honolulu Civil Beat is a news website that practices journalism related to the U.S. state of Hawaii. Journalists and editors at Civil Beat have traveled to other U.S. held territories and military installations in the Pacific, reporting on current and historical events about immigration and other issues. Civil Beat is headquartered in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, and is published by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay.
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Echo Bay is an unincorporated community in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is located on the western shore of the Overton Arm, within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The community contains a campground run by the National Park Service and a boat ramp. There used to be a marina there as well, but it closed in February 2013. Approximately 200,000 people visit Echo Bay annually. There was a small trailer park for housing.
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