eBay Inc. is an international eCommerce platform that connects millions of buyers and sellers in more than 190 markets.
There are 152 million eBay users and 19 million sellers in the world. This tremendous success made many people a lot of money, especially its founder, Pierre Morad Omidyar.
According to Forbes, he is the 65 richest person in the country and has more than $9.9 billion.
Who is Pierre Morad Omidyar?
Pierre Morad Omidyar is a French-born American billionaire and the founder of eBay.
He is a normal kid with a brilliant mind.
Pierre Morad Omidyar was born on June 21, 1967, in France. His father was a surgeon who worked at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, and his mother was an academic with a doctorate in linguistics.
Growing up in Washington, Omidyar was a regular American child, but he was fascinated by computers from an early age. By 17, he had programmed software that could help schedule classes.
He mastered computer programming at the right time.
He attended Tufts University to study computer science when the world was captivated by computers. He graduated from Tufts University in 1988 and attended Berkeley shortly after.
After graduating from Berkley, he worked for Claris, an Apple subsidiary. In 1991, he co-founded Ink Development, later rebranded eShop Inc. Microsoft acquired eShop for less than $50 million, and Omidyar made $1 million for themselves.
Omidyar created the perfect online store.
In 1995, on Labor Day, he launched the prototype of Auction Web on his personal web page to sell a broken. One year later, Omidyar hired his first employee, Chris Agarpao, to help him run the fast-growing company.
Pierre Omidyar quit his job to focus on building AuctionWeb and hired Jeff Skoll as president. In 1997, they changed the name from AuctionWeb to eBay. However, in 1998, Meg Whitman joined the company as CEO and acquired Jump Inc and Up4Sale.
In 1998, the company went public and expected to trade for $18, but it ended the day at $53.50, making many people a lot of money. Since that day, and the company kept improving every year, they introduced eBay University, Half.com, and other services that made it very popular with online shoppers.
Four years later, the company purchased PayPal, which formed a strong synergy with eBay, making people feel more secure about online spending. PayPal became a tremendous success, so it was spun off in 2015.
According to Forbes, Omidyar owns 5% of eBay and 6% of Paypal. Today, an online marketplace with about 185 million buyers and more than 1.5 billion live listings.
He is married with three kids and lives in Honolulu, Hawaii. However, he has multiple properties in Mexico and California.
He donates money to anything anti-Trump.
Last year, Pierre Omidyar donated $100,000 to NeverTrump PAC, an anti-Trump super PAC.
He also said on Twitter, "I think Trumpism is dangerous. So I'm personally supporting @NeverTrumpPAC, a rare political contribution during extreme times."
A few hours later, he deleted his tweet.
He supports many social issues.
He and his wife, Pam, are major philanthropists and have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to projects focused on economic development, human rights, government transparency, and media.
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