Pierre Omidyar
| Pierre Omidyar | |
|---|---|
Omidyar in 2007
|
|
| Born |
June 21, 1967 Paris, France |
| Residence | Henderson, Nevada, United States |
| Nationality | Iranian-American |
| Occupation | Founder of eBay Founder and CEO of Honolulu Civil Beat Founder of Ulupono Initiative |
| Net worth |
 US$8.1 billion (September 2016) |
| Board member of | eBay |
| Spouse(s) | Pamela Kerr Omidyar |
Pierre Morad Omidyar (Persian: پیر مراد امیدیار, born June 21, 1967) is a French-born Iranian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the founder of the eBay auction site where he served as Chairman from 1998 to 2015. He became a billionaire at the age of 31 with eBay's 1998 initial public offering (IPO). Omidyar and his wife Pamela are well-known philanthropists who founded Omidyar Network in 2004 in order to expand their efforts beyond nonprofits to include for-profits and public policy.
Since 2010, Omidyar 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.
Omidyar was born in Paris, the son of Iranian immigrant parents who had been sent to France by their parents to attend university. He was given the name of Parviz by his Iranian parents. His mother, Elahé Mir-Djalali Omidyar (Persian: الهه میرجلالی امیدیار), who did her doctorate in linguistics at the Sorbonne, is an academic. The name of his father, a surgeon who worked as a urologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is undisclosed. Due to his father's work the family moved to the United States when Omidyar was a child.
His interest in computers began while he was a ninth-grade student at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia. He graduated from St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, in 1984. He graduated from Tufts University in Medford/Somerville, Massachusetts, with a bachelor's degree in computer science in 1988. Shortly after, he went to work for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary, where he worked on 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.
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