Pierre Morad Omidyar (Persian: پیر مراد امیدیار, , Persian pronunciation: [piːjeɾ moɾɑːd omiːdjɑːɾ] 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 non-profits 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.
Biography
Early life
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. 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.
Pierre Omidyar net worth: Pierre Omidyar is a well known Iranian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist who has a net worth of $7.8 billion. Pierre Omidyar is the founder of eBay. He earned the vast majority of his his net worth when eBay went public in September 1998. His net worth should come as no surprise to those who know about the enormous success that eBay has seen – it’s one of the only websites to emerge from the “dot com bubble” that is still a thriving and successful business today. He was 28 years old when he wrote the computer code that would eventually become eBay. At that time, the program went by the name of “Auction Web,” and was hosted on a site he had created for information on the ebola virus! The oft repeated story of eBay having been started in order for Omidyar’s wife to trade Pez dispensers was actually a clever myth created by eBay’s public relations department, and does not actually reflect the reality of the situation. Besides eBay, Omidyar has been involved in several other projects, most recently a Hawaiian news service called Civil Beat. Omidyar is also a well-known philanthropist, having started an organization by the name of “Omidyar Network” which has been billed as a “philanthropic investment firm dedicated to harnessing the power of markets to create opportunity for people to improve their lives.”
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