America’s Most Successful Immigrants

Pierre Morad Omidyar

Pierre Morad Omidyar was born in Paris, France and founded a little company called eBay. He was the chairman of eBay from 1998 to 2015 and is worth $8.1 billion. After being the chairman of eBay, he transitioned into online journalism. In 2013, he created and financed First Look Media.

Omidyar was born to Iranian parents. His mother was educated in France and his father worked as a urologist at Johns Hopkins. Omidyar grew up in Virginia and graduated from Tufts University with a bachelor’s in computer science. From there, he helped co-found Ink Development that was later named eShop.

How was eBay Launched?

Omidyar was 28 years old when he started writing the code for eBay. The first name was Auction Web, which he later changed to eBay. So what was the first item sold on the site? A broken laser pointer. The site grew from there and grew more bizarre and became more varied as time went on.

After just two years, eBay had about 800,000 auctions going every day. In 2008, Omidyar had 178 million eBay shares that were worth about $4.45 billion, which is a nice chunk of change. He has since switched to investigative journalism, which he has been pretty successful at.