Pierre Omidyar

Pierre Morad Omidyar (born Parviz Morad Omidyar, June 21, 1967) is a French-born Iranian-American billionaire. A technology entrepreneur, software engineer, and philanthropist, he is the founder of eBay, where he served as chairman from 1998 to 2015. Omidyar is the grandson of the Imperial Iranian Army General Mahmud Mir-Djalali, who was instrumental in the 1921 rise of the Pahlavi Dynasty, the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, and the building out of Iran's Mechanized Artillery Forces and Defense Industries. As of 2023^[update], Forbes ranked Omidyar as the 245th-richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $8.7 billion.

Omidyar and his wife Pamela founded Omidyar Network in 2004, becoming a long-term Democratic Party donor. Since 2010, he 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.

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. His mother, Elahé Mir-Djalali Omidyar, who earned her doctorate in linguistics at the Sorbonne, is an academic. She is the daughter of General Mahmud Mir-Djalali, a former Vice Chairman of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Imperial Iran, and widely regarded as the "Father" of Iran's Military Industries and Tank Forces. He was pivotal in the establishment of Base J, Saltanatabad Arms Factory and the Parchin Chemical and Explosives Factory. General Mir-Djalali was also a close associate of the Station Chief of the GRU Residency in Tehran, Rashid Qurbanbekov. Through his connections with the French Government and General Paul Grossin [fr], General Mir-Djalali ensured admission to the Sorbonne for Elahé, where she became a follower of Ali Shariati, Ayatollah Taleghani, and Jalal Al-e Ahmad. 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.

Omidyar attended Punahou School in Honolulu for two years. He now serves on the school's board of trustees. 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, then entered Tufts University where he majored in computer science and graduated in 1988.

Shortly after studying at Tufts, Omidyar started working for Claris, an Apple Computer subsidiary. He worked with 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 Inc.^{[page needed]}

Microsoft acquired eShop on June 11, 1996, for less than $50 million, and Omidyar earned $1 million from the deal.^{[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.