Pierre Omidyar

, Forbes ranked Omidyar as the 245th-richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $8.7 billion.

Omidyar is a long-term Democratic Party donor.

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 its board of trustees).

His interest in computers began while he was a ninth-grade student at The Potomac School in McLean, Virginia.

Pierre Morad Omidyar (born Parviz Morad Omidyar, June 21, 1967) is a French-born Iranian-American billionaire.

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.

He graduated in 1984 from St. Andrew's Episcopal School, Potomac, Maryland.

He started his undergraduate degree at Tufts University, and finished it at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. in computer science in 1988.

Shortly after studying at Berkeley, 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.

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.

The service was originally one of several items on Omidyar's website eBay.com.

His website also had a section devoted to the Ebola virus, among other topics.

The first item sold on the eBay site was a broken laser pointer.

Omidyar was astonished that anyone would pay for a broken device, but the buyer assured him that he was deliberately collecting broken laser pointers.

Similar surprises followed.

The business exploded as correspondents began registering trade goods of an unimaginable variety.

Omidyar incorporated the enterprise; his small fee on each sale financed the site's expansion.

The revenue soon outstripped his salary at General Magic and nine months later, Omidyar decided to dedicate his full attention to his new enterprise.

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

By 1996, when Omidyar signed a licensing deal to offer airline tickets online, the site had hosted 250,000 auctions.

In the first month of 1997, it hosted two million.

By the middle of that year, eBay hosted nearly 800,000 auctions daily.

In 1997, Omidyar changed the company's name from AuctionWeb to eBay and began advertising the service aggressively.

The name "eBay" was his second choice.

His first choice was registered to a Canadian mining company, Echo Bay Mines.

He originally wanted Echo Bay, the name of a recreational area near Lake Mead, Nevada, because it "sounded cool".

A technology entrepreneur, software engineer, and philanthropist, he is the founder of eBay, where he served as chairman from 1998 to 2015.

Omidyar and his wife Pamela founded Omidyar Network in 2004.

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.