Pierre Morad Omidyar

Celebrate eBay’s 20th year

Pierre Morad Omidyar
Pierre Morad Omidyar

eBay

The auction website eBay has grown from humble beginnings on September 3, 1995, in San Jose, California,  eBay ( NASDAQ:EBAY) just days after Windows 95 was launched, to a mega retail giant.  eBay now employs over 10,000 people world-wide. His  vision, for connecting commerce open to everyone, enabled by people and powered by technology, and his idea of giving sellers a platform, solutions and support they need to grow their business and thrive without an office or huge investment and buyers a safe place to search what they want and buy online, at the comfort of their home. When it’s on your mind, it’s on eBay shop 24/7.

Computer programmer Pierre Omidyar, as a hobby started a website Auction Web and his consulting group Echo Bay Technology Group and tried to register echobay.com, but as this was taken by a mining company Echo Bay mines, so in 1997 it changed and shortened the name to eBay.

Pierre Morad Omidyar, a French-born Iranian-American entrepreneur and philanthropist, is the founder of the eBay auction site, and also founder of Payments arm PayPal, and served as Chairman from 1998 to 2015 and his net worth according to Forbes is $8.9bn, and 24th richest in Tech. Self made billionaire is an Arts Graduate from Tufts University, is happily married with three children. He also launched First Look Media in late 2013, with an aim presenting new forms of independent journalism and with a promise of $250million investment they launched a digital magazine, The Intercept, in February 2014 with investigative journalism from Glenn Greenwald.

If you had invested £1000 in eBay’s IPO, you would have more than £84,000 today. The eBay was listed in September 1998 at $18 a share, and according to Bloomberg their shares have risen 84.5 times since its IPO. In 2014, $82.95bn changed hands on eBay. 19 million Brits use eBay every month and buy more items per capita than anywhere else in the world. In 2006, a 405-foot yacht featuring a helipad and movie theatre, designed by Frank Mulder was sold on eBay for $168m to Russian Billionaire Roman Abramovich, which is more than the second most expensive $4.9m private jet. 800 million users are on eBay website at any one time. It sold $20.1bn in the second quarter of the year which $2,556, £1, 670 a second.

eBay also owns ticket exchange, Gumtree, StubHub and a 25 per cent stake in Craiglist. A British man David Jones bought a pair of ornamental birds on eBay but fell in love with the seller Cheryl Pipes even before they met and were married in 2007 three months after meeting thanks to eBay.

An Australian man tried in vain to sell New Zealand saw his listing closed down when it reach A$ 3000.

The first item sold was a broken laser pointer and it cost $14.83 and the buyer was a collector of broken laser pointers.

Brazilian student Catarina Migilorini put her virginity up for sale in 2012, and it was sold to a Japanese man for $ 780,000. She later tried to sell it again, twice after claiming he money did not arrive.

In 2002, in Bridgeville a Californian town home to 30 people, was sold on Ebay by the landowner as a “private retreat”.

A woman sold a piece of bubble gum that Britney Spears had chewed and spat out at a concert at Wembley Arena in 2000 , for $14, 000.