Omidyar is the founder and largest shareholder of EBay, an online marketplace with more than 170 million active buyers. The San Jose-based company facilitated the sale of $95 billion in merchandise during 2018, according to its annual report. It also owns Stubhub, an online ticket broker, and spun off payment service PayPal in 2015.
Pierre Omidyar's net worth of $7.51B can buy ...
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The majority of Omidyar's fortune is derived from his stakes in EBay and PayPal. He owns about 4% of EBay, according to an August 2019 SEC filing. He owned about 5% of PayPal following its July 2015 spin-off from EBay, according to a February 2018 regulatory filing. His PayPal stake hasn't been disclosed since February 2018. In Bloomberg's calculation it is assumed to match the share count of his disclosed EBay stake, which has previously been the case when both holdings were disclosed.
EBay had more than 170 million active buyers at the end of 2018, according to the company's 2018 annual report. The online auction website managed $95 billion of gross merchandise volume in 2018, according to the same report.
Since EBay's initial public offering in 1998 and through December 2018, Omidyar has sold about $1.1 billion in stock based on an analysis of company filings. He's also donated millions of EBay and PayPal shares. The value of his cash investments is based on an analysis of these cash flows, as well as taxes and market performance.
Jeff Wilson, a spokesman for Omidyar Group, declined to comment on Omidyar's fortune.
Born to Iranian parents -- his father was a surgeon; mom was an academic -- Omidyar immigrated to the U.S. as a six-year-old, eventually getting a degree in computer science from Tufts University in 1988. He worked after school as a consumer software engineer at Claris, a subsidiary of Apple Computer, before co-founding Ink Development (later renamed eShop), which was acquired by Microsoft.
In 1995, he began writing the code for an online marketplace that he called Auction Web. Three years later, he sold shares in a public offering under the name EBay. Today, EBay is the world's largest online marketplace where more than 150 million active users buy, sell and trade almost $80 billion of goods a year.
Omidyar and his wife spend much of their time pursuing their venture-oriented philanthropic efforts, investing in for-profit and non-profit organizations through the Omidyar Group. He served on the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships during Barack Obama's administration.