Pierre Omidyar

Omidyar was born in Paris to Iranian parents who had come to France for higher education — his mother Elahé Mir-Djalali an academic linguist, his father Cyrus Omidyar a surgeon — and his maternal grandfather was General Mahmud Mir-Djalali of the Imperial Iranian Army. The family immigrated to the United States when he was a child; he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Potomac, Maryland, and graduated from Tufts University in computer science in 1988. ^{1 2}

After working at Claris, Omidyar co-founded the pen-computing startup Ink Development in 1991, later rebranded as the e-commerce company eShop and acquired by Microsoft in 1996. In 1995, aged 28, he wrote the code for an online person-to-person auction venue and launched it on Labor Day, 4 September 1995, as Auction Web on his own website; the business grew explosively, was renamed eBay in 1997, and went public in September 1998, making him a billionaire. He served as eBay's chairman from 1998 to 2015, stepped down from the board in 2020, and retains the title of director emeritus. In 2010 he launched the investigative news service Honolulu Civil Beat, and in 2013 he created First Look Media, publisher of The Intercept. ^{1 3}

In 2004 Omidyar and his wife Pamela founded Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm that has committed more than $992 million to for-profit and nonprofit organisations working on property rights, governance, education and financial inclusion; the Omidyar Group and, from 2018, Luminate group his further ventures. In 2010 he joined Bill Gates and Warren Buffett as a signatory of the Giving Pledge, declaring his intention to give away most of his wealth during his lifetime, and he has bankrolled organisations campaigning against the power of the large technology companies. ¹

His faith is recorded as unknown. No source names an affiliation for him in the form the museum requires. The English article's personal-life section calls him "a follower of the Dalai Lama" — a devotional framing in a single text — and its categories file him under "French Buddhists"; a category filing is not an attestation, and together the two are one source family. The Persian, Arabic and Urdu texts name no religion, and Wikidata carries no religion value. His extensive philanthropy is likewise not an attestation of affiliation, so no value is recorded. ^{1 4}

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