Pierre Omidyar’s Crusade Against Tech
The eBay founder became a major progressive philanthropist with a particular focus on supporting journalism. He is now widely funding social, financial, and legal attacks on Silicon Valley.
Pierre Omidyar is the founder of the auction and e-commerce platform eBay and one of the most generous active philanthropists in the United States today. In 2024, Omidyar and his wife reportedly gave $252 million to philanthropic causes, making them the twelfth-greatest donors of the year, ahead of philanthropic heavyweights like Bill Gates or Marc Benioff.1 In the last two decades, Omidyar has given hundreds of millions if not even billions of dollars to a long list of progressive causes and nonprofit organizations, and has built out a nonprofit empire of his own centered around the eponymous Omidyar Network. Currently aged 57 years old and with an estimated net worth of $10 billion as of May 2025, Omidyar is likely to continue to be a major philanthropist in the coming years; he is a long-time signatory of the Giving Pledge to give away most of his wealth during his lifetime.2