The first item ever sold on eBay was broken. A laser pointer, nonfunctional, listed in September 1995 by Pierre Omidyar on a site he'd coded over a single Labor Day weekend. It fetched $14.83. Omidyar, puzzled, emailed the buyer to confirm he understood the pointer didn't work. The buyer replied that he was a collector of broken laser pointers. This was the founding revelation — not that the internet could facilitate commerce, which was already obvious, but that the internet could surface demand so eccentric, so irreducibly specific, that no physical market could ever aggregate it. The broken laser pointer wasn't a glitch. It was the thesis.
Three decades later, eBay processes roughly $74 billion in gross merchandise volume annually, connects 134 million active buyers across 190 markets, and generates approximately $10.3 billion in revenue — numbers that would be staggering for almost any company except the one that exists in the permanent shadow of a competitor that was, in 1995, merely selling books. The distance between those numbers and Amazon's $575 billion in net sales is the central tension of eBay's story: how the company that invented online commerce, that proved the marketplace model, that spawned PayPal and Skype and an entire generation of e-commerce entrepreneurs, came to occupy a position that is simultaneously durable and diminished. A $36 billion market capitalization. Non-GAAP operating margins near 28%. Still the largest online marketplace by listing count — 1.7 billion of them. And yet: less than 4% of U.S. e-commerce.
The paradox is not that eBay failed. The paradox is that eBay won exactly the game it chose to play — and the game turned out to be smaller than the one being played next door.
By the Numbers
The eBay Marketplace
$10.3BRevenue (FY2024)
$74BGross Merchandise Volume (FY2022)
134MActive buyers worldwide
1.7BLive listings on the platform
~28%Non-GAAP operating margin (Q2 2025)
$36BApproximate market capitalization (2025)
190Markets served globally
The Collector of Broken Things
Pierre Omidyar was born in Paris in 1967 to Iranian parents — his father a surgeon, his mother a linguist who would later become a professor of Farsi at UC Berkeley. The family moved to Maryland when he was a child, and Omidyar discovered computers the way a certain kind of kid discovered them in the 1980s: obsessively, in the school library, writing programs before anyone thought to call it a career path. He studied computer science at Tufts, and after a stint at a subsidiary of Apple and then at a pen-computing startup called Ink Development (which pivoted to become eShop, an early online commerce company), he landed at General Magic — the legendary, doomed Silicon Valley venture that tried to build the smartphone a decade too early. From General Magic he carried a conviction that would prove more durable than anything the company shipped: that the internet's real power lay not in broadcasting content downward but in enabling people to transact laterally, peer to peer, without institutional intermediation.
The creation myth, repeated so often it has acquired the texture of fable, involves a Pez dispenser. Omidyar's fiancée Pam Wesley collected them, the story went, and he built AuctionWeb so she could trade with other collectors. It's a charming origin. It's also fabricated — a story crafted by eBay's first PR manager, Mary Lou Song, to give journalists a narrative hook. Omidyar himself has acknowledged as much. The actual motivation was more philosophical and, in retrospect, more consequential: he wanted to build a system where individuals could transact as equals, where the marketplace itself would surface fair value through the mechanism of auction bidding, where trust would emerge from transparency rather than being imposed by authority.
AuctionWeb launched on September 3, 1995, as a page on Omidyar's personal website, which also hosted a tribute page to the Ebola virus (his other interest at the time — the man contained multitudes). There was no business plan. No revenue model. No employees. He charged nothing for listings initially; the first fee structure emerged only when his internet service provider upgraded his account to a business plan because of the traffic. Omidyar started charging a small percentage of each completed sale to cover the $250 monthly hosting bill. Revenue immediately exceeded costs. The marketplace was profitable from the moment it started charging.
This is worth pausing on. In an era that would become synonymous with profitless growth and cash incineration, eBay was profitable from day one of monetization. The asset-light marketplace model — where the platform never touches inventory, never manages fulfillment, never warehouses a single product — was not just capital-efficient. It was capital-generative. Every dollar of GMV that flowed through the system deposited a thin layer of take-rate revenue with essentially zero marginal cost. Adam Cohen's
The Perfect Store captures this period with the precision it deserves: the dawning realization, in Omidyar's cramped apartment, that he had stumbled onto a business model of extraordinary structural elegance.
The Adult in the Room
By early 1998, AuctionWeb — now rebranded as eBay — was growing at rates that defied comprehension. The site had facilitated $95 million in gross merchandise volume in 1997. Omidyar, who had the self-awareness to recognize that building a marketplace and scaling an enterprise required different cognitive architectures, began searching for a CEO. He found
Meg Whitman.
Whitman's résumé read like a case study in brand management at scale: Procter & Gamble, Bain & Company,
Walt Disney, Stride Rite, FTD, Hasbro — where she'd run the Playskool and Mr. Potato Head divisions. She was not, by any conventional measure, a technologist. What she was, irreplaceably, was someone who understood how to take a chaotic, organic system and impose the operational rigor necessary to function at institutional scale without killing the energy that made it work. She arrived at eBay in March 1998 and found a company of 35 employees operating from Omidyar's spare bedroom-level infrastructure. Six months later, on September 24, 1998, eBay went public.
The IPO was priced at $18 per share. It opened at $53.50. By the end of its first trading day, the stock closed at $47.38 — giving the company a market capitalization of roughly $1.9 billion. Omidyar, who owned approximately 40% of the shares, became one of the wealthiest people in the world overnight. He was 31 years old.
What happened next — in the period from 1998 through roughly 2004 — represents one of the most remarkable stretches of value creation in internet history, and the one least remembered relative to its magnitude. Under Whitman's leadership, eBay grew from $86 million in revenue in 1998 to $3.3 billion in 2004. Net income went from $2.4 million to over $778 million. Active users scaled from 2.2 million to tens of millions. The company didn't just survive the dot-com crash of 2000–2001 — it accelerated through it, one of a vanishingly small number of internet companies to report increasing revenues and profits while the NASDAQ collapsed around it. While Pets.com and Webvan immolated billions, eBay's Q4 2001 revenue was $217 million, up 73% year-over-year. The asset-light model was its own insurance policy.
I was inspired by the social impact of eBay — how it connected people and created economic opportunity — to create a hybrid model for philanthropic work.
Whitman's contribution was not glamorous. It was operational: category expansion, customer service infrastructure, trust and safety systems, and — critically — international expansion. eBay entered the U.K. in 1999, Germany in 1999, Australia in 1999, and over the following years pushed into dozens of markets. The German acquisition of Alando (for $43 million) proved particularly prescient; eBay Germany would become the company's largest international market and, for years, its most profitable. She also presided over the construction of eBay's feedback system — the star ratings and text reviews that, crude as they were, represented the first large-scale experiment in algorithmic trust. Sellers with high feedback scores commanded higher prices. Buyers with track records got access to better sellers. It was a reputation economy, and it worked.
The $1.5 Billion Wager That Changed Everything
On July 8, 2002, eBay announced its intention to acquire PayPal for approximately $1.5 billion in stock. The deal closed on October 3, 2002, at a final price that valued each PayPal share at 0.39 shares of eBay common stock. It was, by any reasonable retrospective analysis, one of the most consequential acquisitions in technology history — and one that eBay would ultimately fumble in a manner that remains instructive for every platform operator alive.
PayPal in 2002 was already eBay's dominant payment mechanism. Roughly 70% of eBay auctions accepted PayPal. The company had emerged from a Darwinian payments war — against Billpoint (eBay's own offering), against Citibank's c2it, against Yahoo PayDirect — through a combination of aggressive user acquisition (
Peter Thiel's team famously paid new users $10 signup bonuses), viral product mechanics, and the simple fact that it solved a genuine pain point. How do you pay a stranger on the internet? Before PayPal, the answer was: mail them a check and wait two weeks for it to clear, or wire money through Western Union, or pray your credit card information wouldn't get stolen. PayPal collapsed the transaction to seconds.
eBay's strategic logic was sound. If payments were the chokepoint through which all marketplace value flowed, then owning the payments layer was the highest-leverage acquisition conceivable. And for nearly a decade, this is exactly how it played out. PayPal grew inside eBay like a company within a company, expanding from eBay auctions to broader online commerce, eventually processing payments for millions of merchants who had nothing to do with eBay's marketplace. By the time the companies separated, PayPal's total payment volume dwarfed eBay's GMV.
The problem was containment. eBay's management — first Whitman, then her successors — treated PayPal as a subsidiary that served the marketplace rather than an independent platform with its own network effects and its own enormous addressable market. PayPal's leadership chafed. The talent pool — much of the "PayPal Mafia" including Thiel,
Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, and others — had largely departed before or shortly after the acquisition, and the institutional culture of eBay, methodical and brand-management-oriented, sat uneasily against PayPal's aggressive, move-fast-and-break-things ethos.
eBay's $1.5 billion bet on payments
1999PayPal founded by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek (Confinity merges with X.com in 2000).
2002eBay acquires PayPal for ~$1.5 billion in stock; ~70% of eBay auctions already use PayPal.
2014eBay faces activist pressure from
Carl Icahn to spin off PayPal.
2015PayPal spins off as an independent public company; market cap immediately exceeds eBay's.
2023PayPal's market cap reaches ~$70 billion, roughly 2x eBay's.
The separation, when it finally came in July 2015, was forced less by strategic revelation than by activist pressure. Carl Icahn had been agitating since 2014 for a PayPal spinoff, arguing that the payments company was being undervalued inside eBay's corporate structure. He was right. On its first day of independent trading, PayPal's market capitalization exceeded eBay's. By 2021, PayPal would be worth roughly $350 billion — making the $1.5 billion acquisition look not just smart but world-historically underpriced, and the decision to spin it off a case study in how platforms can create vastly more value than they capture.
The Skype Detour and the Perils of Empire
If PayPal was the brilliant acquisition that eBay mismanaged, Skype was the ambitious acquisition that never made sense in the first place. In September 2005, eBay paid $2.6 billion — plus up to $1.5 billion in earn-outs — for the internet calling service founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The strategic rationale, articulated by Whitman, was that Skype would facilitate trust between buyers and sellers by allowing them to talk before transacting. Voice communication would make the marketplace more human, more relational.
The thesis was elegant. It was also wrong. eBay buyers did not want to call sellers. The entire architecture of the marketplace — standardized listings, feedback scores, structured payment flows — existed precisely to eliminate the need for bilateral negotiation. Skype's value proposition was real and enormous, but it had almost nothing to do with e-commerce. It was a communications platform competing with telephone companies, not a marketplace enhancement.
The write-down was brutal. In 2007, eBay took a $1.4 billion impairment charge on the Skype acquisition. In 2009, it sold 65% of the company to a private investor group led by Silver Lake Partners for $1.9 billion — a transaction that valued the whole entity at roughly $2.75 billion, meaning eBay had essentially lit somewhere between $1 billion and $2 billion on fire, depending on how you calculated the earn-outs. Skype later sold to Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011, compounding the sense that eBay's timing and strategic framework were miscalibrated.
The Skype episode crystallized a pattern that would haunt eBay through the 2000s and 2010s: the tendency to view diversification as a substitute for deepening the core marketplace. The logic of adjacency — payments, communications, classifieds — was seductive but dilutive. Every dollar of management attention spent integrating Skype was a dollar not spent on search, on mobile, on seller tools, on the catalogue infrastructure that would have been required to compete with Amazon's structured product database.
The [Trust](/mental-models/trust) Problem and the Everything Store
To understand why eBay ceded e-commerce dominance, you need to understand what happened to trust on the internet between 2000 and 2015.
eBay's founding insight — that strangers could transact safely if mediated by reputation systems — was a breakthrough in the late 1990s. The feedback score, that little number in parentheses next to a seller's username, was arguably the first consumer trust primitive on the internet. It was social proof before the term existed. And it worked, extraordinarily well, for a particular kind of transaction: one-of-a-kind items, used goods, collectibles, the long tail of human commerce where each listing was unique and the buyer needed assurance that the seller was legitimate.
But as the internet matured, trust migrated from the social layer to the institutional layer. Amazon figured this out first. If you buy a new commodity product — a phone charger, a pair of headphones, a bestselling book — you don't need to evaluate the seller. You need to trust the platform. Amazon's genius was to realize that trust could be embedded in infrastructure: two-day shipping guarantees, effortless returns, A-to-Z claims, and eventually Fulfillment by Amazon, which standardized the logistics layer so completely that the identity of the seller became almost irrelevant. The product page replaced the seller page. The review accrued to the product, not the merchant.
eBay's model was the inverse: the seller was the atomic unit. Each listing was an independent offering, with its own photographs, its own description, its own shipping terms. For unique items — a vintage Hermès bag, a 1967 Corvette exhaust manifold, a first-edition Harry Potter — this was optimal. For commodity goods, it was chaos. A search for "iPhone charger" on eBay in 2012 returned thousands of listings from different sellers at different prices with different shipping speeds and different return policies. The same search on Amazon returned a single product page with a buy button.
We had become too much of a one-size-fits-all marketplace, and our customer satisfaction was lagging, so we picked focus areas.
The structural consequences compounded over years. As Amazon's flywheel — lower prices attract more customers, more customers attract more sellers, more sellers increase selection, increased selection lowers prices — accelerated, eBay's seller base began to bifurcate. Professional sellers of new goods migrated to Amazon, where the built-in logistics and the search-first shopping experience delivered higher conversion rates. What remained on eBay was what Amazon couldn't easily replicate: the used, the vintage, the weird, the collectible, the niche. The very categories that had made eBay magical in 1996 became, in effect, the categories that defined its ceiling.
The Revolving Door at the Top
Meg Whitman departed eBay in March 2008, after a decade as CEO — a tenure long by any standard and remarkable by Silicon Valley's. She left a company that was profitable, international, and dominant in its category. She also left a company that had not yet reckoned with the iPhone, with Amazon Prime, with the fundamental shift from auction-based discovery to search-based purchasing.
Her successor, John Donahoe, inherited both the machinery and the malaise. A former Bain & Company CEO and managing director, Donahoe was a strategist's strategist — cerebral, analytical, comfortable with the language of frameworks and reinvention. He recognized, more clearly than perhaps anyone inside eBay at the time, that the auction model was becoming a liability. Under his leadership, eBay pivoted aggressively toward fixed-price "Buy It Now" listings, which by 2012 accounted for the majority of GMV. He invested in mobile — eBay's mobile app was, for a time, one of the most downloaded commerce apps in the world. He pushed for the structured data initiative that would give eBay a product catalog resembling Amazon's.
But Donahoe also inherited the PayPal question. The activist pressure from Carl Icahn and others consumed enormous executive bandwidth from 2013 through the spinoff in 2015. And the structural challenge — how do you reinvent a marketplace's buyer experience without alienating the millions of sellers whose livelihoods depend on the existing system — proved to be something more intractable than a strategy framework could resolve.
Devin Wenig succeeded Donahoe in 2015 and lasted until September 2019, when he departed amid another wave of activist pressure, this time from Elliott Management and Starboard Value. The activist playbook was familiar: cut costs, divest non-core assets, accelerate share buybacks, and focus the portfolio. Under the pressure, eBay sold StubHub to Viagogo for $4.05 billion and divested its classified ads business to Adevinta for approximately $9.2 billion. Both transactions were financings of a retreat — profitable ones, to be sure, but acknowledgments that eBay's empire-building era was over.
Jamie Iannone became CEO in April 2020, arriving from Walmart and Sam's Club with a mandate that was, by Silicon Valley standards, almost radical: acceptance. Acceptance that eBay could not and would not challenge Amazon in commodity e-commerce. Acceptance that growth would have to come not from expanding the total addressable market but from deepening penetration in categories where eBay had structural advantages. The strategy he articulated — "focus categories" — was less a strategy than a tautology: win where you can win. But sometimes tautologies are the right answer.
The Focus Category Bet
Iannone's focus categories — luxury, sneakers and streetwear, auto parts, collectibles and trading cards, refurbished electronics — shared a common structural feature: each was a market where the product was non-standardized, where authenticity was a critical concern, and where eBay's decades-deep seller base and listing volume represented a defensible advantage. These were markets that Amazon's logistics-first, commodity-oriented model was poorly equipped to serve.
The strategic logic was buttressed by operational investments. eBay launched its Authenticity Guarantee program — first for sneakers over $100, then expanding to watches, handbags, trading cards, and streetwear. Physical authentication centers staffed by trained inspectors would receive items, verify their legitimacy, and ship them to buyers with an authentication tag. By Q2 2025, the program had surpassed one million items inspected in a single quarter. It was, in effect, eBay's version of trust infrastructure — not the algorithmic trust of the feedback score, but the physical, tactile trust of a human being holding a handbag and confirming it is genuine Hermès.
The results, measured in aggregate, remain modest. Focus categories grew 10% year-over-year in Q2 2025, compared to approximately 1% for everything else. Total GMV in Q2 2025 was $19.5 billion, up 6% on a reported basis and 4% FX-neutral — the fastest growth eBay had posted in two years. The stock surged 19% in a single day following Q2 2025 earnings, reaching an all-time high of $92 per share.
Collectibles was once again the largest contributor to growth as year-over-year growth in trading cards GMV accelerated for the 10th straight quarter on the back of continued momentum in both collectible card games and sports trading cards.
Collectibles — particularly trading cards, Pokémon cards, and sports memorabilia — have become eBay's most dynamic growth vector. The acquisition of Goldin, a premier auction house for collectibles, gave eBay a foothold in the high end of the market. eBay Live, the company's live-streaming commerce feature, targets the Whatnot generation of collectors who want the theater of a live auction combined with the trust of a major platform. Rene Nezhoda, a top live-streaming card seller who does $15 million to $18 million annually on Whatnot, told Fortune that eBay Live could become the market leader "because they just have such a big user database."
The auto parts business, less glamorous but enormous in scale, represents eBay's most structurally defensible vertical. Tens of millions of part numbers for hundreds of thousands of vehicle makes, models, and years — a catalog so deep and so granular that no competitor has attempted to replicate it at scale. When you need a driver-side mirror for a 2004 Honda Accord, eBay is where you look, and the margin on that search is eBay's to keep.
The Facebook Deal and Distribution [Arbitrage](/mental-models/arbitrage)
On January 8, 2025, Meta announced that Facebook Marketplace would begin displaying eBay listings to users in the U.S., Germany, and France. eBay's stock jumped nearly 10% on the news — roughly $3 billion in market capitalization created by a single partnership announcement.
The deal emerged, in part, from regulatory pressure. The European Commission had fined Meta nearly €800 million in November 2024 for antitrust violations related to tying Facebook Marketplace to its social network. Meta, seeking to demonstrate competitive openness while appealing the ruling, found eBay a willing partner. For eBay, the calculus was simpler: distribution. The company's active buyer count had been essentially flat at 132–134 million for two years. Facebook Marketplace, with its billions of users, represented the largest pool of commerce-adjacent attention on the internet.
The mechanics are constrained — users see eBay listings on Facebook but must leave the platform to complete a purchase on eBay — and the volume impact remains uncertain. But the strategic signal was clarifying. eBay's future may depend less on growing its own audience and more on surfacing its unique inventory wherever buyers already are. The Facebook deal, the Klarna integration, the AI shopping agent announced in 2025 — these are all distribution plays, efforts to make eBay's catalog available across an expanding number of touchpoints without requiring the buyer to begin their journey on ebay.com.
The AI [Pivot](/mental-models/pivot) and the Listing Problem
The hardest thing about selling on eBay has always been the listing. Photographing an item, writing a description, setting a price, choosing shipping options, selecting a category — the friction is real, and it compounds with every additional item. A seller listing a single vintage jacket performs a ten-minute choreography of photographs, measurements, condition notes, and keyword optimization. A seller listing a hundred items performs that choreography a hundred times.
This is the structural disadvantage that eBay's new AI tools are meant to address. The "magical listing" feature, introduced in 2023 and expanded through 2024 and 2025, uses computer vision and large language models to analyze a photograph and auto-generate a complete listing — title, description, category, price suggestion. Point your phone camera at a handbag, and the system identifies the brand, estimates the model, suggests a price based on comparable completed sales, and drafts a description. The generative AI video tool, launched in 2025, converts listing images into short-form videos for sharing on TikTok and YouTube.
The AI shopping agent, announced in 2025 and available to a small subset of U.S. users, represents an even more ambitious bet: a system that delivers real-time, personalized product recommendations based on a user's shopping history and stated preferences. If the listing AI reduces seller friction, the shopping agent aims to reduce buyer friction — the overwhelming sense of confronting 1.7 billion listings without a clear path to the right one.
Whether these investments are sufficient to change eBay's growth trajectory is the open question. The company is betting that AI can solve the listing problem that has constrained seller supply for twenty years and the discovery problem that has constrained buyer conversion for just as long. The evidence is early. The bet is existential.
The Cyberstalking Scandal and the Crisis of Culture
In June 2020, six former eBay employees — including the company's former senior director of global resiliency and the former director of safety and security — were charged by the Department of Justice with conspiring to cyberstalk a Massachusetts couple who published an online newsletter critical of eBay. The harassment campaign, conducted in 2019, involved sending the couple live cockroaches and a funeral wreath, publishing their home address online, and surveilling their home. All six defendants ultimately pleaded guilty to federal charges.
The scandal was grotesque in its specifics and damaging in its implications. Devin Wenig, who was CEO at the time and whose text messages about the newsletter ("Take her down") were cited in court filings, departed the company in September 2019, though he was not charged. The episode suggested that eBay's corporate culture had developed pathological pockets — a security apparatus operating with a sense of impunity that bordered on the criminal.
For a company whose founding mythology rested on the proposition that strangers could trust each other, the cyberstalking case was more than a PR crisis. It was a philosophical betrayal. eBay had built an empire on the idea that its platform enabled civil, honest commerce between individuals. The revelation that its own employees had weaponized surveillance tools against critics undermined that narrative at its foundation.
Iannone's tenure has been, in part, a reconstruction project — rebuilding trust not just with buyers and sellers but with the public narrative of what eBay is and what kind of company it wants to be. The Authenticity Guarantee program, the sustainability partnerships (Seagate refurbished drives, Certilogo for luxury apparel tracking), the WNBA and Met Gala collaborations — these are as much cultural repositioning as they are commercial strategies.
Capital Allocation as Identity
If you want to understand what eBay has become, don't read its strategy decks. Read its cash flow statement.
In Q2 2024, the company returned $1.1 billion to shareholders — $1.0 billion in share repurchases and $135 million in dividends. In Q2 2025, it returned $759 million — $625 million in buybacks and $134 million in dividends. Over the two years preceding Q2 2025, eBay repurchased roughly $5 billion in stock, shrinking its share count by approximately 10%. The company's free cash flow generation — approximately $2.4 billion annually — is directed overwhelmingly toward capital return rather than reinvestment.
This is not a growth company's capital allocation. It is the capital allocation of a mature platform that generates far more cash than its operations require, that sees limited opportunities for reinvestment at attractive returns, and that has chosen to return that cash to shareholders rather than pursue transformative acquisitions. It is, in financial terms, an admission that eBay's growth story is a story of optimization, not expansion.
The comparison to Amazon is instructive precisely because it is unfair. Amazon reinvests essentially all of its free cash flow — and then some — into new businesses, logistics infrastructure, and AWS capacity. eBay returns essentially all of its free cash flow to shareholders. Both are rational responses to their respective opportunity sets. But the divergence in capital allocation reflects a divergence in self-conception that is now permanent.
The Permanent Marketplace
Consider the following fact: In Q2 2025, eBay's revenue grew 6% year-over-year to $2.7 billion. Its stock hit an all-time high of $92. Analyst Mark Mahaney described it as "something of an inflection point." And eBay still controlled less than 4% of U.S. e-commerce.
There is a version of this story that is tragic — the pioneer that was overtaken, the marketplace that couldn't scale, the company that owned PayPal and let it go. But there is another version, equally true, that is something closer to remarkable endurance. eBay has survived 30 years in an industry where the median lifespan of a market leader is far shorter. It has maintained operating margins that most e-commerce companies cannot dream of. It has generated billions in free cash flow annually while carrying no inventory risk. It has shed empires — PayPal, Skype, StubHub, Adevinta — and emerged leaner, more focused, and still profitable.
The company that sold a broken laser pointer for $14.83 now authenticates luxury handbags, streams live card-break auctions, and partners with Facebook to surface its catalog across social commerce. The market it serves — the non-standardized, the pre-loved, the collectible, the weird — is not the largest market in e-commerce. But it may be the most defensible. No algorithm can commoditize a 1954 Einstein letter questioning the existence of God. No fulfillment center can warehouse the complete spectrum of human material culture. No competitor can replicate 30 years of seller communities, feedback histories, and catalog depth accumulated listing by listing, transaction by transaction.
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eBay's Strategic Timeline
Key inflection points across three decades
1995Pierre Omidyar launches AuctionWeb on Labor Day weekend. First item sold: a broken laser pointer for $14.83.
1998Meg Whitman joins as CEO. IPO on September 24 at $18/share; closes first day at $47.38.
2002Acquires PayPal for ~$1.5 billion in stock.
2005Acquires Skype for $2.6 billion plus earn-outs.
2009Sells 65% of Skype to Silver Lake-led group for $1.9 billion after $1.4B write-down.
2015Spins off PayPal as independent public company under activist pressure from Carl Icahn.
2020Jamie Iannone becomes CEO; introduces "focus categories" strategy. Cyberstalking scandal charges filed.
On the eBay website, in the deep recesses of the category tree, there still exists a section called "Weird Stuff." You can buy an alien preserved in a jar of green plasma. You can buy a framed piece of the original Hollywood sign. In 2000, someone listed the meaning of life; it sold for $3.26. The buyer's identity remains unknown. But the transaction completed, the feedback was left, and the marketplace — indifferent to the profound and the absurd alike — recorded it all and moved on to the next listing.
