Over the Labor Day long weekend in 1995, he had coded a side project called AuctionWeb in a spare bedroom of his townhouse. A dead gadget cost nothing to list, so it became the test run. Drawing on Adam Cohen’s book The Perfect Store, TIME described a listing that was honest to a fault: the pointer did not work, even with fresh batteries. It started at $1, and for a week nobody touched it. Then a bidding war broke out, and the pointer sold for $14.83.
Omidyar was puzzled enough to write to the winner and make sure he understood the thing was broken.
The reply, as reported by VentureBeat and retold endlessly since, ran to a single line: “I am a collector of broken laser pointers.”
A home page shared with a deadly virus
Auctions were one of several things living at eBay.com in 1995. Writing in Fortune, Erin Griffith described how the domain also hosted Ebola Information, a slightly eccentric homage to the virus, built around a photograph pulled from the website of the US Centers for Disease Control. There were pages for a biotech startup where Omidyar’s fiancée worked and a Tufts University alumni group. Anyone typing the bare address had to wade through three home pages before finding anything to bid on.
Even the name was a fallback. His first choice, EchoBay.com, was already taken, so he settled for the shorter version.
The Pez story that never happened
“Too bad the story isn’t true.” That was the verdict of an Associated Press report in 2002, taking aim at the origin tale eBay had nurtured for years, in which Omidyar built the site so his fiancée could swap Pez dispensers with fellow collectors. The company’s chief executive was often photographed with Pez collections, and 121 dispensers stood on display in the headquarters lobby.
Cohen’s book showed the romance had been invented in 1997 by eBay’s first public relations manager, who discovered that the real explanation left reporters cold. Omidyar had simply figured that an auction marketplace would make good use of the internet. He gave the fib his blessing anyway. Nobody ever had to embellish the broken laser pointer.
The buyer who kept it for 20 years
In September 2015, at an eBay seller conference held days after the company turned 20, Omidyar sat on stage while a surprise video rolled. A write-up on eBay’s own newsroom reported that the man on screen was the pointer’s original buyer, who had come forward the week before after catching TV coverage of the anniversary. He said hello, then held up the pointer itself. He had hung on to it since 1995.
The founder had other stories that day. Early customers, he recalled, sometimes paid with coins taped to index cards. He also admitted to staring at an early listing for a 1952 Rolls-Royce, beautifully photographed, and deciding nobody would ever buy a car online. By 2015, he noted, a car or truck was being bought through eBay’s mobile app in the US every four minutes.
What 136 million buyers still have in common
How far did one dud gadget carry the idea? Far, and fast. The VentureBeat anniversary piece records a million registered users and a Nasdaq float within three years, and 100 million users by 2004. In its second-quarter results for 2026, a company press release, eBay counts 136 million active buyers, meaning people who paid for at least one item in the previous 12 months. Gross merchandise volume, the total value of everything sold on the platform including shipping and tax, reached $22.4 billion for the quarter and nearly $80 billion across 2025.
Collectors remain central to the business. The same release notes that an AI tool for identifying trading cards has passed 80 million scans, and that Goldin, a collectibles business eBay owns, sold a solo Michael Jordan card for $4.3 million. A shop on a high street needs plenty of customers who want the same thing. An auction site only needs to find one, and the price is set by the keenest bidder, which is how a piece of junk fetched almost half its original sticker price.
In July 2026 the company closed its purchase of Depop, a secondhand fashion app with a largely Gen Z and millennial following, for about $1.4 billion in cash. Many of those shoppers were born after AuctionWeb went live.