06/18/2026
Truly a gift to Hawaii! Many Mahalos!
For years, Forbes called him the richest man in Hawaii. Most locals have never seen his face.
He has lived on Oahu for 20 years. His money is in the news you read, the food on your table, the leaders running your kids' schools. He might be the most invisible man in the islands.
September 1995. A 28-year-old programmer in San Jose spends Labor Day weekend writing code for a hobby website. He keeps his day job. The idea sounds insane: strangers mailing money to strangers they have NEVER met, trusting that the box will actually show up.
The first thing ever sold on the site was a broken laser pointer. It went for $14.83. Pierre Omidyar emailed the buyer to make sure he understood it was broken. The reply: "I'm a collector of broken laser pointers."
Twenty years later, the buyer confessed he was no collector. Just a tinkerer who hoped he could fix it. He knew exactly what he was buying, and he paid anyway - which was the whole point. Pierre wrote his one belief into eBay's founding values: people are basically good.
Three years after that Labor Day weekend, eBay went public. The 1998 IPO turned the hobby programmer into a BILLIONAIRE. He was 31.
In 2001, he publicly stated that he and his wife Pam would give the vast majority of it away in their lifetimes. Not a foundation for the grandkids to run someday. Their lifetimes. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett didn't make that fashionable until nine years later.
He could have lived anywhere on earth. In 2006, the Omidyars packed up their three kids and moved to Honolulu.
The mainland press filed it under billionaires buying paradise. They missed the story. Pam grew up in Hawaii Kai - an Iolani girl. And Pierre had been here before: he spent 8th and 9th grade at Punahou, an immigrant kid from Paris by way of Maryland. This wasn't a billionaire discovering Hawaii. It was a Punahou kid and an Iolani girl coming home.
Then the checks started, the quiet way. $50 million to the Hawaii Community Foundation in 2009. More than $79 million through the Ulupono Initiative for local food, clean energy and fresh water. In 2010, Honolulu Civil Beat - a newsroom built to watch the powerful, including the man signing its checks.
He knew exactly how it could look. "It's very important that it is not just one family that shows up with a lot of money and says, 'Oh, yeah, we like Hawaii,'" he told the Star-Advertiser in 2010. Five years later he put it even simpler: "We see our futures here."
Then he did the strangest thing a billionaire can do. He vanished.
In 2015, his own newsroom went looking for him. The editor wrote that Pierre had "largely disappeared on us" - that he rarely even visits the office. More than $100 million into Hawaii by then, and the reporters he pays to find the truth could barely find him.
The man who taught the world to trust strangers never asked Hawaii to notice him.
You have touched his money without knowing it. If you've ever shared a Civil Beat investigation in the family group chat, eaten something from a farm Ulupono backed, or worked under one of the 131 leaders who came through the Omidyar Fellows - that's him. Almost everyone in Hawaii has a version of this.
Then Lahaina burned. The morning after the fire, with the islands still counting the missing, a $500,000 gift from the Omidyar ʻOhana Fund helped push Maui Strong past its first $1 million - in under four hours. Quietly, like everything else. A year later, the newsroom he built was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for its wildfire coverage.
Civil Beat is still publishing this month. Ulupono is still writing checks. A tenth cohort of Omidyar Fellows started this past October. And at Punahou, the youngest kids now start school in classrooms that carry the name of a man who first walked that campus as an 8th grader.
Pierre Omidyar bet a weekend hobby on one sentence - people are basically good - and it made him one of the richest humans alive. Then he spent 20 years and more than a hundred million dollars betting it again, on Hawaii. He isn't hiding. He just never needed the credit.
People are basically good. He came home to prove it.
