firm. As members of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge, Omidyar and his wife Pam have donated to the fight against human trafficking, including $115 million to their Humanity United foundation, which funds 85 antislavery nonprofits as well as projects in five countries, including their first in Nepal. They've pledged to spend another $50 million by 2016. Born in France of Iranian parents, Omidyar moved to the U.S. with his family at age six. He wrote code for his website, Auction Web, at age 28 and renamed it eBay after his first choice, Echo Bay, was already taken. He ceded executive control to new hire Meg Whitman in 1998. She was replaced by John Donahoe 10 years later. A resident of Hawaii, Omidyar controls various resort properties in Southern California and Mexico and is planning to develop resorts and homes in Hawaii. 
 
 EBay founder and chairman Pierre Omidyar launched First Look Media in late 2013 with the aim of presenting new forms of independent journalism. With a promised $250 million from Omidyar, First Look launched its first digital magazine, The Intercept, in February 2014 with work from investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald. Omidyar also spends time on the Omidyar Network, his philanthropic investment 

 In honor of eBay’s 20th anniversary Thursday, note that one of the most valuable brands on the Internet started with the sale of one of the least valuable items imaginable: a broken laser pointer. 
 
 Over Labor Day weekend in 1995, the site’s founder Pierre Omidyar wrote code for “AuctionWeb” and launched it as a personal project out of a spare bedroom in his Silicon Valley town house. He had bought a $30 laser pointer with the intention of using it to make flashy presentations, but ended up using it to make his cat chase the red dot, according to The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, a book written by former TIME senior writer Adam Cohen. Omidyar decided to list the $30 laser pointer, which broke two weeks after it was purchased, because “it would be a good way to test out AuctionWeb, he figured, and it would cost him nothing,” Cohen wrote. In the listing, he admitted the item didn’t work, even with new batteries. While no one bid on it for a week, a bidding war started the next week, and the product first listed for $1 ended up selling for $14.83. 
 
 Four years later, Cohen wrote, AuctionWeb — known as eBay — had grown to be an “online retailer valued at more than Sears, or Kmart and JCPenny.” Today, Forbes reports Omidyar’s personal net worth is $8.4 billion and lists the site as one of the “50 most valuable brands in the world. It boasts 157 million buyers, about 25 million sellers, and 800 million listings.” 
 
 Read Next: The 20 Weirdest Things Ever Sold on eBay 
 
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– "AuctionWeb" came into being over the Labor Day weekend that occurred precisely two decades ago, and Time uses the anniversary to look back at the very first transaction that occurred on what came to be known as eBay. It pulls the detail from the book The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, which recalls founder Pierre Omidyar listing a broken laser pointer as a test. He listed the item, purchased for $30, for $1, and noted in the listing that though he tried new batteries, the pointer didn't work. It ended up selling anyway, for $14.83. It was a first sale that snowballed into riches for Omidyar who, according to Forbes, is now worth about $8.5 billion.