Pierre Omidyar's First eBay Sale Was a BROKEN Laser Pointer

The story says he built eBay so his girlfriend could trade Pez dispensers. That story was a lie.

A publicist invented it later, because the truth sounded too strange to sell.

Pierre Omidyar was a quiet programmer who built an auction site over a single holiday weekend in 1995.

He wanted to know one thing: could strangers trust each other enough to trade online?

The very first item sold was a broken laser pointer, bought for fourteen dollars.

Worried, he emailed the buyer to make sure they understood it didn't even work.

The reply came back: I collect broken laser pointers. That was the moment he knew.

People flooded in to sell almost anything, policing each other with simple feedback ratings.

His weekend experiment became eBay, a global marketplace built entirely on strangers trusting strangers.

The quiet coder who bet on trust built one of the internet's first great fortunes.

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