#53 – eBay: Economic Opportunity at Scale

“To connect people and build communities to create economic opportunity for all”

— by eBay, the California-based multinational founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar in San Jose, at the dawn of the commercial internet.

What started as a simple online auction platform quickly became one of the earliest proofs that the internet could enable peer-to-peer economic exchange at scale.

eBay didn’t just digitize commerce; it decentralized it, allowing individuals, collectors, small businesses, and resellers to participate directly in global markets.

Today, eBay operates in nearly every country, with over 132 million active buyers and approximately $73 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) in 2023.

Its platform supports millions of sellers, many of whom are independent entrepreneurs whose livelihoods depend on access to a global customer base.

The company's purpose reflects this origin. It frames eBay as an infrastructure for distributed entrepreneurship, where value is created at the edges rather than controlled at the center.

But scale changes the nature of that promise.

As the platform matured, issues around trust, counterfeit goods, seller conditions, fees, and algorithmic visibility introduced new tensions between openness and control.

Building economic opportunity at a global scale requires constant calibration: who benefits, under which rules, and at what cost.

eBay’s relevance today lies in how it manages this balance.

The platform still enables access to markets that would otherwise remain closed, but the quality of that opportunity depends on governance, transparency, and fairness embedded in the system.