eBay Goes Corporate

and I did a couple of episodes about it. So let's do a quick recap before we continue our story. eBay was created by Pierre A. Midier. Originally it was called auction Web and that was underneath a larger website called eBay that had other stuff on it, including an Ebola virus page. And a. Medier had created it as sort of a hobby. He had not anticipate did it

becoming a business. He just wanted to create a fair market place for exchanges for auctions because he felt that there was a need for that and he had a cool idea of how to implement it. He had to start charging a small fee for successful auctions in order to offset his web hosting service. There was so much traffic going to auction Web after the first few months that his web hosting service said, Hey, we're gonna have to charge you for a business website as opposed to

a personal one. So you're gonna have to pay two U fifty dollars a month in order to keep this site active. So in order to offset that, he started putting in a small listing fee for any successful auction, so if an auction completed, he would take a small percentage of that in order to offset those costs. But he ended up making enough money from auction Web to make that his full time gig, so he quit his day job and auction Web a k a a became

his main job. It became his full time occupation. He brought on a friend to help run the business, and later they brought on Meg Whitman to run it. She became the president and CEO of eBay. Whitman prepared eBay for its initial public offering or i p O. That's when you list on a stock exchange and you sell shares in your company, and that i p O was successful enough to turn a medier into a billionaire, so

he was wealthy beyond his imagining at that point. In about a year after the company went public, eBay had a site wide outage that lasted nearly twenty four hours and required a quick response from the company. I'll talk a little bit later in this episode about the infrastructure they created to try and prevent that from ever happening again, and some other quick backtracking that I need to do because I got up to two thousand two in our last episode, but I skipped over a couple of things

that I think they weren't mentioning. One thing I did not mention in the last episode is how in two thousand eBay created a class it calls eBay University. This uh. This course teaches people the best practices for listing items on eBay, how to sell them effectively, how to create a business using eBay as a foundation. And this would allow people to leverage eBay while eBay also is able to get an advantageous relationship out of it, so it's

kind of a symbiotic relationship. The user is able to expand their reach and use eBay's tools like marketing and listing and all this sort of stuff in order to get their goods out to a wider audience. So let's say that you actually have an antique store, and maybe you're antique store is on a little like it's a nice, little quaint antique store that's off a little road. You know you're you're going to only get traffic occasionally from that.

People don't tend to go out of their way. But by using eBay, you could have your entire inventory up online as well, and even set things aside when you decide to auction off specific things in your inventory that could become your full time business. And you could use eBay's tools to market, to reach out to potential customers, all this sort of stuff. So there's a big benefit to the small business owner. But in turn, eBay benefits because of course it takes a small portion of all

the sales. And of course there's also some other listing fees that happened these days if you're listing a lot of different items. I'll talk more about that in the next eBay episode. So classes at eBay University are actually held throughout the world. It's not a specific location that you have to go to, and they're led by members of the eBay community who have a lot of experience in this. Also in two thousand, eBay acquired another business

called half dot Com. Half dot com allowed people to sell certain things in limited categories like textbooks, video games, movies, and music, and you had to do it at a set price. So it's not an auction. It's a fixed price approach, but you get to choose what the prices as the seller um as a store with a bunch of independent vendors. You can think of it that way.

So let's say that you wanted to sell a specific textbook, you could actually go onto half dot com and search to find out if anyone else was selling that same sort of textbook and what price they had said it at, what the average price was, and this would help you determine what price to set your textbook. Maybe you go a little under because you really want to get rid of this thing. Maybe you go a little overthinking eventually

someone's gonna pay for it. Half dot Com took a commission for any sale, and sellers were responsible for shipping the actual items within three business days of a sale going through. And oddly enough, even though eBay would acquire PayPal in two thousand two, eBay would not incorporate PayPal into half dot com until twenty so that was kind of weird that they delayed so long to put PayPal

functionality in half dot com. eBay stated it would operate half dot com as a separate entity, maintaining its business model, which was pretty much true until when eBay shut down Half dot com, so it is no more. In November two thousand, eBay introduced the buy it Now feature that allows buyers to purchase an item at a set price rather than play the auction game. And of course it's up to the buyer to set this, so if a buyer doesn't set a buy it now price, it's just

a normal auction. But this gave buyers options. They could try to purchase the item at less than the buy it now price by going through the auction, but then they could risk being sniped out of a purchase, or they could just go ahead and buy it for the

asking price. So for example, I might have a lovely Vause up on eBay and the minimum bid for the auction is twenty dollars, but the buy it now price is fifty dollars, So if you really like that Vause, you could buy it for fifty bucks, or if you felt I feel pretty good about this, I don't know

that a lot of people are looking at this. I'm gonna go ahead and put in the minimum bid of twenty bucks and you could just try and buy it for that, and if the auction expires at the end of the set time and you are the highest bidder at twenty bucks, you just saved yourself thirty dollars. So it's kind of a a game almost, or it's you know, a bar of a risk sort of thing, depending on how you want to look at it. But it gave options to buyers. eBay also released an a p I

that is an application programming interface. They did that in two thousand that lets developers create their own apps to interact with eBay. So, uh, it lets you have some functionality with eBay, and you can do it in different ways. You can incorporate it into different websites, that kind of thing. In two thousand one, and this is on eBay's own corporate history, a special auction saw a pair of blue jeans sell for more than forty six thousand, five hundred dollars.

Think about that, Dory, a pair of blue jeans that cost forty sillars. What those genes. By the way, we're the oldest pair of Levi's known to exist. The auction was partly presented by the History Channel. And who was the lucky bidder who put forward nearly fifty grand for a pair of jeans? And he guesses, and he guesses. Try, you're gonna guess. R is not guessing. Give me a guess. Who would put up fifty grand for a pair of

blue jeans? Levi's Vintage Levi's, They date from eighteen eighties. Tarry, you gotta you gotta be faster than this. You gotta be faster. People can't listen to this. It was actually the Levi s. Trouss Company, the company that made the blue jeans, paid fifty thou dollars or nearly fifty thou dollars to buy the blue jeans. That is the most

expensive refund I have ever heard. Actually, they just wanted it so that they would have these vintage genes, and they planned on making replicas essentially of the genes and selling them. The jenes, like I said, were dated to the eighteen eighties, which means that Jack the Ripper could have worn them, but he probably didn't because he probably

didn't wear blue jeans at all. eBay also launched the eBay Store in June two thousand one that allowed sellers to create a virtual storefront that would hold all their listings as well as let them put branding on the page to differentiate their stores from other people's stores, and it eventually included marketing tools for users as well, like email newsletters. So this gave people who had an eBay

account the chance to have their own virtual storefront. So instead of just listing things on eBay, so you have maybe you've listed twenty different things on eBay, but they're all kind of just random and they don't appear in any one location. It's just if people happen to be searching for that particular type of item, then you're listing

might pop up. But having a virtual storefront, people could actually go through all the things you have listed on eBay and it's almost like you are your own little, tiny store. And in fact you could be if you had stuff that you were making, for example, and you wanted to make it available on eBay, you could have your own little storefront. So this really changed things up a lot too. Now we're finally back up to two thousand two, and I realized that was a lot of

stuff I left out of my last episode. But during that last episode I felt the trajectory toward the PayPal acquisition was really important. As for that acquisition, David O. Sachs, who was the CEO and the product leader of PayPal at the time of the acquisition, wrote a great piece on Cora That's the Question and Answer website about why PayPal chose to sell to eBay, Why why did PayPal

want this acquisition to take place? Well, at the time, PayPal was working hard to scale up because payment processing businesses are only really profitable if they scale, and eBay represented the majority of all payment volume on PayPal, two

thirds of all transactions. eBay also had other payment solutions connected to its service, not just PayPal, so you could pay through credit cards, their eBay had its own proprietary approach and others, and so there was a possibility that eBay could end up taking PayPal off that list or push other people to use its own proprietary approach, and that PayPal would suffer as a result. Eventually, now eat

paypals off eBay volume. The stuff that people are using PayPal four that doesn't involve eBay at all would be larger than their eBay volume. But in two thousand two it was a different story. So if eBay were to flip that switch, if they were to say, let's really push people to this other proprietary approach, that could have possibly hamstrong PayPal enough so that the company would have failed because two thirds of their volume was going through eBay,

so they were really dependent upon eBay. In addition, according to Sachs, PayPal was anticipating some legal battles over the use of the service in association with stuff like gambling sites. Now, there was nothing illegal about the arrangement that PayPal had, but there was a perception that politicians in the United States in particular were arming up to take a swing at online gambling and that they might argue that PayPal

was enabling gamblers. And so when the opportunity came, PayPal ended up agreeing to this acquisition deal with eBay in order to join forces with the company so that PayPal could survive and grow. eBay would benefit from that as well. Of Obviously, now it's gonna be fun to revisit that topic when I get up to two thousand fourteen, because that's when PayPal and eBay parted ways. And I'll explain all about that and why it happened in the next episode.

In two thousand three, eBay continued making acquisitions of other auction and commerce online companies, including a Chinese commerce company called each Net, and it continued to grow and add more users. At this time, and play Jim Uncle Griff Griffin published a book called the Official eBay Bible, which was a manual to help buyers and sellers make the

most effective use out of eBay. Oh and also that year, weird Al Yankovic came out with a little ditty called eBay and it was a musical parody of the song I Want It that Way by some group called the Backstreet Boys. Now I'm not gonna sing that song because you guys have done nothing wrong and don't deserve to have that happen to you. But I am going to read some of the lyrics to you just so that you can kind of get a feel for this song.

So the song opens like this, A used pink bathrobe, a rare mint snow globe, a Smurf TV tray I bought on eBay. My house is filled with this crap shows up in bubble wrap most every day. What I bought on eBay? Tell me why I need another pet rock, Tell me why I got that alf alarm clock. Tell me why I bid on Shatner's old to pay they had it on eBay. And a little bit later in that song, he has this bit, I am the type who is liable to snipe you with two seconds left

to go? WHOA got PayPal or visa? Whatever will please you as long as I've got the dough. So he did a really great job making jokes out of the stuff that was very much part of eBay culture. In fact, I haven't really talked about what sniping is yet in these episodes about eBay, and I guess I probably should.

Sniping was this practice of sitting on an auction and watching the time run down and then placing a bit just before the auction expires, and you were said to snipe it because you would outbid the previous bidder just before the auction ended. But this is actually a little more tricky than it sounds because the way eBay allows for automatic bidding. I'll explain that more in just a second,

but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, so we're back, and let's talk quickly about how bidding works on e basis. I haven't really covered that yet before we jump back into the history of the company. In an eBay auction, the auction will last a set amount of time, and you get to choose what that

time is. The seller can select an auction to last one, three, five, seven, or ten days, and typically the seller will also create a reserve price that's the minimum bid the seller will accept as a purchase price for the item. And the seller can also choose a buy it now price, which would allow someone to outright purchase the item for that price rather than bid on it and start up in auction.

Or you might not set a buy it now price, and you might not do it in the hopes of people going bonkers and bidding up the price to a really high amount, much higher than what you would have set. So it's kind of a a risk versus reward thing now.

In normal auctions in the real world, like physical auctions, typically the auctioneer, who I think, by law must be able to speak at a speed that defies belief, will call for bids until the bids trickled down to a halt, at which point the auctioneer calls for the end of the auction of that particular piece, and the person who made the final bid wins. So you just keep going.

And so an auction can last a really long time or be really short, And of course by wins, I mean the person now has to cough up the actual dough to buy the thing that was being auctioned off. Now an eBay auctions have a predefined end time. They don't just go when the bids trickle out, So the auction will continue to go until it reaches it's cutting off point, or the seller chooses to ind the auction early, and at that moment, whomever made the highest bid wins

the auction. Moreover, you can make a bid on an item and to side what you're willing to pay for it at max. From the very beginning, let's say I'm on eBay and I see a listing for an original Deities and Demi Gods source book for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and I think, holy cow, that's the source book that still has Lovecraft monsters in it has characters from Michael Moorecox l Rick Saga in it. This was before the copyright lawyers forced TSR to change it. I have to

have this book. I decide that I am willing to pay up to a hundred dollars for this source book because I'm a collector and the current bid is let's say thirty five dollars. Now, my new bid does not automatically make the price jump from thirty five dollars to one hundred dollars. Instead, eBay will reference whatever the maximum bid was for the person who set the thirty five dollar amount, and if thirty five dollars was the maximum, eBay will bump up the price to a small amount

above thirty five dollars. Let's say it's in five dollar increments. So if someone else bids again to you, but they bid below your one dollar maximum, you will automatically outbid them a little higher than their bid. So let's stick with my example to explain this better. And let's consider this scenario. Um, Matt Frederick and I are in a bidding war for this a D and D source book. This is a totally believable scenario. By the way, he has placed a bid on the item before me. I

haven't even seen it yet. He saw it any bid on it, and when I go to the item, I see that the current bid price is thirty five dollars. Now what I don't know is that Matt Frederick's full bid, the maximum bid is actually fifty dollars. It's showing me thirty five dollars because that's the lowest increment above whatever the reserve price was. So I place my maximum bid of one hundred dollars, and this is what I am willing to pay for that source book. It's kind of

what I feel like is my maximum. I don't want to go over a hundred. When I place my bid, it's as if Matt and I are in a really fast paced bidding war. So his bid of thirty five dollars, I up it up to forty dollars, but because he's has maximum said it fifty, it automatically bumps up again. So his final bid of fifty dollars finally gets up there, and then my bid, because I said my maximum is a hundred, would go out to fifty five dollars. eBay

handles all this automatically. I don't have to do anything except set what my maximum bid is. So the new price to beat appears to be fifty five dollars. Now, let's say Matt checks in on the auction and he sees that he's been outbid and by me, of all people. So he sees the new price is fifty five dollars, and he thinks, well, and I'm willing to go out to sixty, so he bids sixty dollars. eBay processes this, but it sees that I have already said a maximum

bid of one hundred dollars. So the price bumps up to sixty dollars for Matt, but then automatically bumps up again to sixty five dollars for me, and it would keep doing this until it hit my maximum of a hundred dollars. If someone bid more than that. Let's say that Matt goes crazy and he decides to bid a hundred and five dollars, then I would be outbid and I would be out of the auction unless I came

back to continue this bidding war. The nice thing about this is you can set an amount you're comfortable with and then just walk away. So if you win the auction, chances are you're going to win at a level below your maximum, like in that example. I was just giving. If I bid a maximum of a hundred dollars but Matt was not willing to go above sixty five, I would not be charged the full one dollars. I would be charged sixty five dollars for that. That That would be

the winning bid. So that's nice. You actually would quote it not really save money, but you wouldn't spend as much as you were willing to spend. And if you lose, you don't end up spending more than you wanted to on the item because you had already set your maximum, assuming that you just said it and walked away. However, winning is a pretty awesome experience, and so a lot of people may find themselves returning to the auction to increase their bids over what their maximum was as they

see an auction start to get away from them. And that happens all the time, and it's also kind of dangerous behavior, so you gotta be on the lookout for that. And because that's how bidding works, it makes sniping a little tricky. Because let's say that I see that the current bid is thirty five dollars for this sourcebook, and Matt Frederick has set that that winning bid, so far, and there's only two minutes left in the auction, and I think, perfect. Now I'm gonna go in snipe it.

I'm gonna put in forty dollars. I'm gonna win, but I don't know that Matt has already put in a fifty dollar maximum. If I wait too long to snipe, then all I'm really gonna do is drive the price up a little bit and make Matt pay more for the source book than he thought he was going to have to, which I admit has its own sort of sweet poetry. Making Matt Frederick have to spend more money. It warms my heart a little bit, but it doesn't

get me that source book. So that was also part of the strategy, as if you were going into snipe and item, you had to be ready to go quickly because if you did a higher bid and then found out that the person's automatic maximum bid was still higher, you had to keep going up until you reached a point where you were no longer comfortable bidding. So before I get back into the history, let's talk a little bit about how stuff works on the back end at eBay.

Because I mentioned earlier than they had that outage. Well, eBay now depends upon a grid computing system to support their service. They have several hundred database servers in several different areas and they store all the information on the site and there's redundancy in the system, so you have multiple computers that are actually holding the exact same information,

including all the listings that are on eBay. And that is because if one server or set of servers were to crash, another could pick up the load and service would not be interrupted. You would continue to have access to eBay even though entire servers were down because you have this redundancy built in and they could jump in to take the place of the servers that crashed. This is one of the things the company did to make sure alledges would not happen again like they did back in.

The database servers hold all the information, but two other groups as servers support this. There are application servers. There are search servers. These are the machines that handle the interactions between users and the data stored on the databases. So you can think of them kind of like employees who go from point of sale to a warehouse to actually bring inventory to customers. And then you have the

web servers. That's the actual interface itself that users encounter when they visit eBay, whether they are to trying to list an item for sale or they're trying to bid on something, or just visit their profile. But that's the basic infrastructure, all right. Now, it's time to get back to the history. And in two thousand four a few things happened. One was that Jeff Jordan's became the president of PayPal, which again was operating under eBay. At this point.

Jordan's had been a scene year vice president and general manager for eBay's North America division for several years. He had played an instrumental role in acquiring PayPal back in two thousand two, and he would be president of PayPal for two years. He would step down in two thousand six. He would later go on to be president and CEO

of Open Table, and today he's a venture capitalist. Also in two thousand four, eBay purchased another company called rent dot com, which is a website related to rental housing. It was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, my hometown back in nine of course, back then it was called Viva dot Com. eBay made the purchase for four hundred fifteen million dollars

in an exchange that included cash and stock. But eBay would eventually sell rent dot Com to another company that today is called rent Path LLLC, but at the time it was going by the name Prime Media Incorporated. The sale was reported to be four round one forty five million, So yikes. You know they bought it for four fifteen million in two thousand four and then sold it a couple of years later for a million adds a loss. But finally, one other story I want to hit from

two thousand four is a very odd one. You know already talked about blue jeans. Let's talk about grilled cheese sandwiches. Yep. And two thousand four, a woman in South Florida sold a partly eaten grilled cheese sandwich on eBay and it's sold for get ready for this tari twenty eight thousand dollars for a partly eaten grilled cheese sandwich. Now, the reason why was because the grilled cheese sandwich had a pattern, or apparently had a pattern on it. It's really just

random coloration, but still it was. There was some colors on this grilled cheese sandwich that gave a shape that suggested it could be the image of the Virgin Mary, so I say to this sweet cheese is the buyer? By the way, was an online casino site called Golden Palace dot com, which bought several of the stranger items that have been posted to eBay as part of a

museum of weird kind of thing. I think in our final episode on eBay, our next one, I will have to conclude by talking about some of the strangest stuff that's ever been bought on eBay, which honestly could probably be an entire series all by itself. I've got more to say about eBay, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. In two thousand five, eBay brought on John Donahoe as the president of eBay market Places, and he would later serve as the president and CEO

of the company after Meg Whitman's departure. eBay also created a classified business called Kigigi and I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that, but it's from a Swahili word for village. This began as a startup business within eBay itself. It was spearheaded by employees of eBay, so it's kind of like a startup incubator within eBay. It was bolstered by more acquisitions, starting with a British online classified service called gum Tree and a Spanish service called low Quo, and in the

United States this service would morph into eBay Classifieds. In it's still called Kajiji in several countries, however, also just to stick with this for a little bit longer, the division had a stake in a competitor classified site, a little site that you might have heard of called Craig's List. That stake amounted to about twenty eight percent ownership of

the online classified site. But Craig's List and eBay have had a let's call it a contentious relationship over the years, and each company has accused the other of various forms of skullduggery in general shenanigans, and ultimately this resulted in eBay selling back the ownership stake it had in Craig's List. In in September two thousand five, Eba turned ten years old.

I know what that feels like. In an effort to protect their business model and help people who depend upon eBay for their own businesses, the company created a division called main Street. The purpose of main Street is to educate communities about the various legislative moves that could impact

the way online commerce works. It's kind of a grassroots campaign to get people involved in that sort of stuff, and it's an advocacy group which is definitely serving eBay's interests, but at the same time it also helps those who have built viable small businesses using eBay as their storefront to protect themselves. So I could be all cynical about this and say, well, here's a big corporation, multibillion dollar corporation, and it's leveraging average people to advocate on its behalf,

and that's the cynical way to look at it. And in fact, eBay does benefit from this. I mean they're looking out for themselves. However, the name sure of eBay's business means that if eBay were to go away, a lot of those average people would find themselves back at square one. Their way of making a living would go away. So I don't really get as cynical about this. I mean, everyone has a stake in it, so I think it's

actually a pretty responsible move on eBay's part. In October two thousand five, eBay, under the leadership of Meg Whitman, made another big move. This one raised criticism at the time, and perhaps in hindsight you could call it a foolish move to make, although it wasn't nearly the kerfuffle that some have made it out to be. That move was to acquire the communications company Skype. Skype was founded back in two thousand three as a telecommunications software product that

focused on voice and video calls. You know, in case you've never used it. The deal with eBay ultimately meant Skype was acquired for about three point one billion dollars. Two point five billion of that was in upfront hash and stock, and the rest was in uh future transactions, but ultimately it ended up being about a three point

one billion purchase price. Now, Whitman had hoped that Skype would create a new way for eBay users to communicate with one another, that it could be built directly into eBay's interface, and rather than emailing back and forth about items that are up for auction or for sale, users would be able to connect directly in a real time communication session. You could have potential buyers and sellers talk face to face, Questions could be answered efficiently and personally,

and you'd be less likely to misinterpret something. Once you could detect stuff like tone and body language. But there was one tiny little problem. Hardly anyone was using it. It was a failed integration. Tech journalist Tom Keating said in a piece that was published on PC World that eBay users tended to want to be anonymous. They preferred to keep things at a distance. They might contact a seller to ask for more information, but typically they would do so in a way that did not involve direct

real time communication. And I can kind of get this because when I call up a company, I'm actually relieved to get an automated system where I can just push a button and get the information I need. I know that I'm not inconveniencing anyone, and that the system isn't going to judge me for being dumb if I ask a simple question. At least, I hope the robots aren't doing that yet, give me a couple more years, robots. The culture of both Skype and eBay was a big

clash as well. At that point, Skype was operating more like a loose startup, whereas eBay had already started to establish a very corporate culture. Meg Whitman's leadership had really transformed it from the wild West startup into more of a departmentalized, compartmentalized corporation, and so those two things were clashing quite a bit, and eBay kept shuffling around the management team over at Skype while trying to find the best fit, and that meant Skype was really struggling to

find itself, to find a rhythm and an identity. Ultimately, eBay decided to sell most of its ownership of Skype in two thousand nine to a group of private investors, and the investors bought about six of the ownership of Skype and eBay retained the rest of it. They paid one point nine billion dollars to buy that part of Skype, and Brad Stone of The New York Times wrote that quote, the online calling service Skype has thrown off the last of the shackles that limited its growth and potential as

a unit of eBay end quote. Ouch analysts looked at this move as one of eBay trying to make the best out of a bad situation. Jeffrey Lindsay, who is an analyst, called eBay's purchase of Skype a quote serious, a stake by Meg Whitman end quote, and an attempt to buy growth. Now, of course, a lot of companies have bought growth in the past, like instead of trying to develop new businesses or go into new markets, they buy another company and they grow that way. This is

something that happens a lot in business. It's not uncommon, so I don't really think of it as a valid criticism because plenty of companies have done this. But in this case, it just didn't pan out. So in retrospect, sure you could say this was a bad choice, but

that's in retrospect. And at first it looked like eBay was really going to take a bath on this acquisition and come out with a loss because they had already sold sixty of Skype, and at a much lower price than what they spent to buy Skype in the first place. But then in Microsoft stepped in to purchase Skype. They wanted it outright, they wanted all ownership of Skype, and they paid eight point five six bill in dollars total for it, and that thirty or so that eBay had

retained was suddenly worth a whole lot of money. After taxes and debts and all that other mess. It amounted to a bit less than a billion dollars, but it meant that Ultimately, eBay was going to come out ahead on the Skype deal once everything was said and done. It just took two different acquisitions for that to happen. Now, it doesn't mean that the deal was a great one for eBay, but it also doesn't make the Skype acquisition

one of the worst deals in tech history. It ultimately didn't fit, but it wasn't a blown move like News Corps buying my Space for five million and then selling it for less than fifty million. It wasn't as bad as all that. Now, I'm going to end this episode in two thousand six, and our next episode will bring us from that point up to date with eBay and how it's running today. But in two thousand and six, the most expensive item ever sold through through the auction

site was auctioned off kind of. I'll explain why kind of in just a second. But it was a giga yacht that sold for one hundred sixty eight million dollars. That is insane. So what the heck was this giga yacht like? And what the heck is a giga yacht? Well, a giga yacht is a giant yacht, and you probably gathered that from the name and I'm looking at a concept photo of this beast and I am flabbergasted. So it was designed by Frank Mulder, who is a naval architect,

and uh, at this point, it's still a design. But here are some of the stats on this design. The yacht, if it's ever built, will measure four hundred five ft long, that's about a hundred twenty three meters. The design has a multi level v I P state room as seven

guest rooms, including a children's stateroom. It has a spa that includes a gym, and it has an office and a movie theater and a glass elevator and a swimming pool and a helicopter pad, and a garage that can actually have a ski boat and two tender boats in it. You can also launch a submarine from dry dock. And according to one source, the master suite would be three

thousand square feet, which is insane. I don't know if that's true or not, because it was just in this one source, And when I went to Molder's actual website, I could not find any information about how big the VIP suite actually is, so I don't know where they got that information. The purchaser on this auction is an oil tycoon from Russia named Roman Abramovich. He made the winning bid. Technically, the winning bid was for a fifty down payment of eighty five million dollars on eBay. He

was the second bid on that auction. The first bid was ten dollars. I presume that did not meet the reserve asking price. Now, according to Molder designed, this is still in that design phase and hasn't even started construction yet, so there's no I have no idea that this thing is ever even going to be built or what the status is on the payment. It could be the whole deal fizzled out, in which case the most expensive thing ever purchased on eBay might be a little further down

the list. Also in two thousand and six, Rajiv Duta would move over as president of Skype to assume the position of president of PayPal, and PayPal would launch its first mobile application that year. That brings us up to the end of two thousand six and eBay. In our next episode, we will finish out cover more than a

decade's worth of information. I'm not going to break it down quite as granular granul early year by year as I have in this episode, but uh I definitely will cover all the big points, such as Meg Whitman's departure from the company and what has happened since then, and we'll also talk about some of the crazy stuff that's been bought on the site. I hope you guys are

enjoying this series. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, whether it is a person, a company, a technology, maybe there's someone you want me to have on to interview or perhaps a guest host, let me know. Send me an email. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or drop me a line

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