More than anything else, eBay founder Pierre Morad Omidyar—who is ready to plow as much as $250 million of his nearly $9 billion fortune into an as-yet-undefined journalism venture—has impressed colleagues and acquaintances with his refreshingly modest personal style.

 

He’s a very normal person,” says New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who interviewed the press-shy Iranian-American about his plans to join forces with lawyer-turned-investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald, the impresario of the Edward Snowden revelations in Britain’s The Guardian, to create a major media enterprise from the ground up.