Pierre M. Omidyar: The Web For The People

As the world wide web caught fire in the mid-1990s, a long-haired programmer named Pierre M. Omidyar fretted that big businesses would take over. "I wanted to give the power of the market back to individuals," he said. So he spent Labor Day weekend in 1995 furiously coding a bare-bones site he called Auction Web. Omidyar, still working full-time at onetime Silicon Valley star General Magic, sought to create a perfect online market -- one that would let real folks compete on a level playing field with the big boys.

Did it ever. Today, eBay Inc. (EBAY ), as it's now known, has catapulted from its early days as the place to trade Beanie Babies to become the Web's most powerful corporate enterprise in its own right, worth more than $70 billion. So far this year, more than a billion items have been listed for sale on eBay, from antique doilies to 2005 Hummers (GM ). Were eBay a country, its expected gross sales of $34 billion this year would rank as the 59th largest gross domestic product in the world, just behind Kuwait. "It is an economy of its own," says economist W. Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute.