eBay Exposed: A Social Experiment In Free Speech & Corporate Accountability
Behind feel-good mission statements and carefully crafted PR narratives, corporate giants wield immense power but rarely face real-world consequences for poor performance or dubious ethics as public promises of transparency often mask internal systems designed to silence dissent, bury responsibility, and protect leadership at all costs.
When conventional oversight fails, external pressure rooted in the principles of free speech can serve as a powerful corrective force.
This is the story of how one determined scrutineer leveraged public discourse, financial analysis, and digital advocacy to challenge a multibillion-dollar company and compel lasting corporate change.
I first encountered an online persona who went by the name unsuckEBAY in 2019 while posting in the eBay community forum in a previous professional role where I managed a $2M+/year eBay account for an ecommerce business which also sold on Amazon and multiple direct websites.
His comments stood in stark contrast to the average forum discussions I had seen - rather than focusing on individual user complaints, he framed issues buyers and sellers were facing as systemic problems of corporate governance, operational execution, and leadership that eBay could and should address at an institutional level.
That unique perspective piqued my interest, such that when the company I worked for was targeted by a sophisticated form of fraud in early 2020, I reached out to unsuckEBAY privately to get his take on the situation.
He pointed me to several other major eBay fraud incidents he had been tracking, including one where compromised eBay accounts had payments siphoned off to fraudulent PayPal accounts and another where scam websites were scraping eBay listings and using them as bait to steal credit card numbers and other Personally Identifiable Information.
After sharing details of the fraud situation I had encountered, unsuckEBAY's knowledge and experience were invaluable in helping me to identify and fight a wide reaching triangulation fraud scheme operating on the marketplace.
Liz Morton
Through those interactions, I got to know a little about the person behind the persona as I learned his posts in the eBay community were just one part of a broader social experiment to see if a single individual could tip the scales toward corporate accountability and reform.
UnsuckEBAY believed company-controlled forums and customer service channels are often designed to act as pressure valves for consumer complaints, limiting any real push for change and insulating decision-makers from the real impact of their policies.
He referred to this phenomenon (and eBay's community forum in particular) as a “walled garden” - a system that appears accessible but is ultimately self-contained, limiting external exposure of systemic dysfunction.
To counteract that walled-garden containment, he developed a controlled social experiment using digital tools to test if public discourse could force engagement; whether financial and media stakeholders would respond to well-documented inefficiencies; and if a minimal-time investment of highly targeted and optimized 10-15 minute bursts could yield disproportionate impact.
A free speech-protected platform like Twitter offered the strategic advantage of real-time exposure and direct engagement with corporate leadership, business and financial media, investors and analysts, and eBay's buyer and seller customers.
UnsuckEBAY paired public posts with private outreach to analysts, investors, and journalists where seller complaints were reframed not as isolated frustrations, but as systemic governance failures with material risks to eBay’s financial performance - with structured case studies, fact corrections, and insider context to back it up.
Rather than emotional appeals, posts targeted decision-makers with detailed analysis of operational breakdowns, creating a digital paper trail executives couldn’t ignore. Viral amplification turned once-siloed grievances into high-visibility accountability pressure focused on larger questions about executive competence and strategic oversight, forcing eBay to confront public sentiment at scale.
Initially dismissed as just another dissatisfied customer, signs soon showed unsuckEBAY's strategy was working.
High-ranking executives, investor relations personnel, and corporate leadership began following and monitoring the account, providing implicit acknowledgment of its influence despite never engaging publicly.
Journalists, financial analysts, and industry observers also began following the account and engaging with posts, citing unsuckEBAY's insights in reports and articles.
With unsuckEBAY's efforts gaining traction, corporate leadership faced a decision: they could engage in meaningful reform to address the criticisms; continue ignoring the discourse, hoping it would fade; or attempt to suppress or discredit the effort.
While the rational choice would have been internal reform, eBay leadership ultimately chose retaliation.
What unsuckEBAY and the rest of the world did not know at the time was how these efforts had rippled through eBay's C-suite, particularly as activist investors Starboard Value and Elliott Management took sizeable positions in the company, as well as seats on the board, and began a public campaign pushing for major changes at the company in January 2019.
He had used several monikers in the early stages of his experiment (sometimes going by the pseudonym Dan Davis or Fidomaster before settling on unsuckEBAY) and eBay had taken notice of his public commentary in various places across the internet.
As part of the media engagement element of his strategy Fidomaster/ unsuckEBAY interacted with both mainstream media reporters and independent journalists like Ina and David Steiner at EcommerceBytes, submitting news tips and serving as a source providing subject matter expertise, structured data analysis and crucial industry context to help inform their coverage of eBay.
To further the social experiment, he would also often engage with other readers in comments sections and forums and amplify important stories through Twitter to drive awareness of systemic corporate governance issues.
Internally, eBay already had an adversarial posture toward EcommerceBytes, which had been covering both broader corporate and financial news and the experiences of sellers on eBay and other marketplaces since 1999.
But that long simmering frustration came to a boil when issues EcommerceBytes had been covering for years started gaining significant exposure to a wider (and very important to eBay) audience in the financial community, in large part due to unsuckEBAY's amplification.
As CEO Devin Wenig, Chief Communications Officer Steve Wymer, and SVP Global Operations Wendy Jones felt the pressure of increasing scrutiny with activist investors breathing down their necks in late 2018 - early 2019, their frustration was expressed and exerted out to comms, investor relations and most importantly to the company's global security division, headed up by Senior Security Director Jim Baugh.
The end result: a shocking corporate scandal aimed at silencing journalists and unmasking an anonymous source, multiple federal felony convictions of eBay security personnel, a major governance crisis and a potential $500 Million lawsuit against the company, executives, and employees involved.
Liz Morton
Executive irritation with EcommerceBytes and Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY had grown exponentially with commentary on corporate issues being of particular interest to eBay, such as mass layoffs and a management shakeup in 2018 or an article about Wenig's oversized compensation package (earning 152 times the average eBay employee).
In February 2019, EcommerceBytes published an article about Wenig cryptically tweeting an excerpt from Theodore Roosevelt's "Citizenship in a Republic" speech - more commonly referred to as The Man in the Arena.
EcommerceBytes and many of their readers seemed to believe at the time that tweet had a defensive tone and was perhaps subtly directed at the activist investors who had been pushing for changes at eBay.
Many of the other comments on that article had harsh words to say about Wenig, calling him "deranged, sociopathic and megalomaniacal" or "a narcissist...unable to empathize or take criticism" - but it was this comment from FidoMaster/ unsuckEBAY that specifically caught eBay's watchful eye.
That comment prompted eBay PR director Ryan Moore to email Baugh and Sr Manager Global Intelligence Stephanie Popp, with Wymer cc'ed, requesting for the security team to "dig up some intel" on Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY.
Wymer responded, adding he would "specifically appreciate a POV on whether or not we think he could be in direct communication with an eBay employee or insider" and that "some of his 'information' seems more than public."
Strangely, it apparently never occurred to either the Chief Communications Officer or the PR Director to have someone from eBay reach out in good faith to communicate with Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY in an effort to answer their questions or glean any insights into his interest in the company and its leadership.
While that could have been a risky proposition from a PR perspective, it certainly would not have had anywhere near the potential blowback of what actually transpired.
Popp's response showed much of the information Wymer and Moore were concerned about came from publicly available sources (including a Hamptons.com article showing Wenig posing with various celebrities at a Sag Harbor charity event) and did not indicate any insider connections.
As Popp's email revealed, this was not the first time the security department had been asked to "look into" Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY - they had been monitoring his activities since a June 28, 2018 comment on an EcommerceBytes article about that year's layoffs.
In the criminal case against him, Baugh tried to paint Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY's tweets and comments as "threatening" and "ominous" in an effort to mitigate his actions by claiming he was protecting the company and its executives as his job description required.
However, one example he provided shows those claims were significantly overblown or, at the very least, that Baugh lacked either the desire or competence to do even the most basic research or investigation into the contents of these supposedly threatening comments.
The New York Times bestselling business book Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done was written by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan (as noted in Fidomaster's tweet) with a quote on the front cover attributed to Jack Welch.
And, contrary to Baugh's ominous framing, "execution" in this context does not imply anything violent - it's simply a common business term referring to the "practical implementation of a strategy, plan, or idea, transforming it into concrete actions and results."
Baugh and his security team continued to monitor the account and in March 2019, both Wymer and Chief Legal Officer Marie Oh Huber separately requested a deeper investigation of FidoMaster/unsuckEBAY, looking to identify the person behind the account.
Oh Huber included then VP Deputy General Counsel Corporate Governance Marc Rome, Chief Compliance Officer Molly Finn, VP Markets Selim Freiha and VP Investor Relations Joe Billante, asking Baugh to give everyone copied as much info as possible about who was behind the Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY account.
The inclusion of investor relations and concerns about connections to the activist campaigns confirms unsuckEBAY's social experiment had significant impact both internally at eBay and externally with financial analysts, institutional investors and other stakeholders.
Another sore spot for the execs was a May 2019 EcommerceBytes article about CEO Devin Wenig turning a historic house on the eBay campus into a replica of his favorite NYC bar in 2017, which many viewed as a questionable use of corporate resources.
UnsuckEBAY/FidoMaster's amplification of the story on Twitter, and criticism of what he called Wenig's "self-indulgent vanity project" caught eBay's attention, as shown by an email from Global Intelligence Manager Stephanie Stockwell to Jim Baugh dated May 22, 2019.
The email went on to show the full tweet thread, including EcommerceBytes responding to thank Dan Davis/FidoMaster/unsuckEBAY for flagging that the details about Walker's West had been removed from the contractor's website, resulting in an update to the EcommerceBytes article dated May 22, 2019.
The executive leadership team was so concerned about the optics of the story, Jones requested to "huddle" about the matter over lunch, where Baugh says she told him to deal with the issue "off the radar."
Jones denies those allegations, arguing Baugh's statements are inadmissible hearsay, and says the request to "huddle" was not related to EcommerceBytes, but rather about safety concerns posed by the contractor who did the Walker's West renovation posting details on their website.
But that's a laughable assertion, considering the email mentions Ina Steiner by name and it was sent only one day after Stockwell's email to Baugh with the tweets from Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY.
Beyond that, how can Jones or eBay expect anyone to take the idea this was a security or safety concern seriously when Jones proudly appeared in a promotional video for the eBay Main Street project (which included renovating the historic "Little Blue House" into Walker's West)?
This video was published November 28, 2016 - so it had been publicly viewable for ~2.5 years before EcommerceBytes published their story about Walker's West and remains publicly available today.
Culture Capital also posted a video in 2017 about the eBay Main Street project, including a short interview with Wenig and mention of the on campus pub.
The fact that eBay still hosts videos showing interior tours of Walker's West on their official Vimeo and YouTube channels belies any point the company might wish to make about supposed security threats from the details of the building being publicly available.
And current leadership is apparently not too concerned about any supposed security issues either, as the on campus pub continues to operate today - though it has been renamed The Sellar in an effort to distance eBay from the tarnished history of the project and its relationship to this scandal.
Liz Morton
eBay's own actions prove the Walker's West story, and unsuckEBAY's Twitter commentary about it, clearly did not represent a serious safety or security issue for the company.
However, it may have inflamed Wenig's ego - especially with the tie in to activist investor concerns about wasteful spending during his tenure - serving as a critical inflection point and direct catalyst for the corporate scandal that was to come.
Text messages between Wenig and Wymer during these months showed increasingly amped up reactions to EcommerceBytes' coverage, including a message from Wenig directing Wymer to "take her [Ina Steiner] down" on May 31, 2019.
Days later, on June 8, Sr Manager Special Operations Brian Gilbert traveled from California to Massachusetts to engage in an act of vandalism clearly intended as a warning - tagging "Fidomaster" on the Steiners' fence.
Baugh ordered employees under his purview to maintain around the clock monitoring of EcommerceBytes and to step up efforts to discover the identity of the person behind unsuckEBAY.
Security Analyst Veronica Zea's letter to the court submitted as part of her criminal sentencing described Baugh's obsession with the subject, fueled by pressure he was receiving from above:
That fake disgruntled employee was "Marissa", as shown in these excerpts provided exclusively to Value Added Resource by unsuckEBAY.
Not only were the security team pretending to be "Marissa", they also created other fake accounts like unsuckunsuckEBAY/ Fidomaster2 which they used to harass unsuckEBAY and others he engaged with frequently.
When the real Fidomaster changed his username to unsuckEBAY, Baugh and the eBay security team were even able to take over the original Fidomaster1 account due to a quirk in how Twitter allows usernames to be reused after they've been changed.
Baugh became paranoid about unsuckEBAY possibly attending the annual seller conference, eBay Open, in late July 2019, dispatching Zea and Gilbert to surveil arriving passengers at the Las Vegas airport in hopes of catching him.
UnsuckEBAY had grown increasingly suspicious after the "Marissa" messages and posted the airport tweet as a ruse to see what kind of reaction it might receive, even though he had no plans to actually attend eBay Open.
When their plan failed to identify Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY, the account controlled by Baugh and his team tweeted a veiled threat, saying they know where he lives.
The escalation continued until on August 1st, 2019, Wenig (Executive 1) exchanged texts with Wymer (Executive 2), saying it was time to "take down" Ina Steiner.
According to the Steiners' civil suit, that "plan B" allegedly involved hiring Samoan gang members Gilbert and Security Manager Philip Cooke knew from their previous careers in the Santa Clara Police Department to stalk, intimidate, harm and potentially kill the Steiners.
Wymer and Baugh's August 1 2019 conversation continued by text, with Baugh saying "Regarding the unsuck idiot...I've been communicating with him every day. I told him I have an incriminating video that he needs to see. He bit on it hook line and sinker. I want to leave it at a hotel concierge for him. If I can get him to pick it up, his ass is mine...confidential obviously. Rest assured I will handle Ina."
Contrary to Baugh's text messages to Wymer, Fidomaster/unsuckEBAY did not take the bait - but he did send an email to the Steiners giving them a heads up about the strange interaction.
Given Baugh's background allegedly working in clandestine services for the CIA as well as helping the CIA and FBI target and recruit assets from the corporate world as part of his private security work - and the willingness of Baugh and others to deploy violent Samoan gang members as part of their plan - it's not hard to imagine what Baugh had in mind if he had been successful in getting "the unsuck idiot" to show up at a hotel to collect supposedly incriminating videos of eBay execs behaving badly.
Liz Morton
Shortly after that text exchange, Wenig expressed his desire to see the unsuckEBAY Twitter account shut down and assigned the task to Baugh, with Wymer and Oh Huber copied on an email dated August 6, 2019.
Wymer said he had previously discussed the issue with Baugh and explored all angles with Twitter, but had been unable to get @unsuckEBAY killed.
Oh Huber echoed the frustration, but her and another member of eBay legal, Aaron Johnson (now eBay's Chief Ethics Officer) advised there wasn't a strong claim to appeal to Twitter.
Baugh responded that his team had been investigating for weeks and he was close to discovering the identity and location of unsuckEBAY.
Oh Huber accepted that answer with a smiley face emoji, saying she would hold off on pursuing further legal steps in light of Baugh's investigation.
Wymer escalated the issue further the next day by making it clear how utterly vexed by the situation he was, saying any effort to "solve" the problem should be explored...Whatever. It. Takes.
While Jones was not originally included in this email chain, excerpts from court documents show Baugh forwarded at least 2 of the emails to her.
At the same time, Baugh was also separately texting with Wenig about his efforts to out unsuckEBAY with the fake "Marissa" messages and then copied Jones for "visibility."
On August 6, 2019, Wenig received another email complaint about FidoMaster. He sent the following email to Huber, Wymer, and Mr. Baugh: “First of all we should shut down the account. Second, this user name keeps popping up causing all kinds of trouble. Might be worth some research Jim.” Wymer responded that he had Mr. Baugh had been working on the issue. Huber and her colleagues responded that legal remedies were not and would not be effective...Mr. Baugh separately texted with Wenig:
Source: USA v. Baugh 1:20-cr-10263 Doc 227
Baugh forwarded that text thread to Wendy Jones (to provide “visibility” and keep her in the loop) and Jones responded with a “thumbs up.”
In the wake of those texts and emails, Baugh deployed a "White Knight Strategy" whereby he and his team would anonymously unleash a barrage of bizarre deliveries, send threatening messages and engage in both online and in person stalking with the goal of then being able to come in officially as eBay to offer to "assist" the Steiners in hopes of creating goodwill and trust.
Liz Morton
According to US Attorney Seth Kosto, the purpose of the White Knight Strategy was to influence the tone of EcommerceBytes reporting and to try to gain their cooperation in revealing the identity of unsuckEBAY:
Notably, Kosto explicitly called out the White Knight Strategy to out Fidomaster/ unsuckEBAY as particularly egregious, abhorrent to First Amendment values and cause for significant sanction in his sentencing memorandum in the criminal case against Security Manager Philip Cooke.
Baugh's team put the plan into action swiftly, with multiple phases to be stretched out over several weeks.
Since Ina Steiner was "known" to eBay, it stands to reason that the "unknown" target of the order to "find and destroy" was unsuckEBAY.
The documents go on to list a series of frightening messages and deliveries the Steiners began to receive in furtherance of the White Knight Strategy starting August 7 and escalating through August 15th, 2019 - including but not limited to:
- Inbox flooded with dozens of emails and newsletters the Communist Party, the Satanic Temple and more
- Delivery of a Halloween mask featuring a bloody pig face
- Death-themed deliveries of a sympathy wreath and book entitled "Grief Diaries: Surviving the Loss of a Spouse.”
- A voicemail message in response to purported interest in opening an Adam & Eve sex toys franchise.
- Boxes containing, fly larvae, live spiders and cockroaches
- Pornography sent to the Steiners neighbors with David Steiners name on it.
- Threatening private messages and public tweets from multiple Twitter accounts controlled by Baugh and other defendants - including one account named "Tui_Elei" which was specifically created to have a Samoan sounding name to match a fake Person of Interest report Gilbert proposed creating.
If you think that sounds like it was ripped from the pages of a Hollywood script, you wouldn't be far off.
Baugh was apparently quite the film buff and often held regular mandatory viewings of movie and tv clips he thought were instructive for the security team - like a scene from The Wolf of Wall Street where employees refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement, the "circle of trust" from Meet the Fockers, a clip from the tv show Billionaires about loyalty, and a scene from American Gangster where Denzel Washington's character casually executes a man in front of a crowd to prove a point.
An investigator with the FBI Boston Division's Cyber Crimes Squad even said he believed Baugh used the movie Body of Lies as inspiration for the White Knight Strategy.
The messages and deliveries continued until the security team stopped in preparation for the next phase, which would include live surveillance and an attempt to break into the garage to install a GPS tracker on the Steiners' vehicle.
The purpose of attempting to install a GPS tracker was to be able to monitor Ina Steiner's movements, including any in-person meetings she may have with sources - a clear continuance of the White Knight Strategy trying to discover the identity of unsuckEBAY.
On August 17, Baugh ordered the deliveries to continue with late night visits from emergency plumbers and pizza deliveries, Craigslist ads doxxing the victims' home address advertising a swinger's party and an "everything must go" estate sale, and even more increasingly violent and threatening Twitter harassment.
Later that day, the Tui_Elei account posted the Steiners' home address publicly on Twitter, asking "Dis UR address???"
The tweet was eventually removed after being reported by multiple accounts, including unsuckEBAY, who was concerned for the Steiners' safety and reached out privately to make sure they were aware of the doxxing.
The scheme started to unravel as the Steiners identified vehicles that had been following them and law enforcement put the pieces together, tracing everything back to eBay personnel, despite attempts to cover their tracks and obstruct the investigation.
Importantly, these crimes were not just meant to silence the Steiners or influence their reporting, they were also designed to curtail unsuckEBAY's free expression of protected speech with threats and harassment directly targeting him and his followers, as well as the clear violent intent Baugh had in mind if "Marissa" or the White Knight Strategy had succeeded.
Wenig's obvious disdain for the media was ironic, since he served as CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets before joining eBay and has often publicly projected a pro-free speech image, even founding a charity supporting various organization including the Prison Journalism Project.
At Code Conference 2016 hosted by Recode, Wenig was asked for his thoughts on the controversy then brewing between Gawker Media and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, coming down very clearly on the side of press freedom against billionaire tech interests saying "I side with a free media & a free press...we've got to be really careful that powerful voices don't knock down what I call divergent points of view."
Is it right for a billionaire to put large amounts of money secretly behind lawsuits seemingly to settle a political a personal score and to try to put a publication out of business?
Wenig's answer took a very staunch position defending a free press.
I'm gonna answer the broader question which is, I side with a free media and a free press.
I think we've got to be very careful. It is a nuanced argument there's always a pull and tug but something feels like it's different. All First Amendment rights aren't created equal.
There's a strong public interest in a free press and rich and powerful people have First Amendment rights too but if you allow that to be unfettered and what that causes is a real stifling of voices and a real concentration of media.
...We're not going to like the result of that and that really goes back all the way to the Constitution. So I don't want to get into all of that but we've got to be really careful that powerful voices don't knock down what I call divergent points of view.
You know this immediate kerfuffle, I don't like the media actor [Gawker]. I don't read what they do. I don't find it particularly valuable but that's irrelevant.
What's more relevant is that you shouldn't be allowed to drive media companies from expressing divergent points of view and I think we've got to be really careful about that.
Those words are particularly interesting when you consider the person sitting next to Wenig on that stage was Recode reporter, Jason Del Rey.
Del Rey interviewed Wenig shortly after news of the scandal broke in June 2020, but curiously, did not ask how Wenig's messages to "take down" a journalist or shut down a Twitter account that didn't violate platform policies or laws (by eBay legal's own assessment) could be squared with his previous comments about not allowing rich and powerful people to "knock down divergent points of view."
Jason Del Rey
In fact, court records show that knocking down divergent points of view is exactly what Wenig had in mind for dealing with reporting he didn't like, even going so far as to suggest (among other strategies) that eBay could work with friendly outlets to flood the internet with positive stories that would drive EcommerceBytes further down in search results.
While eBay says they did not act on the recommendation, Wenig reacted positively to the idea and at least wanted to consider moving forward with that plan.
eBay founder Pierre Omidyar has also carefully crafted a public reputation as a proponent of press freedom, funding journalists and whistleblower groups through Omidyar Network , First Look Media, Luminate and more as part of Omidyar Network's vision to "Reimagine Capitalism".
Connie Matthiessen
In yet another twist of irony, Omidyar founded the Intercept, which became famous for publishing the Snowden Files before making the surprising decision to halt research on the files and lock them down from any further public access in March of 2019.
Given that history, one might think Omidyar would have some interesting thoughts about journalists being harassed and threatened in an attempt to uncover an anonymous source.
However, he has never made any public statements about the eBay scandal and mainstream media has apparently not seen fit to ask where the elusive billionaire founder was when everything went off the rails at the company which enabled him to amass the vast fortune he now spends on various political and economic "world-shaping" endeavours.
Notably, Omidyar was still an active member of eBay's Board of Directors when these criminal events occured.
He stepped down in September 2020, 3 months after the scandal became public, but is still a major shareholder and retains the honorary title of Director Emeritus
That honorary title may not come with voting rights, but that doesn't necessarily mean Omidyar no longer has any influence at the company.
There are still 4 current Board members who were serving alongside Omidyar when the scandal happened - including Paul Pressler, who as Chair of the Compensation Committee in 2019 would have been pivotal in decisions about Wenig's exit package and clawbacks and who now serves as Chairman of the Board.
More directly, Shripriya Mahesh was appointed to eBay's BOD in 2023 after previously rising to VP Product Management and Product Strategy in 2006, then joining Omidyar's First Look Media as Head Of Product in 2013 and later becoming Partner Emerging Tech at Omidyar Network.
While serving on the eBay Board of Directors, Mahesh has actively maintained her position as Founding Partner of Spero Ventures - a for-profit venture fund spunout from Omidyar Network in 2018 with Pierre Omidyar as its sole limited partner at the time.
Mahesh was also recently appointed to lead a newly created Tech Committee, despite being one of the least technically experienced members of the Board.
Liz Morton
Omidyar also has tangential ties to the studio and team which produced a documentary about the cyberstalking scandal called Whatever It Takes, which debuted at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2024 and features exclusive interviews with the Steiners.
The film was produced by Allyson Luchak and Ben Travers, who had previously worked with the Steiners' original attorney in the civil case, Rosemary Scapicchio, on Trial 4, a documentary series about the fight to free Sean Ellis from wrongful conviction.
Whatever It Takes had backing from Concordia Studio, which is funded by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, who has previously collaborated with Omidyar on various philanthropic and media endeavors.
In fact, Whatever It Takes executive producers Jonathan Silberberg and Nicole Stott from Concordia Studio both worked directly with Omidyar's Luminate Media in 2020 to produce A THOUSAND CUTS - a documentary about the CEO/Founder of news site Rappler, Maria Ressa, and press freedom in the Philippines.
Strangely, Omidyar Network removed all mention of their previous financial involvement and support of Maria Ressa and Rappler in July 2024 as part of a "strategy evolution" which has taken their philanthropic efforts away from free speech/press freedom issues.
Engaging with a production team that has ties to Omidyar-backed projects/ organizations could raise conflict of interest concerns for the film and seemed like an odd choice, given the traumatic experiences of the victims and ongoing litigation involved.
In an interesting bit of timing, the Steiners fired Scapicchio and retained new counsel around the same time as Whatever It Takes debuted, though it's not clear if the film was in any way related to that decision.
While the public narrative around the eBay scandal has largely focused on the bizarre nature of the harassment campaign, painting a picture of a rogue security director going too far in a supposed quest to "protect the company", the criminal and civil cases have revealed a much deeper story of historic and continuing systemic corporate governance and compliance failures and a shockingly reckless disregard for free speech, press freedom, and the rule of law.
Liz Morton
The decision to retaliate rather than engage in open communication or reflect internally on institutional failings was a critical miscalculation. Rather than suppressing criticism, eBay’s retaliatory actions had the opposite effect - transforming the controversy into a full-scale corporate scandal.
Institutional investors now have tangible proof that leadership was engaging in unethical crisis management, triggering a cascading series of consequences that escalated beyond anything eBay’s leadership had anticipated.
The fallout from the scandal set the stage for the final evolution of unsuckEBAY’s strategy - transitioning from direct corporate critique to long-term investigative oversight.
After successfully exposing eBay’s systemic failures, leadership incompetence, and corporate retaliation, unsuckEBAY faced a decision: continue direct engagement, maintaining pressure through ongoing social media efforts or transition the work into a sustainable framework, ensuring long-term corporate scrutiny.
Rather than remaining in the public spotlight indefinitely, unsuckEBAY chose to redirect his efforts toward supporting independent investigative journalism to ensure oversight would continue and remain in the public record, preventing leadership from escaping accountability.
While unsuckEBAY’s direct engagement on Twitter had been highly effective in exposing corporate failures, social media platforms are fleeting, information cycles move quickly, and a single voice can be ignored over time or more easily dismissed.
By transitioning oversight to investigative journalists, the conversation shifted from individual critique to professional long-term analysis.
After seeing the impact unsuckEBAY had achieved, it was clear to me those strategies could be used as a foundation to build an investigative platform for the broader tech and ecommerce industry to advocate for greater corporate accountability and transparency - thus Value Added Resource was born.
Through this framework, VAR is able to produce in-depth reports on marketplace leadership, operations, and seller relations that ensure issues across the industry are documented with journalistic integrity and accessible to other media outlets, analysts, investors, regulatory agencies, and the public at large.
Sustained scrutiny is necessary to keep corporations in check, especially as eBay continues to actively pursue comms strategies explicitly aimed at "developing, pitching, preventing and securing high-impact media coverage" - a chilling thought considering what happened in the cyberstalking scandal.
Liz Morton
A truly free and independent press is crucial for holding power of all kinds to account - which is why governments and corporations alike pour vast resources into controlling and countering media narratives, often employing "catch and kill" practices to prevent "inconvenient" information from going public.
In that vein, it's not surprising that much of Omidyar's philanthropic work has centered around funding "pro-democracy" journalism around the globe, just as it's no coincidence that Omidyar Network "supports" tech whistleblowers or finances "tech accountability" organizations like Accountable US and Accountable Tech who never seem to find any reason to mention eBay.
Omidyar Network has also been strategically funding freelance journalists for years through their Reporters in Residence program, awarding several grants to labor journalists like Kim Kelly, Hamilton Nolan, s.e. smith, and Brian Merchant - all of whom appear to have been curiously quiet about the first union in eBay's ~30 year history and ongoing labor troubles at the company.
With multiple National Labor Relations Board complaints and ex-employees in the US and Ireland suing for alleged labor law violations, discrimination and retaliation, why have we yet to see any high-profile public eBay whistleblowers?
These issues have been brought to the forefront in recent years as journalists like Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi have uncovered new and disturbing details of what they call the "Censorship-Industrial Complex" perpetuated through alliances between Big Tech and Big Government - and unsurprisingly, you'll find Pierre Omidyar connected to many of these stories.
Shellenberger details how Omidyar betrayed traditionally liberal and progressive values with funding and research aimed at censoring "problematic content" and supposed "disinformation" and "misinformation" both on public social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook and in private chat apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram.
Michael Shellenberger
The Omidyar Foundation, created by Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar, has advocated the spying on and censorship of encrypted wrongspeak.
“Reports of violence, disinformation, and manipulation campaigns originating on private messaging platforms have become all too common,” warned Omidyar Foundation in a January 2022 report. “Not only are individuals’ lives and liberties impacted, but dangerous platform design choices also have devastating implications for our democratic institutions and the health and well-being of our societies.”...
...The Omidyar report explicitly argued against the right to privacy in text messaging. “Privacy is essential to building trust, but it is not a singular standard for safety,” wrote Omidyar Foundation authors. “We believe online safety is the result of trustworthy technology and enlightened regulation. While the shift toward adopting end-to-end encryption has reinforced trust between users, the technological architecture that encourages scale, virality, and monetization has ultimately facilitated the rapid and large-scale spread of dangerous, distorted, and deceitful content.”...
...What is going on here? Why is the censorship industry now trying to spy on and censor our private messages?
Taibbi briefly worked for Omidyar at The Intercept but was forced out before ever publishing a word.
No, I only worked for one, and Pierre Omidyar a) mostly just wishes he was one of the richest men in the world, and b) forced me out of his company before I got to publish one word. https://t.co/8xNGEuRvrV
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 22, 2023
As he and Shellenberger delved into the Twitter Files in early 2023, Taibbi's Racket News published a report on the Top 50 organizations involved in the Censorship-Industrial Complex, naming Omidyar one of the most prolific private funders of projects combating “disinformation.”
Susan Schmidt
Even Glenn Greenwald, who famously covered the Snowden Files as a co-founding editor at the Intercept before resigning in 2020, has criticized Omidyar's pursuit of censorship under the guise of fighting misinformation.
Glenn Greenwald
Speaking of Omidyar's backing of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021, Greenwald said it was unsurprising but highly revealing to find the eBay founder at the heart of this effort to police and control political speech on the internet.
It is completely unsurprising to learn, as Politico reported last Wednesday, that the major financial supporter of Facebook "whistleblower” Frances Haugen's sprawling P.R. and legal network coordinating her public campaign is the billionaire founder of EBay, Pierre Omidyar.
The Haugen Show continues today as a consortium of carefully cultivated news outlets (including those who have been most devoted to agitating for online censorship: the New York Times’ "tech” unit and NBC News's “disinformation” team) began publishing the trove of archives she took from Facebook under the self-important title "The Facebook Papers,” while the star herself has traveled to London to testify today to British lawmakers considering a bill to criminally punish tech companies that allow “foul content” or “extremism” — whatever that means — to be published...
...Omidyar's central role in this latest scheme to impose greater control over social media is unsurprising because he and his multi-national foundation, the Omidyar Network, fund many if not most of the campaigns and organizations designed to police and control political speech on the internet under the benevolent-sounding banner of combating "disinformation” and “extremism.”
Though one could have easily guessed that it was Omidyar fueling Frances Haugen and her team of Democratic Party operatives acting as lawyers and P.R. agents — I would have been shocked if he had no role — it is still nonetheless highly revealing of what these campaigns and groups are, how they function, what their real goals are, and the serious dangers they pose.
And it appears Omidyar may have connections to the PR firm behind current Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams as well.
Collin Anderson
It's also noteworthy that Omidyar has underwritten and promoted high profile FTC cases against Amazon and Meta/Facebook, while the FTC under Lina Khan completely ignored a petition filed last year urging investigation of eBay's acquisition of TCGPlayer.
Liz Morton
UnsuckEBAY’s campaign proved that even the most insulated corporations are vulnerable when free speech, public pressure, and disciplined investigative work converge.
What started as a solitary critic exposing eBay’s internal dysfunction evolved into a full-scale leadership crisis that triggered executive resignations, financial scrutiny, and permanent damage to the company’s reputation.
But this isn't just about eBay, it's a warning shot for every company that thrives on opacity and evasion. The question is no longer whether corporations can be exposed - it’s how long they think they can outrun the truth before someone, somewhere, decides they can't.
