McCain Wrongly Claims Meg Whitman Founded eBay

Senator John McCain talked about the economy in Cleveland and made another gaffe when he called Meg Whitman the founder of eBay. Whitman worked for eBay that was originally founded by Pierre Omidyar.

If McCain wins the election, Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, will be the leading candidate for the Treasury Secretary post. Whitman currently works as a national co-chair for McCain’s campaign. McCain today talked about his economic policies in Cleveland and along with him were Whitman and Mitt Romney. He introduced Whitman as the founder of eBay and added that she started with eBay with just five employees and now it's a multi-billion dollar business with more than 1.3 million sellers. McCain made two errors in this introduction speech. Firstly, Whitman is not the founder of eBay, the actual founder was Pierre Omidyar, who started it in September 3, 1995. The online auction Web site was founded in San Jose, California, on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar as AuctionWeb, part of a larger personal site that included, among other things, Omidyar's own tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Ebola virus. In 1997, the company received approximately $5 million in funding from the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. Secondly, Meg Whitman started working for eBay in 1998, three years after eBay was founded. She didn't start eBay with Omidyar. Besides, Omidyar is an Obama supporter. He wrote in his blog in May:

Barack Obama is showing a mirror to America, and despite the bad stuff we see in our reflection, we see that we are fundamentally good and strong and proud, and we can overcome our challenges by working together, across all sorts of lines, be they partisan, racial, cultural, religious, or whatever. That's something unique about Barack Obama's America -- our America -- and that's the America I want to live in.

McCain made a similar error about Whitman in another speech few weeks ago.