Born in Montreal, Jeffrey Skoll is a US-based Dot Com Mogul, film producer, philanthropist and social activist.
Skoll worked his way through an undergraduate degree at University of Toronto by pumping gas. After an MBA at Stanford, he became the President and first full-time employee at eBay, and when the company went public in 1998, Skoll found himself a billionaire.
In 2001, he used these profits to establish the Skoll Foundation, which supports healthcare, employment, climate change, renewable energy and education around the world through more than 70 international NGOs. He is one of only 20 people to have given away more than one billion dollars to charities, including irrigation systems for farms in Africa and centres for at-risk youth. As the only Canadian signatory to Bill Gates and Warren Buffet’s Giving Pledge, for which he was recently made an Officer of the Order of Canada for his “commitment to social causes and innovative practice of philanthropy,” he has already donated over half his fortune to worthy causes, and promises to give away as much as 95%.
Skoll’s commitment to social justice is also exhibited through his award-winning production company, Participant Media, which has produced dozens of films, including He Named Me Malala, Food Inc., Fast Food Nation, Citizen Four and An Inconvenient Truth. Participant Media has recently partnered with Cineflix Media of Montreal to create socially-relevant programming. He also created and supports the Oxford University’s Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship as an international think tank.
Skoll’s efforts to promote peace and prosperity around the world have been honored with the Jefferson Award’s S. Roger Horchow Award for Greatest Public Service by a Private Citizen (2015), a career tribute at the Gotham Independent Film Awards (2012) and the John W. Gardner Leadership Award (2012).
