If you listen to McCain’s bio on Meg Whitman in the video above, it is easy for anyone to believe that she founded a multi-billion-dollar company and created nearly 1.3M jobs! However, neither is true.

For the second time, McCain has mistakenly introduced or referred to his financial advisor - Meg Whitman as the ‘Founder Of Ebay‘.

Meg Whitman is not, by any means, the founder of Ebay, nor was she even aware of that organization when it was founded, much less part of it. Furthermore, Meg Whitman is not publicly known for founding any company whatsoever in her entire career.

Meg Whitman was employee number 31 at Ebay, and didn’t even work for that company until 3 years after it had been founded and operated by Pierre Omidyar. At the time of her joining Ebay, it already had $100M in annual sales and had received $5M in funding from Benchmark Capital to go public with its IPO in 1998.

The inarguable Founder of Ebay is French-born Iranian-American entrepreneur Pierre Morad Omidyar. Omidar authored the original software and launched the site, then known as AuctionWeb, in the fall of 1995.

Pierre Morad Omidyar has publicly announced his support for Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential Election.

What’s even more annoying and compounds the misleading McCain bio of Whitman is that McCain states:

“….12 years ago there were 5 employees, and today there are 1.3M people around the globe make a living off of eBay…”

Uh, yeah, and 12 years ago, Meg Whitman would not have been hired for another 2 years!

Also, eBay only has about 15,000 employees today - the other 1,285,000 McCain refers to, I assume, are eBay sellers, and how he has calculated that they ‘make a living off of eBay‘ vs ‘make some money selling stuff on eBay’ is a detail I have not been able to dig up.

Sounds great in a sound bite though!

If McCain argues that he does not know the difference between the founder and CEO of a corporation, or that being the CEO of an existing company when it goes public makes you a ‘founder’, then he has no business being president in an economic crisis. If he argues he was mistakenly informed of Whitman’s role, he is VERY poorly advised, since the owner of the title ‘founder’ is clear as day on the eBay corporate profile.

There are only two remaining explanations for McCain’s gaffe, and that is either he had a ’senior moment’ or is just plain lying to embellish Whitman’s bio.

eBay prospered under Whitman’s tenure, although she departed at a time when her failed expansion of the company into China and perplexing $2.6B acquisition of the never-profitable Skype saw eBay’s auction business in decline, and triggered criticism of her lack of attention to the core business model.