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Joseph Gebbia Jr. (; born August 21, 1981) is an American designer and entrepreneur, and a co-founder of Airbnb. Gebbia is on the board of directors of Airbnb, but has not been involved in the operations of the company since 2022. In 2022, Gebbia joined the board of Tesla Inc. and bought a minority stake in the San Antonio Spurs basketball team. He also co-founded Samara, an accessory dwelling unit startup. In 2025, he joined the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Gebbia is the 328th richest person in the world according to Forbes, with a net worth of $8.8 billion, mostly due to his 7 percent ownership stake in Airbnb.
Gebbia attended Brookwood High School in Snellville, Georgia, where he took classes in ceramics, photography, and jewelry . He also took classes in figure drawing and painting at the Atlanta College of Art on weekends. In high school, he also was a finalist of the Georgia Governor's Honors Program, where he spent a summer taking college-level art courses. There, one of his professors encouraged him to go to Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and he spent the following summer taking courses on the campus.
In one of his first courses at RISD, Gebbia took a 3D foundations class with a semester-long project aiming to produce 12-inch scale works of a famous artist or designer. Gebbia decided he wanted to create life-size models so he could use them afterwards, but his professor dismissed the idea and told to stick to the achievable. Gebbia set out to prove his professor wrong and produced sixteen full-sized chairs for his final project. He refers to this anecdote as one of several examples that allowed him to transcend beliefs of what was possible. Around this time, Gebbia also became inspired by the work of Charles and Ray Eames and switched his studies from painting to industrial design.
One of his first design-business ventures was CritBuns—soft, foamy cushions to keep art students’ pants clean during their hours-long critique sessions, known as "crits". He developed the idea at RISD and the design was selected as the senior gift for his graduating class of 800 students. After two years developing his sales pitch and story, the product was featured in I.D. and was sold by many retailers. In 2005, Gebbia graduated from RISD with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Graphic Design and Industrial Design. Gebbia took supplementary business-related classes at Brown University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) while attending RISD.
In 2008, another of Gebbia's roommates, Harvard graduate and technical architect Nathan Blecharczyk, became the third cofounder. He said he was inspired to co-found Airbnb due to a landlord increasing the rent on the San Francisco apartment he shared with a roommate, believing that there should be competition to this practice. While struggling to find initial angel investors, Gebbia and Chesky created two boxes of cereals, Obama O's and Cap’n McCain's, to sell online before the 2008 election.
They found a small manufacturer in Berkeley who agreed to fabricate 1,000 cartons in exchange for a cut of the royalties. The team bought generic Cheerios and Chex, and placed the cereal into their boxes. The boxes, which cost $40 each, received coverage from CNN and Good Morning America; Katy Perry auctioned off an autographed box to her fans. The promotion netted Airbnb $30,000; sales were strong at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Impressed by the cereal boxes, computer programmer Paul Graham invited the founders to the January 2009 winter training session of his startup incubator, Y Combinator, which provided them with training and $20,000 in funding in exchange for a 6% interest in the company.
Gebbia helped early hosts present their listings. When the company was struggling to gain traction in New York City, Gebbia and Chesky booked with two-dozen hosts and discovered that many hosts were taking low-quality photos that did a poor job of presenting the listing. Leveraging Gebbia's background in design, they rented a camera and took high-resolution photos of the listings. Gebbia offered complimentary professional photography services sourced from a community of over 2,000 freelancers. As a result, Airbnb's revenue in the city doubled and the Airbnb Photography Program was created. In March 2009, the name of the company was shortened to Airbnb.com, and the site's content had expanded from air beds and shared spaces to properties including entire homes, apartments, and private rooms.
In May 2017, Gebbia launched Neighborhood, a office furniture business. The furniture was created for Bernhardt Design, a furniture company that has worked with emerging designers. It was launched at the ICFF furniture fair as a part of New York City's design week. The LEGO-like collection earned featured recognition in publications like Designboom, the first and most popular digital magazine for architecture and design culture, Quartz, Dezeen, and Interior Design. Gebbia supported the newly formed Eames Institute for Infinite Curiosity, aimed at broadening the influence of Ray and Charles Eames through exhibitions from the Eames Collection.
On December 10, 2020, Airbnb became a public company via an initial public offering, raising $3.5 billion. In January 2022, Gebbia acquired a minority ownership stake in the San Antonio Spurs, joining billionaire Michael Dell and San Francisco-based global investment firm Sixth Street Partners as fellow investors. In July 2022, Gebbia stepped down from his full-time operating role at Airbnb, while remaining on the board of directors in an advisory role. In September 2022, Gebbia was appointed by Tesla, Inc. to its board of directors. Samara, formerly a research and development unit of Airbnb established in 2016, became an independent accessory dwelling unit (ADU) startup in 2022. Gebbia announced the launch of its first product in November 2022, a net-zero tiny house called Backyard.
In February 2025, he joined the Department of Government Efficiency. Concern that Gebbia's work for DOGE undermined U.S. democracy resulted in widespread calls to boycott Airbnb. In a Jan 19, 2025 post on Twitter, Gebbia wrote that Trump "is not a fascist determined to destroy democracy" and that "I ... love the whole DOGE initiative."
In 2019, Gebbia donated to the Kevin Durant Charity Foundation which was used to redevelop basketball and tennis courts at playgrounds in Hayes Valley, San Francisco. In 2020, he and his team launched Airbnb.org, a non-profit that enables hosts on Airbnb to house people in times of crisis. In December 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Gebbia made a $25 million donation to benefit two San Francisco charities working to end homelessness in the San Francisco Bay Area: Rising Up—Larkin Street Youth Services and All Home. In 2021, Gebbia was included on the list of America's 50 Biggest Charity Donors by The Chronicle of Philanthropy. In May 2022, while Gebbia was the graduation speaker at his alma mater, Brookwood High School, he pledged 22 shares of Airbnb stock to each of the 890 graduates, a gift worth a total of $2.1 million.
In February 2023, Gebbia made a $25 million gift to The Ocean Cleanup, the organization's largest private donation to date. The gift expands climate health and ocean sustainability operations across oceans, rivers, recycling, and research. Funds particularly support deployment of the organization's System 03 cleaning technology in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In February 2023, Gebbia committed to donating $25 million to Malala Fund over a period of five years.
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