Joseph Gebbia Jr. (born August 21, 1981) is an American designer, entrepreneur, and co-founder of home rental company Airbnb.

Gebbia is the 386th richest person in the world according to Forbes, with a net worth of $7.4 billion,[1] mostly due to his ownership of 53 million shares of Airbnb.

[2][3] In 2022, Gebbia joined the board of Tesla Inc. and bought a minority stake in the San Antonio Spurs basketball team.

[9] Gebbia was known as the "art guy" in grade school when he started his first business selling illustrations of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to his classmates.

[11] 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.

[12] 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.

Around this time, Gebbia also became inspired by the work of Charles and Ray Eames and switched his studies from painting to industrial design.

Knowing that the Industrial Design Society of America conference was to be hosted in San Francisco and many hotels were fully booked, Gebbia came up with the idea of renting out airbeds in their apartment to conference-goers.

They marketed the beds by creating a website called "AirBed & Breakfast” and emailed design blogs to garner interest.

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.

[26] 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.

[35] 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.

[52][53] Gebbia lives in Austin, Texas, where, in 2020, he bought a 6,000 square foot, $10 million home, designed in the minimalist style.

[58] Gebbia is on the board of directors of Airbnb and Airbnb.org, a non-profit foundation; Samara, an accessory dwelling unit startup and Tesla Inc.

[63] In 2025, Gebbia praised President Donald Trump's nomination of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to United States Secretary of Health and Human Services.

[65] A former scholarship recipient, in 2014, Gebbia donated $300,000 to his alma mater, RISD, to create an endowed fund that will make the school accessible for students in need of financial assistance.

[62][67] In 2017, Gebbia brought Yeonmi Park, a North Korean refugee as his guest to the Met Gala to bring attention to the issue of global-refugee security.

[68] 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.