Sami Moubayed and Tammam Salam. In December 2008, he was the first Syrian to interview a US president, being Jimmy Carter. Additionally, Moubayed has been accredited with landmark interviews with Brazilian bestselling author Paolo Coelho and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales . In 2004, along with Syrian web-designer Sahban Abd Rabbo, Moubayed co-founded www.syrianhistory.com, an online museum of Syrian history containing over 10,000 photographs, documents, and rare audiovisual material on Syria during the years 1900-2000. The website also contains unpublished audio clips from historical Syrian figures. Moubayed has written much about pre-Baath Syria, and in 2016, was voted into the London-based Royal Historical
Jimmy Wales web. He taught at both universities during his postgraduate studies but did not write the doctoral dissertation required for a PhD, something he ascribed to boredom. In 1994, Wales took a job with Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm in Chicago, Illinois. Wales has described himself as having been addicted to the Internet from an early stage and he wrote computer code during his leisure time. During his studies in Alabama, he had become an obsessive player of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs)—a type of virtual role-playing game—and thereby experienced the potential of computer networks to foster large-scale collaborative