When First Look Media, the journalism enterprise backed by the billionaire founder of eBay, Pierre M. Omidyar, started about a year ago, its mission was clear.

Mr. Omidyar would personally invest $250 million to build a company that would hold the powerful accountable. He paid lavishly to recruit adversarial reporters like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, who had received classified documents from the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, and Matt Taibbi, who used a piercing wit and deep reporting to skewer most of Wall Street during his time at Rolling Stone magazine.

And then Mr. Omidyar tried to manage them.

Mr. Taibbi abruptly left First Look this week without ever writing a story. On Thursday, an unusual article appeared on The Intercept, a First Look-owned site started by Mr. Greenwald and others. It described a power struggle inside First Look between Silicon Valley executives “and the fiercely independent journalists who view corporate cultures and management-speak with disdain.”

Image Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, pledged $250 million last year to First Look Media. Credit... Brian Harkin/Getty Images

Mr. Omidyar, according to people with knowledge of internal discussions at First Look who spoke on condition of anonymity, seemed not to realize what he had gotten into by hiring so many aggressive and competitive journalists and then trying to manage them largely from his home in Hawaii, with only sporadic visits to First Look’s offices.