Eyal Ofer was born in 1950 in Haifa, Israel. His Father, Sammy Ofer, was a Romanian-born Israeli shipping magnate and once Israel's richest man. Eyal graduated from Atlantic College, an international boarding school affiliated with the United World Colleges, based in St Donat's Castle, Wales. In his teenage years, he spent summers working on the family company's ships, loading cargo, scraping the boats' sides and repainting them, as well as traveling to international ports.