Haha, no they won't. They'll see weird stars everywhere and a confusing and weirdly indented chunk of text (they aren't using a monospaced font and their edi^H^H^Hword processor mangled the line wrapping).

At least that's been my entire experience. I wish that weren't true however, and it's not like other text markup formats are any better.

In addition to what LiveTheDream said, you can export to plain text with org-export-as-ascii.

And Pandoc is great (but not perfect) for two way conversions to/from various formats now that it supports org files.

I still keep all my stuff in org files, but it's only fair to warn people that these don't work very well as a format when sharing those files with people of arbitrary technical knowledge.