Craigslist Founder Signs Giving Pledge and Narrows Focus

Craig Newmark made his fortune by starting Craigslist, the online classified site where people can buy or sell just about anything. But when it comes to his philanthropy, Newmark is taking a more focused approach. After some hard-earned lessons from gifts that didn’t pan out, Newmark is concentrating on his top two priorities – cybersecurity and helping military families and veterans.

“I’ll do random things that strike my fancy every now and then, but I work hard on staying focused,” Newmark says.

He’s trying to become more strategic after some grant-making misfires, including in journalism — a top priority before the pandemic. “I used to wing it,” he admits.

That strategic shift comes after years of broad, large-scale giving. When Newmark signed the Giving Pledge last month, he was mostly formalizing what he had already accomplished. By his own accounting, he has given roughly $450 million to charity, with tens of millions more committed.

Now he relies on established charities in his areas of focus to do some of the hard work for him — either by regranting funds to smaller nonprofits or by building networks that further Newmark’s own goals. 

For the effort to help veterans and military families, Newmark now works almost exclusively through the Bob Woodruff Foundation for veterans and Blue Star Families for service members and their families. In his latest round of giving, in November 2024, he committed $25 million over five years to each charity.

In cybersecurity, he works with a broader range of partners, including Aspen Digital, a program of the Aspen Institute that focuses on technology, media, and policy; the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Long‑Term Cybersecurity; and several other organizations. Newmark encourages his partners to collaborate, including on his own campaign urging people to pause for nine seconds before clicking on suspicious links.

Unlike some big-name philanthropists, Newmark is open about his own challenges and understands what he needs from others to be effective.

“Frankly I’m not certain I know what I’m doing, so I get a lot of help,” Newmark says. “The success I’ve had in my past has been about building networks of networks. I don’t know how to lead from the top — I can just lead by example. So I find people who are really effective in enlisting large numbers of other people, and I work to tie them together.”

Newmark’s model is unusual, but it’s one that other donors and even some foundations might consider. He puts MacKenzie Scott on a short list of philanthropists he admires, alongside Michael Bloomberg and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and some philanthropy experts see echoes of her approach in his own strategy.

“He seems to share with MacKenzie Scott a recognition that effective philanthropy doesn’t necessarily mean top-down control,” says Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, which released a study last year about how Scott’s gifts were affecting grantees. “Expertise and good work exist in every community. Sometimes, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish, the most effective thing you can do is allow others who are closer to the ground to decide how to distribute those resources.”

Inspiring Billionaires

While Newmark may be narrowing his scope, he isn’t cutting back. In December, by signing the Giving Pledge, Newmark and his wife, Eileen, committed to donating at least half their assets to philanthropic causes during their lives or in their wills.

Signing the Giving Pledge “is good for my sense of absurdity,” Newmark says. “I don’t look at myself as a big-deal philanthropist.”

Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.3 billion in 2020, but Newmark has recently said that he’s no longer a billionaire, in part because of his giving. Newmark says he’s already written checks worth $450 million to charity, and he has made additional commitments of $37 million. As of 2023, he held $154 million in his foundation, and he had placed his remaining Craigslist equity, worth $392 million, in a 501(c)(4) with many of the same stated goals as his foundation.

That’s a significant sum considering his bare-bones philanthropic infrastructure. Craig Newmark Philanthropies has no employees; instead, Newmark relies on outsourced accounting, legal, and communications help.

Newmark gives away serious money, but he doesn’t take himself seriously. His philanthropic causes include pigeon rescue, and he is so moved by the lyrics of Leonard Cohen that he describes the late songwriter as “my rabbi.”

“What I do is find people who are really good at their jobs and who can tolerate my sense of humor,” Newmark writes on his website. “I provide them with resources and then get outta their way.”

Still, he hopes signing the Giving Pledge will inspire others at a time when both the pledge and billionaire philanthropists are under intense scrutiny. A report last summer from the Institute for Policy Studies called fulfillment of the Giving Pledge “weak” and urged billionaires to do more to help people in need.

“I wanted to inspire really rich people — billionaires — to pony up some dough,” Newmark says.

Fighting Scams

Given Craigslist’s role in arranging online sales, Newmark has decades of firsthand experience identifying and preventing scams. His own family members have been scammed, and even Newmark himself has been duped. After buying a cheap pair of Ray-Bans online, he quickly canceled a credit card, fearing his information would end up on the dark web.

“I’ve been doing scam fighting professionally for about 25 years,” Newmark says. “It just really pisses me off. I take this very personally.”

He supports a range of organizations in this area including Consumer Reports, Aspen Digital, and Common Sense Media and also works through them to promote his own ideas. Newmark’s cybersecurity awareness campaign, launched last year, promotes a small behavior change to help “prevent doing something stupid, like I’ve done once or twice,” Newmark says.

“This could be a very big and expensive marketing campaign,” he says. “It looks like I’ll have to spend — for me — some serious money on this.”

Aspen Digital, which is playing a big role in helping Newmark carry out his awareness campaign, worked with Common Sense Media to arrange an information booth about Take9 at the latter group’s annual summit in March. Newmark has given Common Sense Media, a tech- and media-focused child advocacy group, a total of $14 million over the past decade for work on cybersecurity and AI safety.

“He loves connecting the organizations in his portfolio,” says Ellen Pack, co-CEO of Common Sense Media. “He’ll encourage us to have calls with each other and find ways to collaborate.”

Artificial intelligence is driving down the cost of spoofing, phishing, and other forms of cyberattacks, enabling bad actors to earn higher returns by going after smaller and more vulnerable targets, including nonprofits, says Michael Enos of TechSoup, a charity that provides technology systems and assistance to other organizations. Nonprofits are prime targets because of their information about wealthy donors, and because many work in politicized areas like reproductive rights, immigration, and racial equity. In December 2023, Newmark gave TechSoup $250,000 for its Digital Resilience Program, which helps charities improve their cybersecurity approach and policies.

As the threat grows, the defenses may be weakening: The federal government is cutting its own spending on cybersecurity, and nonprofit boards may be less likely to emphasize digital security as their budgets tighten.

That lack of focus provides an opening for cyberattackers who are having an easier time than ever.

“AI is making the time to market very, very short for anybody who wants to go into the fraud business or the scam business,” Enos says. “It’s a bad situation that is getting worse.”

Roughly half of Newmark’s cybersecurity giving focuses on scam prevention; the rest supports efforts to protect critical infrastructure such as power grids. Through the Berkeley center, he has backed the build-out of the Cyber Resilience Corps, an effort to mobilize a nationwide force of volunteers to defend nonprofits, schools, municipalities, and small businesses from cyberattacks. Citizens should see protecting infrastructure as a patriotic duty, Newmark says, since global powers like China and Russia are already carrying out cyberattacks and espionage in the United States. He compares the campaign to the effort to get all Americans to contribute during World War II.

“The difference between World War II and now is that the enemy military is already here — they’ve done some forward positioning,” he says.

Newmark concedes that he struggles to measure the impact of his cybersecurity and scam-prevention grant making. “There appear to be only indirect measures of effectiveness,” he says.

Using Partners to Reach Families

In his work supporting members of the military, veterans, and their families, Newmark has a clearer goal: helping charities reach more people.

Last year, he committed $25 million over five years to Blue Star Families, which supports military families through employment programs and caregiver support. Some of that funding supports the organization’s “Outposts” program, which provides local nonprofits up to $15,000 a year to promote Blue Star’s services and sponsor activities that connect military families to career opportunities and the outdoors.

The Bob Woodruff Foundation, which works to ensure veterans and their families have the support they need to lead fulfilling lives, also received $25 million from Newmark in late 2024. Military-related charities that apply for Newmark’s grants are automatically routed to the Woodruff Foundation. In 2024, Woodruff distributed $4.5 million in Newmark funds to 34 charities.

“It’s been a way for us to streamline Craig’s time,” says Anne Marie Dougherty, the foundation’s CEO.

The Woodruff family started the charity after Bob, a journalist, was injured in 2006 while reporting on the war in Iraq. The charity struggled at times to connect with service members until it acquired Got Your 6 in 2018, Dougherty says.

Got Your 6, a military phrase meaning “got your back,” was a nonprofit originally founded to improve portrayal of veterans in film. The Woodruff Foundation revamped the brand and uses it for a network of 400 affiliated organizations that provide veterans, service members, and their families with physical and mental health care, housing and legal assistance, disaster relief, and job-placement services. Woodruff hopes to expand the network to 2,000 organizations in the next five years, Dougherty says.

“It was Craig who, in the early days, understood the big vision and made the first donation to support building the Got Your 6 network,” Dougherty says. “It simply wouldn’t have been possible without Craig’s financial investment.”

Admitting Mistakes

Newmark’s efforts to support journalism offers the clearest example of how his approach to philanthropy has changed and what he says he learned after ambitious grants fell short.

Before the pandemic, journalism was a major focus for Newmark’s giving. He remains excited about the City University of New York’s graduate journalism school, which was named for him following a $20 million gift in 2018. Last year, he gave the school an additional $10 million to kick off a fundraising effort intended to eventually make the school free to all students.

“For a couple of centuries, CUNY has given opportunity to people who wouldn’t otherwise have opportunity,” Newmark says.

Bella DeVaan, one of four co-authors of the report critical of the Giving Pledge, says Newmark’s support of CUNY is the kind of wealth redistribution that the country needs from its billionaires. Too many donors are supporting rich colleges and universities that primarily serve students from wealthy families, she says.

“You don’t always see grants from ultra-wealthy people to institutions that are meant to bolster public access in that way,” DeVaan says. “And the intellectual humility Newmark exhibits in announcing his grants is quite remarkable — and all too rare in the billionaire philanthropy space.”

Newmark is also willing to acknowledge — at least in broad strokes —  what hasn’t worked. He now views journalism as a secondary focus after some grants fizzled.

“A lot of my efforts haven’t been as effective as I’d like them to be,” he says.

In 2018, Newmark gave $20 million to launch The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom investigating technology’s impact. The organization faced internal turmoil at the outset and was acquired last year by CalMatters, a news organization focused on California policy and politics.

Newmark says he now sees more effective approaches coming from the grassroots, a shift that helps explain his continued investment in CUNY — rather than in “prestigious” news organizations.

Buchanan, of the Center for Effective Philanthropy, says Newmark’s willingness to admit mistakes is perhaps the clearest sign that he’s on the right path.

“If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in 25 years of working with donors and foundations, it’s that humility is a really effective attribute if you want to be a good philanthropist,” Buchanan says. “If you think you have the answers to other people’s problems, you’re probably wrong.”

Reporting for this article was underwritten by a Lilly Endowment grant to enhance public understanding of philanthropy. The Chronicle is solely responsible for the content.