Craig Newmark

The foundation supports a broad range of left-of-center causes, but focuses on a few main causes, such as supporting left-of-center journalism, opposing election-integrity legislation, and suppressing right-of-center narratives in the news. The foundation also funds media that caters to racial minority groups, programs to increase the number of women working in the tech industry, and veterans’ organizations. ³

In addition to managing his foundation, Newmark sits on the boards of numerous left-of-center institutions, including journalism organizations, environmental activist groups, and think tanks. ³ According to Forbes, Newmark has a net worth of approximately $1.3 billion. ² At the same time, Newmark has described himself and his wife as having too many material possessions, and has said that people should not necessarily accumulate wealth even if the opportunity presents itself. ⁴

Worldview

On his foundation’s website, Newmark features a quote from Canadian philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, which states that “World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.” The list of issue areas that Newmark features on the site include preventing supposed “foreign and domestic interference” in American elections and countering alleged “Influence Operations [sic] that destabilize our country.” ³

Newmark opposes election integrity measures that he claims would infringe on voting rights. ³ In a 2008 interview, Newmark indicated his support for voting by mail and spoke positively of the possibility of voting online. However, he emphasized that such a system would need to be “completely secure” in order to prevent “dirty tricks,” and that it would require “lots of checks and balances.” ⁵

When asked in a 2008 interview if the internet was making “our political culture” better or worse, Newmark replied “overall better” but added that it is a vehicle for “bad” as well, with allegations that Republicans were using it to spread racism. “The dirty trick guys are indulging in a lot of racist behavior in this campaign,” he claimed. “It is disturbing that some McCain supporters throughout the net, and on our discussions board at Craig’s, routinely use the N-word.” ⁶

In a June 2017 interview, Newmark said that he and his wife “both feel we have too much stuff, and should live with as little as we can.” He said that they had chosen not to own a car and were using Craigslist to give away some of their possessions. Newmark also expressed his desire to “be known as a counterexample” to the typical image of wealthy people, and said that “just because you can make millions of dollars, you don’t need to.” ⁴

Peter Zollman of AIM Group, a consulting firm that has studied Craigslist since 2007, described the business philosophy of Newmark and others involved in launching Craigslist as “not in any sense … conventional.” Regarding the unusually low fees that the site charges, Zollman said that “those guys … really are socialists about it” and suggested that “they don’t really care” about additional profit. ⁷

In the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests and riots in the summer of 2020, Newmark compared the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent organized violence by far-left extremists to “really bad episodes in world history,” such as repressions that “happened in 1930s Germany.” ⁸

Craig Newmark cites singer and songwriter Leonard Cohen as one of the primary inspirations for his activism and philanthropy, describing Cohen’s music as “more or less giving me my marching orders in terms of what I should be doing right now.” Newmark, who identifies as secular Jewish, also jokingly referred to Cohen as “more or less my personal rabbi.” ⁹

Career

Craig Newmark was born in Morristown, New Jersey. He attended Case Western Reserve University, from which he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science. After graduating in 1977, Newmark was hired by IBM, where he worked as a programmer for 17 years. In 1993, he moved to San Francisco and began working for Charles Schwab as a software engineer. He left Schwab in 1995 and held a series of jobs around the Bay Area, including a stint as a software engineer at Bank of America, until 1998. ^{10 11 12 13 6}

In 1995, Newmark began curating an online guide to San Francisco social life, involving a list of arts and technology events being held around the city, as a means to socialize. He would email the list to friends and associations, who dubbed the online repository “Craig’s List.” People began to use it as a bulletin to advertise things other than events, such as technical job positions. Newmark was surprised by the development and began adding categories to meet popular demand. Newmark eventually transformed the list into a free classified advertisement website with a public-friendly interface; Craigslist.org went live in 1996 and was immediately highly popular for a website at the time. It became a profitable private company in 1999 and Newmark quit his job as a Java software engineer to run it full-time. ^{11 12}

Over the following year, Newmark developed Craigslist into a company of nine employees, with Jim Buckmaster ascending through positions of lead programmer and chief technology officer before getting promoted to chief executive officer in November of 2000, a position he still held as of March 2026. As of 2026, Buckmaster was also managing the Craigslist Charitable Fund. ^{14 15 16}

Newmark stepped away from active involvement in the company’s operations in 2000 and appointed James Buckmaster as chief executive officer because he felt that he lacked the management skills to run the company effectively. ⁷ However, he has continued to help with maintaining the site and resolving customer service issues. ¹⁷

Through the early 2000s, Newmark remained involved with Craigslist, principally by addressing its customer service issues. In August 2004, Newmark announced eBay had bought a 25 percent stake in Craigslist. By 2008, Craigslist was the 11th most popular website in the United States and the 37th most popular in the world, according to Alexa.com. ^{6 18}

In 2008, Newmark was a technology adviser to the presidential campaign of then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL). At the time, Newmark described the ongoing election as “the beginning of a transition from top down power to bottom up power,” due to the sizable role played by the internet and mass fundraising efforts. He continued: “We are strongly moving forward toward participatory democracy as power devolves toward people who want to be involved. It is an evolutionary process and it is quite unstoppable.” ⁶

Newmark officially retired from Craigslist in 2018, declaring “that Craigslist customer service didn’t really need me anymore,” and he began to pursue “full time philanthropy.” As of 2026, Newmark was living in New York City and was pursuing hobbies of science fiction and birdwatching. ^{19 10 11}

Philanthropy

Craig Newmark was engaging in political philanthropy as early as 2008. In an interview at the time, he stated he was funding online fact-checking outlet PolitiFact, operated by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which he proudly noted had “recently caught the McCain campaign lying, and then caught them again lying about lying.” ⁶

In 2012, Newmark published an infographic titled, “Think you have the right to vote? Not so much!” Relying on data from a report by the Brennan Center for Justice, the graphic alleged there was widespread “voter suppression” in America and downplayed the dangers of voter impersonation and fraud. It also criticized pre-registration, photo ID requirements, proof of citizenship requirements, and the curtailing of early voting. George Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) shared the infographic and proudly noted that the Brennan Center was a grantee of OSF. ^{20 21}

Craig Newmark launched his foundation in 2015. ² As of 2018, the foundation’s assets totaled nearly $138 million. ²²

In 2016, the foundation gave a $1.5 million grant to Wikipedia. It also gave a $1 million grant to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, the nonprofit journalism organization which maintains the controversial fact-checking website PolitiFact. ²³ In March 2017, the foundation gave a $1 million grant to ProPublica, an investigative journalism organization which tracks the financial disclosures of nonprofit groups. It also gave $100,000 to the Anti-Defamation League, a pressure group which promotes left-wing policies under the pretense of combating antisemitism. ²⁴ The foundation distributed these grants as part of Newmark’s initiative to give a total of $3.5 million in support of left-of-center journalism in 2017. ²³

In August 2018, the foundation awarded $1 million to the magazine Mother Jones, whose chief executive officer Monika Bauerlein praised Newmark for his support for left-of-center journalism. ²⁵ In September 2018, the foundation gave $20 million to a newly-launched publication called The Markup, created to report on alleged abuses by large tech companies from a left-of-center point of view. ²⁶

In 2019, the Foundation awarded another grant to the Poynter Institute, as well as a grant to the Columbia University journalism school. Newmark gave the two institutions $15 million in total, citing the proliferation of alleged “disinformation” coming from “social platforms and the news.” ²⁷

In 2020, Newmark told Forbes that he would commit almost $200 million to a media campaign opposing the re-election of President Donald Trump. Newmark alleged that “foreign adversaries” were partially responsible for directing “the people who are in control of this country” to “continue to dismantle our democracy.” ⁸

In April 2021, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law announced that Craig Newmark Philanthropies had donated a $500,000 grant to support its efforts to “fight online misinformation and election interference targeting Black communities and other communities of color.” ²⁸

In May 2021, Newmark funded and opened a scholarship fund for veterans, active-duty servicemen, and “military-connected students” at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. The stated purpose of the fund at its inception was to “deepen the impact” the above-mentioned groups have “in public policy.” Of the first cohort of scholars, half were female, despite the fact that women only comprised about 17 percent of active-duty military personnel at the time, and all recipients were in their early twenties. This trend has continued since 2022 until at least 2026. ^{29 30 31 32 33}

In January 2023, the California Voter Foundation (CVF) announced that Craig Newmark Philanthropies had donated a $100,000 grant to support its Election Community Network, a consortium of academic, nonprofit, and government leaders who claim to protect American election officials from physical threats and “conspiracy theories and election denialism.” ³⁴

In 2023, it was reported that Newmark had given $42 million to organizations supporting veterans since leaving Craigslist in 2018, and that he planned to spend another $58 million over the following three years on veterans’ causes. ³⁵

In 2023, on Craigslist’s 28th anniversary, Newmark announced he would be pledging $100 million toward cybersecurity efforts in the United States. The grants were largely directed toward what Newmark termed “Cyber Civil Defense,” namely programs that serve to educate the public on cybersecurity, with recipients including Consumer Reports and the Aspen Cybersecurity Program. ³⁵

As of January 2026, Newmark announced he would be scaling back his philanthropy efforts towards journalism. According to Inside Philanthropy, he stated that “funding has been less effective than he’d hoped, citing too little attention to audience development and marketing among journalists as a big problem.” ³⁶ He also announced he would be focusing his philanthropic efforts towards funding “veterans and military families, and cybersecurity.” Branding these efforts collectively as “getting everyone to protect the country,” Newmark said in late 2025 that he had already contributed “about $600 million” to related initiatives. However, as of March 2026, Craig Newmark Philanthropies’ listed areas of philanthropic activity included “journalist protection”—along with “pigeon rescue”—in addition to “cybersecurity” and veterans issues. ^{36 19 37}

Criticism

Craig Newmark and his website Craigslist have been criticized for the alleged role they played in undermining the newspaper industry, particularly local newspapers, by cornering the classified advertising market that had been crucial for newspaper revenues. Critics argued this was not only detrimental to regional culture and community but to the health of American democracy at large through the formation of “news deserts.” Newmark’s philanthropic commitment to journalistic initiatives has been interpreted by reporters as a form of moral absolution from these charges. ^{38 39}

In 2018, a reporter from the New York Times referred to Newmark as a “Newspaper Villain,” claimed classifieds had made up about 40 percent of the newspaper industry’s revenue before Craigslist was created, and contended that the website “drained $5 billion from American newspapers over a seven-year period,” citing a 2013 research paper from scientific journal Management Science. ^{39 40}

Associations

In 2021, Newmark sat on the boards of numerous organizations, including the Center for Public Integrity, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Sunlight Foundation, and several other left-of-center media groups. In addition, he sits on the advisory boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an internet privacy advocacy group; the New America Foundation, a left-of-center think tank; and the Sierra Club, a leading environmentalist group, as well as several other left-of-center advocacy groups. ⁴¹

As of 2026, Newmark had changed and greatly expanded his board memberships. The changes reflected his conscious decision to move his focus away from journalistic endeavors and toward veterans’ and cybersecurity issues, among other areas. He had left the boards of the Sierra Club, the Center for Public Integrity, Columbia Journalism Review, and the Sunlight Foundation. ⁴²

At that time, he was still on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the New America Foundation, but was additionally sitting on the boards of Blue Star Families, the Bob Woodruff Foundation, City College of San Francisco – Veterans Educational Transition Services Lounge, Consumer Reports, the Cybercrime Support Network, DonorsChoose.org, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Girls Who Code, God’s Love We Deliver NYC, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, the News Integrity Initiative, the Organic Health Response, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum’s Advisory Council, Swords to Plowshares, the U.S. Veterans Affairs Center for Innovation, VetsInTech, Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation), and Women Who Tech. ⁴²