$11 billion turned down, a life given away: Craig Newmark’s wonderfully odd Giving Pledge
In characteristically Craig Newmark style, the unusual philanthropist went on social media to make the following announcement:
“Okay, I’ve formally signed up for the Giving Pledge, sometimes considered the Billionaire’s Pledge, though I’ve never been a billionaire, particularly after I gave away all my craigslist equity to my charitable foundation.
Seems like a good way to officially enter my middle seventies, which I’ve done today.
This is also my #3 niece’s wedding in Long Island, which will distract me, though not as much as you’d think.
This all feels like a follow up to my decision in early 1999 to monetize craigslist as little as possible. The best estimate so far is that I turned down around $11B that bankers and VCs wanted to throw at me. I still made plenty after that.
I don’t regard this decision as altruistic, it has to do with the way my moral compass was defined so very long ago.
My Sunday School Teachers, Mr & Mrs Levin, back in Morristown NJ, did the heavy lifting, teaching me that I should know when enough is enough, and that I should be my brother’s/my sister’s keeper. I’m still having a hard time figuring out how, since as a nerd, I want to take things literally.
My rabbi, Leonard Cohen, has instructed me to read what Jesus said in the Bible about selling my stuff and giving it away to the poor. Also figuring out what that means, but doing the best I can.
So I’m giving most all of it away, keeping a small part for my family.
My focus is where I can do some actual good in neglected areas, like for military families and vets, like fighting cyberattacks and preventing scams. Also, a little for pigeon rescue.
Like I say, a nerd’s gotta do what a nerd’s gotta do, and a nerd should practice what he preaches.”
Craig Newmark practices a kind of stealth radicalism in philanthropy: he lives like a modest neighborhood nerd while quietly moving serious money into the fragile plumbing of American democracy, local journalism, cybersecurity, and veteran support.
The approach is deliberately unglamorous—find good people, give them resources, and get out of their way—but the scale, focus, and personal quirks behind it make his giving one of the more unconventional stories in modern tech wealth.
Where many of his peers built empires and then foundations, Newmark famously left “billions on the table” by under‑monetizing Craigslist, then declined the usual billionaire script of yachts and trophy architecture in favor of a quiet Manhattan townhouse, streaming subscriptions, and someone to water his plants.
The real extravagance is elsewhere: seven‑ and eight‑figure checks to investigative newsrooms, journalism schools, fact‑checking networks, cyber “civil defense” labs, women‑in‑cybersecurity programs, food‑security efforts, and veteran‑focused nonprofits, very often in the form of multi‑year, largely unrestricted support.
What makes it vivid is the contrast between the man and the money. Newmark talks about “stumbling across causes,” then quietly wiring them life‑changing grants and refusing to micromanage, preferring to back people he considers “values‑driven nerds” who are “getting stuff done.”
His great worry is that disinformation and cyberattacks will hollow out democracy from the inside, so he spends his days nudging obscure but essential institutions—local newsrooms, election‑protection groups, infrastructure‑security outfits—into better fighting shape.
And then there are the pigeons. In the same garden where he feeds and waters neighborhood birds and dotes on a favorite visitor he calls “Ghost Faced Killer,” he has signed paperwork committing roughly 100 million dollars and ultimately most of his fortune to the civic immune system he believes keeps the country standing.
It is an almost ascetic model of tech philanthropy: a billionaire who dresses like an engineer, spoils the pigeons, and treats his bank account as raw material to be converted, as efficiently and quietly as possible, into civic armor.