The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars

204 pointsposted 3 hours ago
by Tomte
(independent.co.uk)

104 Comments

helterskelter

3 hours ago

I don't know much about this guy, but I remember reading an interview with him maybe 15 years ago where he was asked if his lifestyle had changed since he came into money and if he bought a new house or anything, and his answer was basically something like: "Not really, and I've already got good water pressure where I'm at, what else do I need?" I can't help but like his attitude.

dlcarrier

a minute ago

He has a point. Good water pressure us underrated.

urbandw311er

2 hours ago

I can't help but like his altitude.

dsatrainer

an hour ago

No that's height, you're thinking of audacity

roksprok

2 hours ago

Craigslist is often held up as an example of a company "doing it right", but what is never mentioned in these posts is that a large portion of their revenue comes from facilitating scams. Around 25% of rooms/apartments I contact are scams, and Craigslist has so far done nothing to prevent these. A common scam is to take pictures from a real estate site of a house that recently sold and advertise it as for rent, but they don't even let you say "I live at this house and do not want to rent it, don't let anyone post it".

bredren

12 minutes ago

Yes.

Even if you take out revenue from scams, it does not change the question of what Craigslist could or should have done regarding governance.

Craigslist adhered to basic features and community volunteers partly to avoid responsibility.

The org had no problem enforcing its moat around UGC (posts) with lawsuits but only at after extraordinary foot dragging did they implement basic advancements in the best interests of their own community.

This has resulted in untold numbers of scam victims, yes but also it allowed bad landlords, (and tenants) to carry on with no repercussions. This continues, actually.

Craigslist was a benevolent dictator. It squandered an opportunity to be a low profit leader of p2p, instead yielding it to Facebook and a variety of venture backed products.

I have first hand knowledge of Craigslist response to market competition because my cofounder on Gliph and I are the creators of the product that Craigslist privacy relay email service is based on.

This point of who actually created the concept and tech is actually being litigated right now between Apple and a patent troll over the Hide My Email feature of iCloud in Rally vs. Apple Inc.

jedberg

2 hours ago

Craigslist doesn't make any money from those scams because they don't charge for rental listings. It sucks that it's there, but for them to hire staff to deal with it, they'd have to charge for the rental listings.

Right now they rely on volunteers to combat that problem, in the form of legit landlords reporting the scams.

wyre

an hour ago

So why not charge for rental listings? i'm sure the number of scams would go down, while posting would still be of good value for someone looking to rent out a $3000/mo apartment.

jubilanti

an hour ago

They do in some markets like NYC specifically because of scams.

dfxm12

a minute ago

Of course I've found some too good to be true auto listings on cl (so I stayed away), but this is a weird thing to fixate on when there are scams on Amazon, fb marketplace, newspaper classifieds, etc.

As an aside, I think getting involved in making people prove they live at an address to cl is not the right way to do anything.

jackconsidine

2 hours ago

From Craig's Wikipedia article [0]. He sure cares about fighting scams. Craigslist != Craig I know, but may these are intractable problems, not that there's necessarily negligence

> In 2022, Newmark committed $50 million to the Cyber Civil Defense initiative.[39] As of April 2022, approximately $30 million of this commitment had been awarded.[40]

> In 2023, Craig Newmark Philanthropies announced it would double its donations from $50 million to $100 million for fighting cyber threats.[41]

> In 2026, Newmark founded a public service campaign, "Take9", encouraging users to pause and think before responding to a text or email to help avoid being scammed.[42][43] A video for the campaign featured Newmark teaming up with Count von Count from Sesame Street.[42][43]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craig_Newmark

a2tech

2 hours ago

Airbnb has the same exact problem. Also doesn’t seem to give a crap when they’re reported.

dstroot

20 minutes ago

I once wanted to build an alternative to Craig’s list. There were SO MANY things I had ideas to improve. Then I realized I had literally no idea how Craig’s list makes money. None. They did not charge for ads and they didn’t have advertising. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

BeetleB

15 minutes ago

IIRC, he said the bulk of revenue comes from job listings.

jeffbee

2 hours ago

Craigslist doesn't even charge for rental listings, do they? I thought they only charge for help wanted ads.

criddell

2 hours ago

They charge for rental listings in some markets.

jeffbee

2 hours ago

Interesting. I wonder why they feel it is not necessary or not profitable to do it in the Bay Area.

floren

2 hours ago

They now charge to list your car, even as a private party. I'm not sure it was the right choice because it drove so much traffic to Facebook Marketplace, which is an absolute disaster.

socalgal2

2 hours ago

It's also one of the major things the destroyed newspapers. I'm not saying that's bad, just pointing out it happened.

jeffbee

2 hours ago

Local newspapers can rest in piss. No monopoly was ever more deserving of fatal disruption than charging people $50 to post a used car ad.

dghlsakjg

an hour ago

It wasn’t a monopoly.

There were tons of ways to advertise selling your used car (e.g. most towns did and still do have a high traffic spot where people will go park the car with a for sale sign, or - more directly in competition with local papers - were car classifieds publications distributed for free. These cost more than newspapers to place an ad and tended to target the enthusiast market).

Besides that, newspapers competed with each other. In the heyday of print, it was pretty rare - almost unheard of - that there weren’t multiple publishers in any market, even small towns. Kind of the anti definition of monopoly. Hell, the US constitution literally encodes the right for anyone to publish a newspaper. Even now, most markets have several options for buying print classifieds.

An “expensive” offering from a variety of vendors that happens to be effective is not a monopoly, it’s just businesses pricing at value not cost.

The $50 was what many people, apparently, were happy to pay to have their ad distributed daily for a few weeks, on paper, delivered to the homes of thousands of people. Look up the cost of a full size ad in a print publication, and classifieds look like a pretty good deal.

Zigurd

2 hours ago

Indeed, conflating local news with local newspapers is a mistake. They were able to support news gathering by monopolizing print advertising. They were also overly dependent on the municipal government and police for access, and were therefore often timid on certain subjects.

pm90

an hour ago

Well that kind of gating actually kept the scams out so I have mixed feelings about it.

jeffbee

an hour ago

You can't have lived through that era and believe that print classifieds were scam-free. I'm sure the rate is higher today, but in the newspaper era it wasn't zero. In fact there's an unbroken lineage going back decades of the exact same fake rental scam prevalent on Craigslist today.

profsummergig

8 minutes ago

For me, Craigslist is one of the greatest services ever created.

It got an ugly loser like me laid, uncountable times.

I was able to buy a bunch of crap.

I was able to sell a bunch of crap.

I was able to get into angry fights (rants & raves) with strangers about topics I shouldn't have cared about.

I was able to learn lots of secrets about cities I was living in (the best shopping, dive bars, etc.).

"Best of" was and is always good for a laugh.

It was AI before AI.

foobarian

an hour ago

I think he has given away a whole lot more than half a billion dollars when you think of the opportunity squandered to grow CL the way other unicorney companies grew

Quarrelsome

an hour ago

it was an intentional choice to not go big. I can seriously respect that. I feel like all these "big tech leaders" like Zuck or Musk have some pretty blatant mental health issues, its a path with significant drawbacks because that level of absurd wealth causes issues.

jrmg

2 hours ago

Is Craigslist still the go-to classifieds site in some places?

Around here it’s (very sadly IMO) been almost completely replaced by Facebook Marketplace, to the extent that people make Facebook accounts just to use Marketplace.

vvpan

9 minutes ago

I've been told that it is a regional thing.

apparent

an hour ago

I use ND first, then CL. I've used FB a few times, but mostly it's been scammers (though I have friends who swear by it).

jeffbee

2 hours ago

I use both in the Bay Area and have never succeeded in selling anything on FB. Craigslist usually connects me with some buyer and if not I go to eBay.

lotsofpulp

an hour ago

I only sell on Facebook marketplace because being able to see someone’s profile means a lot less time spent selling the item.

xnx

2 hours ago

Craigslist is one of the few sites with a UI even better than HN. Totally fits that Craig would have this type of character.

apparent

2 hours ago

I'd be curious to know how the economics of craigslist works, such that he's made so many hundreds of millions of dollars. It only charges a modest fee for a small fraction of transactions, but presumably the denominator is big enough that this adds up (and of course he would have subsequently invested the proceeds).

I had assumed that the fee portion of the site was substantial enough to cover all costs, and generate perhaps tens of millions of profit (he's well known for having given away money to media, so obviously there's some profit). But I didn't realize that it made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Are there any articles that break down how this pencils out?

Jblx2

2 hours ago

I suppose some of it is due to craigslist being around for 30+ years. At $25-$30 million a year, it adds up over time. And then if he invests most of it, 30 years of compounding interest does the rest.

apparent

2 hours ago

Yeah, and investing during the last 30 years would yield incredible results even if you are lousy at picking stocks. And of course, if you'd put even a tiny bit into BTC, you'd have even more.

LeoPanthera

34 minutes ago

Craigslist is the pinnacle of web sites. True brutalist web design.

ElijahLynn

an hour ago

That is beautiful! I hope to be able to be well off enough some day to give to causes I believe in (to start I would fund a ton of open-source engineers on projects that I use).

Love news like this, happy tears!

Jblx2

2 hours ago

I wonder what the infrastructure is like for craigslist.

jedberg

2 hours ago

My experience is a few decades old but it was pretty simple. Some servers for the text and some for the images. The data is super cacheable, the hot set is really hot (current listings), and storing text and some image pointers is pretty simple for even a moderate database (which can be split by metro).

I was on the security team for eBay/PayPal at the time they took a minority stake in Craigslist, and one of the jobs we got was securing their infrastructure (they didn't have a security team).

I wonder if they still have that arrangement with eBay...

ryandrake

3 hours ago

> “They told me that I should treat people like I want to be treated,” he said. “I should know when enough is enough. And they told me I should be my brother's keeper or my sister's keeper. And that made sense to me.”

Refreshing to see a multimillionaire+ who actually knows the meaning of the word "enough." The world seems to be run by people who don't even know of the word.

RankingMember

2 hours ago

This is a great reminder even for those of us who aren't multi-millionaires. It's easy to get wrapped up pursuing ostentation and even notoriety as elements of our culture hold it up as as goal to strive for, and I think it's important to see it for the hollow goal it is regardless of your income.

Kiln6125

2 hours ago

Truthfully, it doesn't shock me that the founder of Craigslist in particular, a site that found a good, workable setup and then left it as is, would know this. Its more disappointing that no one else really seems to know when enough is enough.

Zigurd

an hour ago

It's almost as if you can make $1 billion without intrusive, exploitative, sneaky data gathering and products that are a witches brew of dark patterns.

mrguyorama

an hour ago

>The world seems to be run by people who don't even know of the word.

That is the explicit design of Capitalism yes.

It's literally a system built around "Those who can amass the most capital are explicitly in charge of distributing it."

It cannot go any other way. Without some external forcing, it will always lift up sociopaths who can squeeze more blood from the stone.

It's like getting upset that Apple's reviews aren't impartial and reliably screw over people trying to compete with Apple. Like, what did you expect? What are you going to do to prevent the obvious outcome?

dayyan

37 minutes ago

How effective is his giving?

maebert

30 minutes ago

More effective than not giving, which apparently is a bar other billionaires are not clearing.

kgwxd

2 hours ago

How did he even make money? Was it from craigslist? If so, how!?

kaycebasques

3 hours ago

I'm curious about the logistical details of Newmark's donations. Skimmed the article but didn't see an answer. This is just a pledge to donate at this point, right? Newmark has not yet actually transferred any money? Presumably his trust would handle the transfer after his death or something. But then what exactly are they donating? Shares in a private company?

duncan-donuts

3 hours ago

The article does say that he’s already given away this amount of money since the founding of Craigslist 30 years ago. From the sound of things he’s always actively doing philanthropic work, but I could be reading into it too much.

gnerd00

3 hours ago

Planetwork org (serious,respected,boutique) interviewed with these people and got a sort of snotty frat guy to answer to.. He wanted to know if I had been to any weddings in France recently, as part of the interview. no checks were written

BrenBarn

an hour ago

The side takeaway from this is that most rich people won't voluntarily give away their wealth, so it will have to be taken.

Zigurd

2 hours ago

Meh. Haven't the "effective altruism" people proved that conventional philanthropy is less effective?

rozap

43 minutes ago

Ea appears to primarily be a post hoc rationalization for someone's unhinged drive for money and power. A way for people who see themselves as good, but act according to a different set of principles, to launder their consciousness through a compelling sounding framework. Now, this isn't to say that all EA practicioners are like this, or that it's bad (I think doing some good is better than doing none, if we can quantify good...), or even that there's a better alternative in the system that we live in. But the whole thing just feels inauthentic and handwaves externalities in a way that always felt uncomfortable. So I'd hardly say EA has "proved" anything.

zuzululu

3 hours ago

good for him!

but empty words to the american working class

it may be too late, now ppl hate the rich

WalterBright

2 hours ago

I know two people who immigrated to the US with essentially no money. They're multimillionaires now. America is the place to be if you want to get wealthy.

computerex

5 minutes ago

Except capitalism is a zero sum game. The two people you talk about that are multimillionaires are lucky. For each person you know that has made it, there are thousands of people that are equally as hardworking/talented but are destined to slum away for the rest of their lives.

All human beings deserve to live a happy life. We live in a world where few have accumulated more capital than they could ever spend in their lives while others starve to death.

I don't think anyone with a good moral conscience can support America's brand of capitalism. We live in a world where few live, the rest survive.

WalterBright

an hour ago

I've always been an advocate of the free market. And I'll tell you why.

When I was 9, my dad arranged a tour of East Berlin for his family. As part of the deal with the USSR when the 4 zones were partitioned, this was allowed for an Air Force officer. This was at the height of the Cold War.

The Wall is gone now, but it was something to behold in those days. There's the Wall, the kill zone, the tank traps, the dogs, the watchtowers, the barbed wire, and the machine guns. All on the east side.

We went through Checkpoint Charlie on a bus, and were searched by the East German guards entering and exiting. The guards ran a mirror under the bus. They were all carrying machine guns. You could sum up East Berlin in one word - grey.

There was a museum next to Checkpoint Charlie, which was about the Wall. It was loaded with pictures of east Germans being killed trying to escape to the west.

West Berlin built platforms next to the Wall, so you can stand on the platform and look over it and see what a freakin' abomination it was. I never heard of anyone using those platforms to "escape" to East Berlin.

In West Berlin, there was the Russian War Memorial. It was an island of East Berlin surrounded by the west. The memorial was surrounded by barbed wire. There were two guards on duty there, with machine guns, of course. We waved at them, and they grinned at us.

Then an officer came out and looked them up and down. Their faces turned to stone, looking straight ahead.

I asked my dad about it, he said the guards were a pair who didn't know each other, with strict orders to shoot the other if one attempted to get escape through the barbed wire.

It was pretty obvious to my 9 year old mind that people simply do not like living under communism.

I've read a lot of history books over the years. It's pretty clear that communes and communism and socialism do not work. They don't work when people do them freely, they don't work when people are forced into it.

And the more free market a country is, the more prosperous it is. The evidence is strong and everywhere.

WalterBright

an hour ago

Some time ago, an American leftist told me that the Berlin Wall was necessary to keep the West out of East Berlin. he wasn't happy when I started laughing. I said that even to a 9 year old, it was clear the tank traps were set up to stop people fleeing to the West.

It's too bad the Westerners did not leave a section of the Wall standing. It would stop people from rewriting the truth about it.

hnav

34 minutes ago

East-side gallery is still standing.

WalterBright

13 minutes ago

Just the Wall or including the defense-in-depth?

hnav

7 minutes ago

If you mean watchtowers with armed guards, then no those don't exist anymore.

zuzululu

2 hours ago

America is the place for very few people to get wealthy relatively compared to the rest is more accurate.

I don't know how long this asymmetric upside down pyramid structure will hold. Monopoly on violence requires participants to believe in its continuity, any fracture in perception no matter how small, will create an increasingly chaotic redistribution effect.

gottorf

2 hours ago

"The rest" is still quite wealthy, even by today's developed economy standards. Median household disposable income is higher in Mississippi, a state widely panned for its poverty, than Germany, the richest major EU nation.

In American discourse, there's a ton of talk about inequality from the haves against the have-mores, pushing policy that often times will lead to worse outcomes for the have-nots.

micro2588

2 hours ago

median household income is not higher in missisippi vs germany, especially not true if you adjust for the value of healthcare, education, and social benefits including time off work.

gottorf

an hour ago

There are, of course, many ways to measure this, some of which are slightly higher for Germany and some for Mississippi. Many are in the same ballpark, which is pretty crazy to think about. Many of these statistics take into account the taxpayer-funded programs you mentioned.

Broadly speaking, the median Mississippian is about as rich as the median German, with the tradeoff being that the Mississippian has greater access to private goods (e.g. a fishing boat or a big car), whereas the German has greater access to public goods (e.g. socialized insurance or college).

My point is that even "the poor" in America are really quite well off, and not just in historical terms.

micro2588

an hour ago

Why is the median considered "poor"? The true poor in Mississippi are way worse off than those in Germany. If you neglect everything it takes to live a good life like public capital, education, healthcare, time off with family, a retirement, total years on this earth and ignore the insane inequality in Mississippi then sure the median numbers are not that far off.

WalterBright

2 hours ago

The top 1% of America pays 40% of the federal income taxes.

Getting rid of the rich is probably a pretty bad idea for the rest of us.

overfeed

40 minutes ago

The 1% hold more than 40% of the wealth, and therefore should be paying much more than 40% of income taxes, based on proportion alone - nevermind historic precedence before trickle-down Reaganomics.

When the top 1% are not in the top tax bracket, something is horribly wrong.

wewtyflakes

2 hours ago

This is a byproduct of wild wealth disparity, not because the rich are so generous with paying the government.

WalterBright

an hour ago

And if you take away their money, then who is going to fund the government and all those wealth redistribution programs?

blanched

2 hours ago

Right - and iirc the bottom of the 1% is somewhere around 700k. Still a ton of money, but very very far off from a billion.

fsckboy

an hour ago

>700k. Still a ton of money, but very very far off from a billion

that 700K is income, but the billion is assets.

earning 700K is the income from $10 million in the stock market (although working to earn $700K is in exchange for you time while the income from $10 mil is passive. OTOH people with the work ethic to earn like that tend to like what they do.

a billion in the stock market is $70 million a year, a large number but far from a billion.

TLDR: 700K compares to a billion 1 in 1000, but the truth is closer to 1 in 100

fsckboy

an hour ago

>a byproduct of wild wealth disparity, not because the rich are so generous with paying the government

you're overcorrecting WAY too far. Tax rate percentages are much higher on high income people, and THAT is why they pay most of the federal budget, it's forced generosity paying the government.

and it's actually the top 20% who dominate income and taxes, but including that extra 19% is important because that is the class of people ("coastal elites") who have a (all too human) tendency to rig the system in favor of their children in terms of good schools, universities, learning high status pasttimes, "internships" at prestigious institutions, rent paid in high value/opportunity areas after university etc. These high income people basically earn their livings from the 1%.

(that should not be interpreted as a pure sign of oligopoly, capitalist markets measure productivity, and that's how it works out, production in these industries is highly valued by the populace, but turnover of these people is high, where the top of the list is almost invariably new people each generation.)

hnav

31 minutes ago

The top %1 is a strawman invented by the top 0.01%.

Varelion

3 hours ago

As they should. Money boils down to a finite resource, and a class of people have been flaunting their theft of the working class since the famous balcony champagne image taken during Occupy Wallstreet.

That singular image should be the poster of this Epstein era.

WalterBright

2 hours ago

> Money boils down to a finite resource

Musk more amply demonstrated how wealth is created.

Varelion

an hour ago

Yeah, start by having enough to buy more influence with the right people, so they don't realize your assets are nowhere near a correct valuation.

zuzululu

2 hours ago

The reason there is cynicism around philanthropy by America's elite class is perhaps the obliviousness to the methods and means it is created and supported.

"Here is a few billion dollar to a non profit company I control but you better not write that in the article" or "I didn't care for social consequences, I was just another player, it was ultimately for you" vibes

it just doesn't have the impact it used to, ironically because then inflation was low and integrity/morality was rewarded as society.

I think Ray Dalio has done a fantastic job of mapping out the trajectory we are on. We've already started seen glimpse of it and I don't think its going to cool down. America and the West in general has growing fatigue with various elements and perhaps the biggest one is that of wealth gap disparity.

Perhaps a snapshot of where we are: The richer you get the more you need access and proximity to those that monopolized violence and pay protection money too. It's not unlike Italy in the 1800s, you need money to purchase and distribute violence to acquire more resources and eventually the gap gets too big, people can't afford bread, and they get bold.

Varelion

41 minutes ago

You do not become a Billionaire without abusing and taking advantage of others. It would be foolish to think that anyone with that pattern of behavior would or could be philanthropic.

The one exception I had for this was Bill Gates.

Then I looked into the past behavior of Microsoft, and what he was going with Jeffery Epstein.

I no longer hold him as an exception.

rayiner

2 hours ago

We are almost two decades into the age of billionaire philanthropy and what’s results has it produced? Can you point to any area where it’s really changed the world?

I think a fundamental problem is that the non-profit/NGO sector doesn’t have the same caliber of people as the private sector. There’s no Jeff Bezos equivalent working on inner city education. Bill Gates is really the only one who has tackled this, by investing his own time into public health, which I understand has produced real results.

raybb

2 hours ago

Sounds like you may have read it but the book Winner Takes All is about this topic and pretty enjoyable.

I think there's a case to be made that philanthropy produced the Internet Archive but maybe that's a little different from usual philanthropy since Brewster is very hands on for so long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winners_Take_All:_The_Elite_Ch...

skybrian

2 hours ago

The Gates Foundation also put a lot of money into education in the US, but my understanding is that it’s had mixed results. Public health seems to be easier.

hermitShell

2 hours ago

I understand Gates has also helped in reviving Nuclear power, from reading news on this site and others. Smaller, updated designs that don't face quite the same level of pressure from regulators.

If we assume you are right about billionaire philanthropy being basically ineffectual (I personally agree) there is a line of reasoning that I find explains why adequately. When systems don't have their incentives structured properly, then quite often the unexpected outcomes are stronger than the predicted outcome. Because the input to the system did not properly account for, or change the incentives which drive the dynamics of the system.

Examples about in healthcare, social programs, education... large SWE companies...

There's so little real pressure for results when you're backed by some billionaire's fortune, the existence of the organization is not threatened by non-performance... there's no free market to survive in, the goal is to lose money... the things you are trying to measure are slow signals or mostly qualitative...

cossatot

2 hours ago

We're a century into it at least, even in nominal dollar terms, starting with Rockefeller as the first billionaire.

I don't know whether John Arnold is spread too thin or not, but he's certainly top caliber and does a lot to measure progress before/during investment in various causes (including education). He also seems to be more agnostic on what the most appropriate solution may be at the beginning of the process.

comrade1234

an hour ago

It's too bad the pimps and prostitutes ruined casual encounters. Craigslist had to remove it because some people were using it for prostitution. It was a safe place to arrange experiences that you would never have had otherwise.

standardUser

an hour ago

It's also too bad our society shares in the collective delusion that sex work can be prevented. It not only makes sex work far more dangerous, but it tramples on these exact kinds of novel spaces for sex/intimacy.