The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars. He fears for an America where generosity is trolled | The Independent Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent<br>Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.<br>Not nowYes please

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The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars. He fears for an America where generosity is trolled<br>In a world where a growing number of billionaires are lashing out against philanthropy, Craig Newmark has a message for them – and everyone else, J.R. Duren learns

Wednesday 17 June 2026 14:37 BST<br>Bookmark

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Craigslist founder Craig Newmark shares why he’s giving away at least half his fortune

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Craig Newmark, multimillionaire founder of Craigslist, has long had trouble keeping his mouth shut – leading to some “influential mistakes”, he readily admits.<br>But he doesn’t consider it a lapse in judgement that he’s given away half a billion dollars to charity since founding the classified ads site 30 years ago – nor voicing his hope that others with vast fortunes will take a similar tack.<br>There has been a shift away from philanthropy toward hard-edged individualism and ostentatious displays of wealth in America in recent years, even in the highest office. President Donald Trump has increased his net worth from $4.3 billion to $7.3 billion during his second term, plans to spend $600 million on the White House ballroom and is gilding the capital at every turn.

Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel told The New York Times earlier this year that he had been encouraging wealthy peers to undo commitments to The Giving Pledge, a longstanding philanthropic campaign that encourages the ultra-rich to give away vast sums during their lifetime to causes of their choosing. Thiel claimed contributions would go to “left-wing” nonprofits, according to an audio transcript provided to Reuters, and dubbed it an “Epstein-adjacent fake Boomer club.”<br>Newmark signed The Giving Pledge last year and recently wrote aNew York Times op-ed on how he was dumbfounded by Thiel and some other billionaires’ positions.

“When I started Craigslist in the mid-1990s, I never thought I’d become rich. But I did. A lot of people in tech around that time also got lucky. Millions – even billions – were made simply by being in the right place at the right time,” he wrote. “That’s too much money for anyone to have, so I’m giving most of it away to people and causes that need it. It makes no sense to me that others with this kind of money would criticize anyone doing this.”

Newmark, 74, told The Independent that he doesn’t judge other wealthy people who don’t want to give their money away but nevertheless finds their decisions hard to fathom.<br>open image in gallery

Craig Newmark, multimillionaire founder of Craigslist, has long had trouble keeping his mouth shut, leading to some “influential mistakes”, he readily admits (GETTY IMAGES)<br>“Everyone has to make their own moral decisions,” he said. “There are some highly visible, super-rich people who've made their own decisions, and it's their right to make those decisions. I just don't really understand.”

His own financial decisions are rooted in a classroom at the Jewish Community Center in Morristown, New Jersey. It’s there that six-year-old Newmark attended the Sunday school of Holocaust survivors Rafael and Rachel Levin in the late Fifties, and never forgot the lesson that kindness was more important than riches.<br>“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.”

The sentiment remained with him early in his career when he was a software engineer at Bank of America and Charles Schwab, and even after he launched his unexpectedly popular classifieds site Craigslist in 1996.<br>The site started as a weekly email...