Nice guys finish first
Billionaire Craig Newmark shuns the Silicon Valley high life – he just wants to do good, he tells Olivia Rudgard
Craigslist nerd is almost too pleasant for the internet
Craig Newmark is confused. “Who is Bob?” he says, peering across a table in the Telegraph office in downtown San Francisco. A reluctant Anglophile, the New Jersey-born Craigslist founder turned philanthropist delights in British-isms such as “Bob’s your uncle”, but is baffled by its origin. “Is this some kind of secret Anglo-saxon or Celtic deity?” he asks. “No one will tell me.”
These aren’t the things that puzzle most tech billionaires. But Newmark, 66, bears little resemblance to today’s polished and practised Silicon Valley elite. Despite an estimated net worth of $1.6bn (£1.3bn), he doesn’t own a car, preferring public transport, and lives with his wife in a small home in San Francisco’s Cole Valley – although he did buy a three-bedroom apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village in 2016 for a reported $6m.
After he founded Craigslist in 1995, the listings site rapidly became a top US destination for cars, property and jobs. Millions still use it as a virtual classifieds section, despite it looking like it was designed in the Nineties, a relic of a pre-dotcom bubble age. By 2008, it was worth $5bn.
Newmark also seems to eschew the globetrotting statesmanship of other techies. He is a self-confessed nerd as he points out a lot, usually to argue he is poorly qualified to comment on something or to explain some aspect of his character such as his efforts to give away his fortune. “As a nerd, I don’t know why I need a billion dollars,” he says. Nowadays, he is “technically a philanthropist”, but his attempts to do good stem from 1999, when he says venture capitalists and bankers wanted to “throw a great deal of money” at his business, and he decided he didn’t need it.
Other Silicon Valley leaders, who could all be reasonably described as nerds, have rebranded themselves billionaire businessmen who hobnob at society parties, spend on cars and private jets and keep a tight grip on the companies that made them rich. Newmark instead gave up control over his, so quietly that he says many people believe he still runs it.
“I decided in ‘99 to have this business model of doing well by doing
good. That’s worked out. Within the year, though, people helped me understand that, as a manager, I suck. It took me a few months to really figure it out. But I did step down, which as ‘founder syndrome’ goes, is not so bad,” he says.
Newmark is one of America’s biggest full-time philanthropists, giving away $144m last year to support journalism and media initiatives, including investigative outfit Propublica, transparency initiative the Trust Project and Consumer Reports, a US watchdog and consumer advocacy outfit. “A trustworthy press is the immune system of democracy. As voters, we need good information to drive out bad,” he says.
This includes fighting back against the “weaponised disinformation” that has disrupted democracy around the world, including the 2016 US election, and allegedly the Brexit referendum.
Newmark is also interested in cyber security, and the threats to democracy. The Democratic Party was hacked in 2015 and 2016 and this kind of threat is becoming more common.
“I wonder if I should have served, let’s say, in Vietnam. Vets tell me that I wouldn’t have done well in boot camp. Because, nerd. But when it comes to information warfare, that’s my fight.”
He highlights “bot” attacks, which can be used to spread misinformation or attack news coverage. For example, hundreds of Twitter accounts have been used to criticise western media coverage of Syria. “Do you actually know that it was being attacked by a lot of different people? Or was it a botnet or proxies for both foreign and domestic adversaries?” he says. “When a pretty serious journalistic entity is being attacked like that, there’s a fair probability the attackers aren’t real.”
We are meeting the day after Donald Trump tweeted that four Democrat congresswomen should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came”. Mainstream American rhetoric is in places that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, leaving the media floundering. “Right now, the environment is increasingly challenging. Recently, we’ve seen some verbally explicit racism. The disappointing part of it is that so many news outlets are failing to be frank about it,” he says.
Newmark represents an older, more idealistic Silicon Valley, when people believed the internet could be a free utopia, without corporate power. He insists Craigslist is meant to be written with a lower-case C, “to de-emphasise me”. That optimism has not been realised, as a handful of tech firms now dominate the web. But Newmark’s niceness extends to a refusal to criticise more cut-throat successors.
Critics have argued that founders including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have too much power, crippling the companies they created, and should step down. “I can’t presume to know what battles any individual is fighting every day,” he says. “All I can do is respond with kindness and then quietly talk to people. I can do that and I’ve had some success. But that means keeping my mouth shut and doing no harm.”
Craigslist too, has been affected by the net’s dark side. It has come under fire for being less regulated, with scandals including prostitution ads, fakery and buyers being robbed at gunpoint. Newmark seems upset by the critique: “I don’t understand why people want to sensationalise things. It does happen. I don’t get it. I was a nerd. There’s a lot of things I don’t understand that a human does understand.” He says he tried his hand at moderating the website for a while, which left him traumatised: “Much of it I don’t want to talk about because I don’t want to relive it. You’ll see people harassing each other in ways that I find very ugly. Having founded the site, I take it personally.”
On getting Silicon Valley to deal better with democracy-crippling disinformation, he says “that’s a quiet back channel discussion. If you want to be effective, sometimes, you need to discuss things via back channels. That’s why it took me decades to understand that diplomatic cables should stay – sometimes those are very sensitive. They need to stay secret.”
His awakening to the problems in journalism began in 2006, when he met “journalists, editors, publishers” who “decided to start educating me”. Now, he acts as a benefactor and connector for the industry. “Mostly what I’m doing is getting the people doing good work to talk to each other. And then writing cheques.” Newmark dismisses the suggestion Craigslist killed local newspapers by gutting advertising revenue. He’s consulted “industry analysts and economists”, who say “the problems with American newspapers started in the early Fifties, with television news ... my intuition tells me Craigslist must have had some effect. But it had to be a pretty small.”
Craigslist is much smaller elsewhere in the world, including in the UK. Did negative press harm it? “I don’t know. Because I really don’t know UK culture.” For someone who doesn’t understand UK culture, Newmark seems obsessed – and amused – by it. Our interview is peppered with references to British history, books, TV and films. We get through Monty Python, Bernard Cornwell, Bodyguard, Line of Duty and King Alfred. “I’ve been fighting Anglophilia but seem to be succumbing,” he says. “But there’s a lot of mysteries. For example, why is it pronounced Gloucester?”
Would Newmark bring his philanthropy to the UK press? “The more I read and watch about, in particular, what takes place in London, the more I want to see of it. But first things first, there’s a lot of work to be done here. And one has to prioritise.”