Its just area itself is expensive. Not like owns mansion with a zoo and 100 servants.
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.
Anyone who thought they had invented something new here were kidding themselves.
I’d have presumed this would have come up in the evidence for that case but afaik it has not.
IANAL, but perhaps Craigslist’s response to our product, which included blocking its usage on the site after they implanted their version, served as a stronger example of the commercialization of the product still well ahead of the Rally Patent.
Right now they rely on volunteers to combat that problem, in the form of legit landlords reporting the scams.
> 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]
You could make your point without this lie. Craigslist moderators are both very active and quick to respond. Their moderation system is explained on the website. Try flagging scams when you see them.
they don't charge for rental posts in most cities, so your conclusion is false
Even if it was not the original intent, it’s somewhat deceptive to keep it.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/craigslist-drops-adult-ser...
Everyone need stop making out Craig and James out to be super moralistic dudes. They both profited, enormously, off sexual exploitation and human trafficking around the world by (knowingly) serving as a directory for pimps.
US have legal porn industry and its strictly regulated and mostly safe for those wofking in it. Imagine how it would look like if it was illegal too.
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, especially in the context of cl, where many listings may have many different people who live together at that same address.
Yes, someone else would have addressed this niche eventually, or newspapers would have gotten their acts together on the digital front. The fact that Newmark started so early and was almost completely non-commercial in Craigslist operations and attitude allowed it to proliferate quickly, quickly gutting the revenues of local newspapers.
I can't claim the changes would be easy to implement, but if they made a FEW small changes the result would be 1000x better.
For example if you want to sell something on Craig's List they do some "you can't make this post because it looks too similar to a previous posting" kind of thing AND you might need a mobile number but somehow someone can stuff 1000 random keywords into a for-sale posting that's not at all about the item? So if you're looking for a "Miata" you'll end up getting listing for a bunch of other cars since someone is gaming the system?
Or it's an option to "reject duplicates" -- why do duplicates or clone postings even show up if they have their "this is too similar to another posting" capability?
Or, Craig's List lets AutoTrader and other "commercial" sites post items but if you want to actually message someone now on AutoTrader you need to upload your DRIVERS LICENSE just to send them a message? So Craig's List is OK with a reciprocal arrangement with a vendor who does not honor the same "equality" rules Craig's List was built on?
Sadly, many years ago I would send feedback to Craig's List and Craig himself would reply. I don't know if he's completely checked out of his site now, but if you're out there Craig a few simple changes could restore the utility of the service which you created. People like me would even PAY to see these improvements.
Craig and James knew damn well where most of their revenue was coming from, and pimps were able to get increasingly bold with their slang, moving from "model" to "escort" to just outright saying "prostitute" because Craigslist didn't care.
They only did something about it in 2010 when public outrage grew and prosecutors - around the world - started investigating.
Craig and James belong in jail cells, not having their di...er, egos, stroked for giving away their money to organizations that help veterans - the most lazy, non-controversial target for a non-profit.
Edit: how many times are you going to post that? You have something against sex workers? Or just Craigslist?
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.
But it's more likely to be apparent to someone who is a parent (the alternate meaning of my handle).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Markoff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Beasley_(serial_killer...
Yes, now there will be arguments about if that’s really Musk’s goal. that’s beside the point. The point is some goals require money than others
I totally see how the acquisition of twitter and funding of probably the worst US government in recent decades is in keeping with that aim. OR perhaps he just wants people to think he's cool, so he invests in "cool" stuff. This is because he has some of those mental health issues lots of absurdly wealthy people do, that results in him feeling like he constantly has to prove himself.
By hiring McKinsey to tell them they need to start selling and and acquire their competitors? That is the only way the unicorns established their position.
squandered?
how about: decided not to become an asshole billionaire like many of the other unicorn asshole billionaires, and help other people instead
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?
Revenue peaked in 2018 at $1 billion.
Throwing money at military veterans doesn't erase the stain of having a hand in the explosion of human trafficking and sexual exploitation Craigslist (and Backpages) enabled.
The FBI arrested Gambino family members for child prostitution, and one of their top ways of soliciting Johns was via paid ads in Craigslist. One state AG counted 200,000 ads a year and estimated the revenue to be almost $2M, in their state alone.
Mr. Newmark gets it! I hope he's as nice in person as he comes off in this article.
Love news like this, happy tears!
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...
I asked him one time what he was doing. Answering emails, he said. Customer support emails. I think he really enjoyed that part of the business.
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.
What makes you think rich people keep working to make more money, instead of doing it because they want to build things and want to have the capital to do it? We don't exactly live in the era of inherited wealth anymore.
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?
It’s a bit disappointing that in articles like this there’s relatively little discussion around what organisations receive the money and what impact it has. We should ultimately judge people by that, not abstractly by “charity == good”? If a billionaire donates millions to the Against Malaria Foundation I would judge that differently than a donation to an art museum in a developed country - and I think people should, and it matters morally.
The difference between for profit and non-profit isn’t really important either compared to “what concretely did they spend money on and what does that plausibly achieve”.
(Tbc some cause areas he donates to are explained, and they seem reasonable and close to his life, but unfortunately not in any depth).
He seems like a private person doesn't flaunt his wealth and has mostly avoided inserting himself into public discourse, unlike many of his tech-rich peers.
Were I king, I'd (also):
- Create endowments for journalistic orgs. Sufficient that they can maintain financial, and therefore editorial, independence.
- Award lots of grants to independent journalists, to simply do their thing, no strings attached. This ensures plenty of content for those independent orgs.
Currently, investments by non-right-wing donors to non-right-wing orgs are contingent. Metrics, strategy, ideology, blah blah blah. Whereas the right-wing ecosystem doesn't get bogged down by the money chase, endless self-justification, navel gazing, consensus building, etc.
Tax the richs, or eat them.
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/800...
They spent $23M in 2024, 10.7% went to executives and 24.4% went to other workers.
From the 2025 Impact Highlights of their website:
- 300,000+ military and family veteran families supported
- 12,290 families were helped by Nourish the Service
- 726 virtual, 1567 in person events
- 10,000+ military voices shared through surveys etc.
- 200,000+ new families joined
I know. I just have to figure out how to pass off my snark as "effective ambiguity."
For a few years I certainly didn't, despite donating more than 10% of my income to charities, since the standard deduction was increased and the SALT cap was very low.
but empty words to the american working class
it may be too late, now ppl hate the rich
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.
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.
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.
First, it's so easy to start a business in the US.
$1000 (maybe less?) gets you an LLC or an S-Corp, properly done with an accountant. $200/mo gets you a virtual office or a coworking space. Tax code is also friendly to small businesses. Healthcare is the only disadvantage, though you can get on group plans to work around that.
If you have an idea, it's easy (well, easier) to scale it in the US.
Actually, going back to taxes. Tax in the US is CHEAP compared to other developed countries. I met someone from Denmark some time ago that told my wife and I that they left to escape 50% taxes. Here, the worst you'll do is ~38%, federal, state and city combined. This means that you can make great money as a worker bee depending on the industry.
All of this is a major reason why so many people all over the world come to the US, make their money (with enough to send to family back home) and move back.
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.
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.
Objectively wrong, because Germany does better in the things that subjectively matter to you?
> Germany's average life expectancy is ahead of Mississippi by 10 years.
Comparing like for like, that gap drops down to 5-6 years and puts Mississippi on par with, say, Thailand or Latvia. Hardly grounds for condemnation.
> Germany ranks as one of the highest in the world in general satisfaction of the people, Mississippi does not.
Those rankings are all stupid, but in most of the ones I've seen, Germany ranks a scant few spots higher than the US. Sure, if Mississippi were a country, the distance would be greater, but how meaningful is it? I just saw one that ranks Saudi Arabia and El Salvador ahead of Spain and Italy[0].
And in any case, why do people keep leaving those satisfactory countries for America?
Different groups of people have different ideas of what "general satisfaction" is. Hence, such cross-group studies are pretty suspect.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2026/...
America used to be a great place to be. To put it in perspective, I myself am an American in the top 5% of earning households. I am strongly considering leaving. The value is no longer here. I don't want to live in a country where my healthcare is conditional, on principal. I don't want to live in a country where the Epstein class is protected.
People in America used to pay for healthcare out of pocket, instead of relying on insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.
> where the Epstein class is protected
Epstein died in jail.
> The value is no longer here
Rosie O'Donnell didn't stay in Ireland very long.
> I am strongly considering leaving.
Fortunately, you live in a country where nobody is going to stop you from leaving.
Because most big-city coastal Americans think of the median Mississippian as that way.
> If you neglect everything it takes to live a good life [...]
We're speaking past each other somewhat. You seem to have a belief system that says a good life is not possible without the stuff that Germany provides via taxation and redistribution. Whether that stuff is a necessary or sufficient condition for a good life for you, I'm not sure; but it is clear you place a lot of importance on it.
I'm saying that in America, more of those things are left to choice to the people, and that a good life, even a great life, is available to the average Joe (hence my banging on about the median) in one of the poorest states in the union, to a degree that is not matched anywhere else.
Put another way: you've defined a good life in large part as access to taxpayer-subsidized goods and services, or at any rate the lifestyle outcomes enabled by such access. By that metric, you're right, Mississippi comes behind Germany, and America as a whole likely behind Germany. But if you look at people voting with their feet over the past few decades, more Germans settled in America than the other way around in absolute numbers; which is even more striking if you consider the difference in population. Clearly there exist people who value the stuff that America has to offer that Germany doesn't.
Getting rid of the rich is probably a pretty bad idea for the rest of us.
When the top 1% are not in the top tax bracket, something is horribly wrong.
The federal income tax is based on income, not wealth.
They are not in the top bracket by choice - a luxury option unavailable to non-wealthy people in the working middle-class who actually are in the top tax bracket.
As you helpfully noted in your second half of your comment, high wealth, deliberately low income[0] means they are not in the top tax bracket[1] on the basis of their carefully calculated, tax-optimized income.
0. Taxable events need be overhauled to cover loopholes, including including removing tax-advantages of borrowing against securities. The legal fiction that allows rich people to spend money not recognized as income is deleterious.
1. Warren Buffet, IIRC, noted his assistant was in a higher tax bracket than him.
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
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.)
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.
That singular image should be the poster of this Epstein era.
Musk more amply demonstrated how wealth is created.
"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.
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.
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.
Like, funding a homeless shelter or the Trevor Project won't fix the problems causing homelessness or LGBTQ teen suicides. But there are enough people with immediate problems who we do want to support them somehow until policy changes happen, if ever.
You're right that the Gates Foundation is one of the few that has achieved some lasting changes, but I would say that is because their MO is quite different from what many NGO's do. This is based on second-hand knowledge from somebody who works there, so I'm not sure if they do this exclusively, but they strongly prefer to partner with the local governments to introduce highly targeted interventions.
This simultaneously makes it extremely slow and frustrating to operate (especially in countries with dysfunctional governments, which is where help is most needed) and ironically reduces the leverage of money (which is a problem when you have a mandate to spend X% of your money annually!) but also means that whenever any change happens it is generally structural and long-lasting.
There are many other organizations that operate with similar long-lasting principles, but it seems to me most focus on immediate, short-term support, which may be a function of the limited funding and skills of the people available to them.
Non-profits are 12% of GDP, over $3.5 trillion. Excluding hospitals, universities, and churches, leaves over $2 trillion in non-profit expenditures. Of that, about $300 billion comes from the government. That is more than enough money to solve structural issues.
My dad spent his career in non-profits working on public health in third world countries. These NGOs were able to work with highly dysfunctional foreign governments to achieve real and measurable improvements in some of the poorest countries in the world. Which is why it blows my mind that non-profits spending vastly more money domestically can’t work with e.g. the government of Baltimore to deliver meaningful improvements to the abysmal literacy rates in that city, or work in infant morality in inner cities.
The key difference it seems to me is the lack of accountability in domestic non-profits. The U.S., EU, Japan, etc., care how their foreign aid dollars are used. Every project is evaluated for effectiveness in quantitative terms. That culture of measured accountability seems entirely absent in domestic non-profits.
But that's the thing, the money is not helpful when it comes to policy issues. As the Gates Foundation MO and your dad's experience probably shows, lasting change comes down to political will. I can only surmise that the reason more US non-profits don't achieve lasting change is because they are not able to or they are not trying to.
This is not to say they are deliberately being ineffective, e.g. consider that inner city infant mortality rates have socioeconomic and racial factors, so solving that would require "solving" poverty and racism. Offhand, I really can't see how non-profits would be able to address these with even billions of dollars.
Of note, a sibling comment mentions the book "Winner Takes All" and links its wikipedia page which has this quote:
> The Aspen Consensus, in a nutshell, is this: the winners of our age must be challenged to do more good. But never, ever tell them to do less harm. The Aspen Consensus holds that capitalism's rough edges must be sanded and its surplus fruit shared, but the underlying system must never be questioned. The Aspen Consensus says, "Give back," which is of course a compassionate and noble thing. But, amid the $20 million second homes and $4,000 parkas of Aspen, it is gauche to observe that giving back is also a Band-Aid that winners stick onto the system that has privileged them, in the conscious or subconscious hope that it will forestall major surgery to that system – surgery that might threaten their privileges. The Aspen Consensus, I believe, tries to market the idea of generosity as a substitute for the idea of justice."
Not saying I agree entirely, but that is the kind of thing that could lead to billions in spending without achieving lasting structural changes.
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...
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...
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.
10 decades, Rockefeller was the first billionaire 100 yrs ago, and also a philanthropist.