Billionaires make philanthropic gifts for a variety of reasons. Some do it for authentic reasons such as giving back to organizations that have touched their lives or helping causes with a lack of funding, but some use it as a self-fulfilling prophecy to help their own business or industry interests.
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark committed to giving away his fortune to his passions: combatting disinformation, election security, cybersecurity, and… pigeons.
Newmark, who started Craigslist in 1995 as an email listserv to inform friends of tech events and social gatherings in San Francisco, promised to give away the vast majority of his net worth based on lessons dating back to when he was a kid.
“I learned early on in Sunday school, from Mr. and Mrs. Levin, to know when enough is enough,” Newmark wrote in his Giving Pledge letter in 2025. “Also, I should treat people like I want to be treated.”
A few years later, they taught me that I should help ‘repair the world,’” Newmark, 73, continued. “I got lucky with my stuff, but I don’t need the money, so I’m giving it away.”
Those early lessons, he said, are driving his plan to give away the bulk of the wealth he built from the popular classifieds site he launched three decades ago. He’s worth an estimated $1.3 billion today, and in 2025, he signed the Giving Pledge, an effort started by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett in 2010 that encourages the ultrawealthy to commit to giving away the vast majority of their fortunes.
How Craig Newmark made his money and why he’s giving it away
Newmark built his wealth as the founder of Craigslist, a once bare‑bones classifieds site that went on to upend local newspaper ad revenue and quietly throw off hundreds of millions of dollars a year in fees.
Craigslist stayed lean, largely free, and lightly monetized, while still turning him into a self-described nerd of means. Forbes pegged his net worth at about $1.3 billion in 2020, though he has since fallen off its billionaire rankings and has said he gave away most of his wealth to his charitable entities. He’s also insisted in the past that he’s not a billionaire.
“This all feels like a follow-up to my decision in early 1999 to monetize Craigslist as little as possible,” Newmark wrote in a December 2025 post announcing he had signed the Giving Pledge. “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,” he continued. “It has to do with the way my moral compass was defined so very long ago.”
He also said in his post that he’s giving away most of his wealth, only “keeping a small part for my family.”
Newmark’s priorities include military families and veterans, cybersecurity and fighting scams—and, in characteristically nerdy fashion, pigeon rescue.
“I love birds, have a sense of humor, and I suspect that pigeons may become our replacement species,” he told the Associated Press in 2023. His favorite neighborhood pigeon is named Ghostface Killah, who is featured in a painting on Newmark’s home mantle.
Newmark’s love for pigeons started in the mid-1980s when he lived in Detroit, he said. Pigeons are “the underdog,” he told NYU’s student newspaper, Washington Square News.
“They’re the grassroots, most prominent bird and possibly our successor species,” Newmark said. “But pigeons are, well, I identify with them as well. I grew up with no money, living across the street from a junkyard.”
He told The Chronicle of Philanthropy in January that he’s donated $450 million to charity so far and has made additional commitments totaling $37 million.
“I may not be the nerd you want, but I’m the nerd you got,” Newmark wrote in his Giving Pledge letter.
Another billionaire megadonor, MacKenzie Scott, is forthright about her reasons for donating her massive $30 billion-plus fortune to charity.
Scott has said the seeds of her philanthropic giving were planted in college, when two small acts of kindness changed her trajectory. As she recounted in a December 2025 essay, a local dentist offered her free care after spotting her trying to secure a broken tooth with denture glue, and a Princeton roommate found her crying about money and insisted on loaning her $1,000 so she wouldn’t have to drop out in her sophomore year.
The Giving Pledge’s promise—and gap
The Giving Pledge asks the world’s wealthiest people to publicly commit to giving away at least half of their net worth to charitable causes during their lifetime or in their wills. As of late 2025, more than 250 individuals and families from around 30 countries had signed on, representing an estimated $600 billion in wealth.
But the Pledge’s track record is mixed. A 2025 analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the original U.S. signers who remain, billionaires, have collectively become about 166% wealthier (after inflation) since 2010, and only 8 of 22 signers who have died appear to have actually given away at least half their fortunes by the time of their deaths.
Because the pledge is voluntary, non‑binding, and often back‑loaded to estates, critics argue it has functioned more as reputational cover than as an enforceable obligation. Recently, some high‑profile figures, including Peter Thiel, have publicly derided the effort or walked away from it, suggesting it has lost momentum among the ultra‑rich.
“They got an incredible number of people to sign up those first four or five years, and it somehow has really run out of energy,” Thiel told The New York Times. “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
