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LOVE/HATE
Craig Newmark’s New Hit List
The internet mogul was vilified for destroying journalism. Now he’s setting out to save it.
There was hay here once. Horses, coachmen. Carriages were stored one room over. But that was a long time ago, before this house in lower Manhattan was even on the market, before the construction workers arrived, before the limestone tile for an adjoining hallway was cut, before the hayloft was removed to make room for a spiral staircase and more bookshelves. Before it became the two-story personal library of an unassuming internet mogul. Before Craig.
Yes, that Craig. The Craig of online classifieds fame, the Craig of Craigslist, the unmistakable character of late ’90s internet disruption: squat, bespectacled, flecks of gray in the goatee, a pleasant gloss atop his balding head, the slightly upturned wry smile that indicates he’s about to employ his trademark dry humor.
“If the drill noise becomes annoying enough, let me know,” he says, referring to the cacophony echoing through the first floor of his mid-renovation New York City home, all the way back to the library where we sit. “It’s no worse than the dentist, but without any vibration, and it’s just the vibration that really bothers me.”
The library, with its unadorned desk, is where the soon-to-be 66-year-old Newmark will continue the latest chapter of an already eventful life. He’s a self-described awkward kid from Morristown, New Jersey, prone to squirreling himself away with a quart of milk, a box of chocolate chip cookies, and works of science fiction. (“I would socially isolate myself as a fat little kid,” he recalls.) In 1999, Newmark, having relocated to San Francisco after a 17-year tenure at IBM, turned a small email newsletter into a worldwide digital classifieds behemoth called Craigslist. In the process, he amassed a fortune of reportedly more than $1 billion. (Newmark doesn’t discuss his finances, but Craigslist, where he hasn’t held an executive role since 2000, made $690 million in revenue in 2016.)
The success of Craigslist lay in its being free, fast, and accessible. It’s just easy. Last spring, I sold my old drum kit there. Some photos and a short description took 10 minutes; a week and a half later, I bid…
