The celebrity CEO is now thinking about the website that makes a bunch of lists and is barely staying solvent after turning down big money, not all that long ago.

Elon Musk

Craigslist

The founder of Craigslist on giving away his money, whether billionaires should exist, and why so many of our plutocrats lose their minds

I recently ran into Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, at an airport. I had gotten to know him after my book WINNERS TAKE ALL came out. Unlike most super-rich people, he became curious about the critique and wondered what someone in his position could do in order not to perpetuate the problems of plutocracy while still operating as a philanthropist. He read the book, absorbed its ideas, invited me for a conversation, and continued, over a period of years, to grapple with the question of how someone with outsize power and influence should make use of that privilege.

At the airport the other day, he told me that he was about to turn 70 — today, in fact. And he further explained that he had decided to use the milestone to announce that he was giving virtually all of his assets away.

Was he inspired by the headline-grabbing announcement not long ago by the owner of Patagonia? Not so, Craig says, because he had already been planning on his own announcement. But his birthday vow today will inevitably be read in concert with that story, and they both reflect a larger ongoing reckoning about what billionaires who profess to bemoan the skewed distribution of resources in their favor can do to fix it.

So enjoy our conversation below. And if you haven’t yet subscribed to access these discussions with smart and important voices in our culture, today may be the day!

You’re turning 70, and it has prompted the decision to give most of your income-generating assets away. You’ve given money away in the past. Can you tell me about the evolution in your thinking that got you to this announcement?

I’ve been realizing that I need to do a better job of doing philanthropy. Being an amateur has given me some advantages in that it helps me understand my limitations. I tend to share power in the form of whatever influence I have. I’m not the kind of guy who commands attention. I need to support the people who can. That means two forms of currency: attention and cash. I realized that and thought, “How much do I really need to go on?” Because my family, friends, and I only need so much. I don’t know the point of retaining a whole bunch of assets. So I decided I’ll support things I believe in, which have to do with protecting the country. – Source

Chaos on Twitter Leads a Group of Journalists to Start an Alternative

It’s one thing to hope for a better community online, and another, very different one, to build it. Just ask the users and administrators of journa.host, which was started by journalists concerned over the direction of Twitter.

“Come on in, the water’s confusing but fine — and more swimmable,” the journalist Virginia Heffernan wrote on journa.host on Nov. 6.

On Nov. 7 the MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan posted: “I feel like a new kid in a new school.”

The network is the brainchild of Adam Davidson, a journalist who helped found “Planet Money” and has worked at The New York Times and The New Yorker. He said the jump from Twitter to the new site reminded him of his family’s move to Vermont from New York City, a few years ago.

Journa.host is part of Mastodon, a vast network of thousands of servers that look and function much like Twitter. Over the past three weeks, hundreds of thousands of people, seeking an alternative to Twitter as Elon Musk took over, have signed up for Mastodon, according to Eugen Rochko, who created the software in 2016. Many of them are journalists.

The network currently has almost 2,000 members, and they include the hyperlocal and the national, weathermen and sports reporters. Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School, is a member, as is Kasie Hunt, the CNN anchor. Some journalists from The Times are also members.

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To manage the flood of applicants, Mr. Davidson has been joined by a part-time volunteer staff of nine journalists, who verify new members; Mr. Davidson said that a few applicants had been rejected because they work in public relations. Journa.host received $12,000 in funding from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center, which has been used so far to pay server and domain registration fees.”

According to Kelly McBride, senior vice president and chair of the Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership at the nonprofit Poynter Institute, Poynter is in talks with the journa.host team about bringing the social network under its umbrella. For the overworked administrators of the server, it would come as a relief. – Source

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