Craig Newmark is a self-proclaimed nerd and reformed jerk. Now he's putting money behind his politics.

Craig Newmark is a man of quiet contradiction. Wrapped in a sweater the color of hot chocolate, the 66-year-old founder of Craigslist is painfully self-effacing, yet he started a wildly successful online marketplace emblazoned with his name. He deemphasizes his personal wealth, yet knows exactly how much he's donated to his philanthropies (over $100 million). He speaks in vague terms about political "bad actors," yet specifically insists that a trustworthy press is "a matter of national security."

"I'm a dull and uninteresting kind of guy," Newmark says from the wood-toned living room of his San Francisco home. He is anything but.

You might expect Newmark to thump his chest about building the world's largest site for online classified ads from thin air. Or let slip his net worth, once estimated to be at least $1.3 billion. The privately owned Craigslist, is, after all, thought to earn $1 billion per year. Newmark would not reveal the percentage of his stake. 

He would rather photograph a California scrub jay bobbing its blue-and-white head into the bird feeder on his back deck than boast about his achievements. Newmark keeps a Nikon Coolpix P900 in the kitchen for that very ornithological purpose.

"I'm not a birder," he says. "The contract that we've made is that I will put out food and water for the birds. And then they come over to be watched...How I got into it, I'll never know."

Accidental birder. Accidental billionaire. Deliberate activist. 

For a man whose temperament begs to shirk from the spotlight, Newmark's extraordinary success thrust him unwittingly onto the national stage when he created Craigslist in the mid-1990s. It's brought in over 600 million visitors since June 2018, according to ComScore.