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Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist

Source: Bleacher + Everard

Craig Newmark made his fortune off a website, founded in 1995, that served as an early online bulletin board and looks like it hasn’t been updated in two decades.

That website, Craigslist, is still cranking along, featuring apartment listings, an active jobs board and items for sale. But the privately held company has long been surpassed in value by the likes of Airbnb, LinkedIn and Facebook Marketplace, which all face Wall Street’s demands for growth and profit.

Though Newmark’s internet company may be outdated, his concerns about where the industry is headed are most certainly not. Since the 2015 debut of Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the entrepreneur has donated many millions of dollars to various causes involving media and technology.

Most recently, his organization contributed $3 million to help fund a new artificial intelligence and education initiative from Common Sense Media, the nonprofit told CNBC this week.

“While I tried to pay some attention to what was going on, just everything caught me by surprise,” Newmark said, referring to the current boom of generative AI and all the new and intelligent chatbots.

Newmark, 70, spoke to CNBC as he was recovering from a minor heart procedure he went through in late August. The heart ablation required Newmark to lay on his back “the whole time in the wrong position” and he “woke up with a lot of back pain,” he said.

More than the surgery, Newmark wanted to talk about the hospital food.

“Hospital pudding is really good,” he said. “And since they served my lunch cold, I asked them and got more containers of pudding.”

Newmark, who ran his business out of San Francisco but now lives with his wife in New York, said the hospital stay didn’t cause him to reflect much on mortality, as he’d already addressed such existential issues when he decided to simplify his life by giving away much of his Craigslist riches.

Facebook's Marketplace takes on eBay, Craigslist

Newmark’s foundation has principally focused on donating to organizations and causes pertaining to journalism, combating misinformation, countering online harassment, cybersecurity issues, and supporting veterans and military families.

The rapid evolution of AI and its potential hazards have recently caught Newmark’s attention, and his money.

The goal of Common Sense’s AI project is to provide an AI ratings system for parents, educators, policymakers and regulators so they can evaluate what makes certain tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT safe or unsafe for children. Additionally, the nonprofit is offering online AI literacy courses intended to help parents and educators teach basic AI fundamentals to children.

The full scope of AI’s capabilities and potential for societal harm became more clear to Newmark by the time companies began “modifying search engines to use generative AI.”

“I realized that if a search engine was using sources that weren’t reliable, if the sources were about lying to people, that would create a big, ethical problem, and you really don’t want a news source of any sort to knowingly lie,” Newmark said.

Newmark is concerned that bad actors will use generative AI to more easily amplify and spread disinformation. At the same time, he’s worried that tech companies, particularly in social media, “aren’t even trying anymore to get rid of stuff they know is dishonest,” he said.

Tech companies like Meta, Amazon and X (formerly known as Twitter) recently laid off numerous trust and safety workers as part of major cost-cutting initiatives, but have said that the downsizing won’t affect the safety of their platforms.

‘Bad uses’ of the internet

Meanwhile, AI has the potential to profoundly affect society, like the internet and the printing press before it, Newmark said. That’s an area where he has notable expertise. Craigslist was both hugely disruptive to newspapers and their classified ads sections, and has been a site that’s attracted criminals and scammers.

Few people predicted the “bad uses” of the internet, which has allowed nefarious actors to “mostly lie to people in large numbers,” Newmark said.

“I guess the profits to be made in being a really good professional liar, those profits have greatly increased because the internet is a big amplifier,” Newmark said. “It’s everyone’s printing press, and you get to use it as a printing press, whether your intentions are good or bad.”

Newmark said he became interested in language-generating software like ChatGPT in the early 1970s, “when people were beginning to talk about language understanding and neural networks.” However, he says, “I didn’t really understand it.”

Now the technology is here and spreading rapidly.

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Newmark said he doesn’t want to name names when it comes to the organizations he fears are creating the most societal discontent through AI, because he’s previously been scarred for getting that specific.

“In the past when I’ve pointed out major problems, I’ve learned the hard way that I’m no match for someone who lies for a living,” Newmark said. “So, I’m allowing myself to be chickens—.”

Rather, he said he relies on “people who are both braver and smarter” to call public attention to those matters.

“Protecting kids when it comes to AI is a big issue,” Newmark said, regarding his donation to Common Sense Media. “I have no idea how I would go about getting started, but I know where to put my money where my mouth is.”

Why Common Sense?

“A lot of groups and politicians talk about protecting kids,” Newmark said. “But these guys are the real deal, and so I’m helping them.”

Misinformation and journalism

Newmark acknowledged that the topics of misinformation, journalism and content moderation have become more polarized and politicized of late. House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, alleged that tech companies unfairly censor conservative speech, and he’s undertaken a “censorship investigation” to probe suspected ties between the executive branch and certain technologists and researchers.

Several academics previously told CNBC that the politicized landscape has led to some organizations cutting back on funding research into combating misinformation for fear of being publicly criticized.  

“Some people are backing off, some people are getting braver. Again, I’m not very brave,” Newmark said. He highlighted the Knight Foundation and Ford Foundation as organizations that are “doing brave things.”

Within journalism, Newmark’s most high-profile endeavor is the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School in Journalism. The program was renamed in 2018 after Newmark endowed the school with a $20 million gift, though he made prior contributions in 2016 and 2017.

He also donated $20 million in 2018 to help fund The Markup, which describes itself as a “nonprofit newsroom that investigates how powerful institutions are using technology to change our society.” That project quickly became controversial after founding Editor-in-Chief Julia Angwin said she’d been fired over email by co-founder and Executive Director Sue Gardner.

Still, Newmark says both the CUNY journalism school and The Markup have been successful, while other efforts “have not been successful, and I’m being discreet about them because I’m still trying to help before I have much sterner talks.”

He pegs his philanthropy success rate at “70% or 80%, which is good, but it’s not 100.”

In terms of where he spends his time online, Newmark said he still posts on X, primarily to promote and highlight the work of teachers. However, he said the site is losing its effectiveness as it leans toward showing people algorithmically recommended posts.

Thilina Kaluthotage | Nurphoto | Getty Images

“As a social network, Twitter does seem to be gone,” Newmark said, adding that he’s trying out rivals like Bluesky, Mastodon and Meta’s Threads.

In particular, Newmark said he likes “like the spirit of Mastodon and Bluesky,” which he likened to the early days of the internet when it took a long time for websites to build devoted audiences.

“The audience development is very slow,” Newmark said. “Twitter and everything else grew slowly and the other sites are growing slowly, and yet we are impatient and we want to see network effects now.”

Cybersecurity is another area of focus for Newmark. He pointed to a recent $100 million commitment announced in March to a collection of organizations working on cyber-related issues, like combating the spread of ransomware and creating methods for tech and security companies to share threat information.

He said the total number will probably exceed $100 million, because he’s already “broken through $80 million.”

In June, Newmark’s philanthropy arm also pledged to donate $100 million to multiple organizations supporting veterans and military members, who “sometimes have to choose between decent housing or feeding their families,” Newmark said. He called the treatment of that community “a national security matter.”

“There’s nothing virtuous in that,” Newmark said about his donations, noting that he doesn’t spend his money on “yachts or fast cars.”

“It’s more satisfying to give it away,” Newmark said. “Again, that’s not pious or altruistic. It’s just what I was taught in Sunday school.”

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OpenAI in talks to sell around $6 billion in stock at roughly $500 billion valuation

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OpenAI in talks to sell around  billion in stock at roughly 0 billion valuation

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., on July 8, 2025.

David A. Grogan | CNBC

OpenAI is preparing to sell around $6 billion in stock as part of a secondary sale that would value the company at roughly $500 billion, CNBC confirmed Friday.

The shares would be sold by current and former employees to investors including SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group and Thrive Capital, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who asked not to be named due to the confidential nature of the discussions. The talks are still in early stages and the details could change.

Bloomberg was first to report the discussions. All three firms are existing investors in OpenAI, but Thrive Capital could lead the round, as CNBC previously reported. SoftBank, Dragoneer and Thrive Capital did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

OpenAI’s valuation has grown exponentially since the artificial intelligence startup launched its generative AI chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022.

The company announced a $40 billion funding round in March at a $300 billion, by far the largest amount ever raised by a private tech company. Earlier this month, OpenAI announced its most recent $8.3 billion in fresh capital tied to that funding round.

Last week, OpenAI announced GPT-5, its latest and most advanced large-scale AI model. OpenAI said the model is smarter, faster and “a lot more useful,” particularly across domains like writing, coding and health care. But it’s been a rocky roll out, as some users complained about losing access to OpenAI’s prior models.

“We for sure underestimated how much some of the things that people like in GPT-4o matter to them, even if GPT-5 performs better in most ways,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a post on X.

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Tech IPOs are roaring after ‘years of Prohibition’ — it may be too good

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Tech IPOs are roaring after 'years of Prohibition' — it may be too good

Brendan Blumer, Chairman of of Bullish and Tom Farley, CEO of Bullish, Bullish a cryptocurrency exchange operator, pose with staffs during the company’s IPO at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, U.S., August 13, 2025.

NYSE

The Bullish IPO this week took on added significance, perhaps because of the company name.

When shares of the Peter Thiel-backed cryptocurrency exchange more than doubled out of the gate on Wednesday before finishing the day up 84%, it was the latest sign that the tech IPO bulls are back in business.

In July, design software vendor Figma more than tripled in its New York Stock Exchange debut, and a month earlier shares of crypto firm Circle soared 168% in their first day on the Big Board.

Wall Street has been waiting a long time for this.

Three years ago, steep inflation and soaring interest effectively closed the market for public offerings. Tech stocks tanked and private capital dried up, forcing cash-burning startups to turn their attention away from growth and toward efficiency and profitability.

The roadblock appeared to be loosening earlier this year, when companies like StubHub and Klarna filed their prospectuses, but then President Donald Trump roiled the markets in April with his plans for sweeping tariffs. Roadshows were put on indefinite hold.

The president’s tariff agenda has since stabilized a bit, and investor money is pouring into tech, pushing the Nasdaq to record levels, up more than 40% from this year’s low in April. Optimism is growing that the hefty backlog of high-valued startups will continue to clear as CEOs and venture capitalists gain confidence that the public markets will welcome their top-tier companies.

Ahead of Figma’s debut, NYSE president Lynn Martin told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” that immense demand for that offering could “open the floodgates” for the rest of the market. And earlier this week, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman told “Fast Money” that there’s a “very healthy list” of companies looking to IPO in the second half of this year, ahead of the holiday season.

“I’ve been meeting a lot of CEOs, getting them prepared to think about what they want in the public markets and where they’re going,” Friedman said.

There are more than two-dozen venture-backed U.S. tech companies valued at $10 billion or more, according to CB Insights. StubHub has updated its prospectus, suggesting an offering is coming soon.

“The IPO window is open,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark, in an interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell” this week. “You’ve seen across industry, broad-based support for IPOs, and therefore, we’re advising companies we’re investing in to get ready and go public.”

IPO window is open and we're advising companies to go public: FirstMark Capital's Rick Heitzmann

Another big topic among VCs and bankers is the regulatory environment.

The Biden administration took heat from startup investors for cracking down on big acquisitions, mostly attributable to Lina Khan’s perceived heavy hand at the Federal Trade Commission, while also failing to ease restrictions that they say make it less appealing for companies to go public than to stay private.

Paul Atkins, the new head of the SEC, said in July he wants to “make IPOs great again,” by removing some of the impediments around the complexity of disclosures and litigation risk. He hasn’t offered many specific recommendations.

Friedman told CNBC that the first conversation she had with Atkins after he took the job was about making it easier and more attractive for companies to go public.

“The conversation was constructive along many fronts, looking at disclosure requirements, the proxy process, other things that really make it harder for companies to be public and navigate the public markets,” Friedman said. “He’s as interested as we are, so hopefully we’ll turn that into great action.”

In addition to the big gains notched by Bullish, Figma and Circle, the public markets welcomed online banking provider Chime with a 37% gain last month and trading app eToro with a 29% pop in May. The health-tech market has seen two IPOs: Hinge Health and Omada Health.

But it was the roaring debuts of Circle and Figma that sparked chatter of a new bull market for IPOs. Figma jumped 250% on IPO day after pricing shares a dollar ahead of an updated range. Circle’s value more than doubled after the stablecoin issuer also priced above the expected range.

Figma celebrates its initial public offering at the New York Stock Exchange on July 31, 2025.

NYSE

That sort of price action reignited a debate ahead of the last IPO boom in 2020 and 2021, when venture capitalist Bill Gurley made the case that big first-day pops suggest intentionally mispriced offerings that hurt the company and hand easy money to new investors. Gurley has advocated for direct listings, where companies list shares at a price that effectively matches demand.

As Figma was hitting the market, Gurley was back at it, referring to the big gains as an “expected & fully intentional” outcome benefitting clients of major investment banks

“They bought it at $33 last night and can sell it today for over $90,” he wrote. In a follow-up post, he said, “I would have loved to see DLs replace IPOs — it just makes sense to match supply/demand. But Wall Street may just be too addicted to the massive customer give-aways.”

Read more CNBC tech news

Lise Buyer, founder of IPO advisory firm Class V Group, wrote on LinkedIn that the company gets to make the call on where it prices the stock and that plenty of thought gets put into the process. Also, in the IPO, companies are selling only a small percentage of outstanding shares — in Figma’s case roughly 7% — so if they deliver on results, “there will very likely be plenty of future opportunities to sell more shares at higher prices.”

That’s already happening.

Circle said this week that it’s offering another 10 million shares in a secondary offering. And on Friday’s, CNBC’s Leslie Picker reported that bankers for CoreWeave, which is up 150% since its March IPO, orchestrated some block trades this week.

But Buyer warns that tech markets have a history of overheating. While there’s always a difference between what institutions are willing to pay in an IPO and what exuberant retail investors will pay, it’s currently “a gap like we haven’t really seen since 1999, 2000,” Buyer told CNBC, adding “and, of course, we know how that ended.”

Compared to the dot-com bubble, businesses that are going public now have sizable revenue and actual fundamentals, but that doesn’t mean the IPO pops are sustainable, she said.

“It’s almost like we had several years of Prohibition,” Buyer said, referring to a period a century ago when alcohol was banned in the U.S. “Folks, in some cases, are drinking to excess in the IPO market.”

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Sen. Hawley to probe Meta AI bot policies for children following damning report

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Sen. Hawley to probe Meta AI bot policies for children following damning report

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg departs after attending a Federal Trade Commission trial that could force the company to unwind its acquisitions of messaging platform WhatsApp and image-sharing app Instagram, at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 15, 2025.

Nathan Howard | Reuters

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said Friday that he will investigate Meta following a report that the company approved rules allowing artificial intelligence chatbots to have certain “romantic” and “sensual” conversations with children.

Hawley called on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to preserve relevant materials, including emails, and said the probe would target “whether Meta’s generative-AI products enable exploitation, deception, or other criminal harms to children, and whether Meta misled the public or regulators about its safeguards.”

“Is there anything – ANYTHING – Big Tech won’t do for a quick buck?” Hawley said in a post on X announcing the investigation.

Meta declined to comment on Hawley’s letter.

Hawley noted a Reuters report published Thursday that cited an internal document detailing acceptable behaviors from Meta AI chatbots that the company’s staff and contract workers should permit as part of developing and training the software.

The document acquired by Reuters noted that a chatbot would be permitted to hold a romantic conversation with an eight-year-old, telling the child that “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.”

The Meta guidelines said: “It is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness (ex: ‘your youthful form is a work of art’),” according to the Reuters report.

Read more CNBC tech news

The Meta chatbots would not be permitted to engage in more explicit conversations with children under 13 “in terms that indicate they are sexually desirable,” the report said.

“We intend to learn who approved these policies, how long they were in effect, and what Meta has done to stop this conduct going forward,” Hawley wrote.

A Meta spokesperson told Reuters that “The examples and notes in question were and are erroneous and inconsistent with our policies, and have been removed.”

“We have clear policies on what kind of responses AI characters can offer, and those policies prohibit content that sexualizes children and sexualized role play between adults and minors,” the Meta spokesperson told Reuters.

Hawley said Meta must produce documents about its Generative AI-related content risks and standards, lists of every product that adheres to those policies, and other safety and incident reports.

Meta should also provide various public and regulatory communications involving minor safety and documents about staff members involved with the AI policies to determine “the decision trail for removing or revising any portions of the standard.”

Hawley is chair of the Senate Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, which will carry out the investigation.

Meta has until Sep. 19 to provide the documents, the letter said.

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