That $5 B valuation comes much later in the article after a paragraph with at least 5 “lets assume” statements like “lets assume Craigslist started charging…” for a whole bunch of services that they don’t charge for. Craigslist isn’t work anything near a billion dollars, let alone 5. It was all just silly “lets assume” hypotheticals. Silly article, apparently misunderstood by the Kelsey Group.

I wouldn’t normally care, but I worked at eBay at the time when they bought a 25% stake in Craigslist for between $12 and $15 million in 2004. That would assume a relatively small valuation back then, and makes the $750 million current valuation not too shabby. Newmark only owns a large fraction of that, though, assuming that eBay has 25% and other employees also have a bunch. I think we can all still respect Mr. Newmark, even if he’s worth less than a billion!

OK, back to the diabetes!

Re: Craig’s net worth. This article http://blog.kelseygroup.com/index.php/2008/07/23/craig-newmark-at-inman-real-estate-connect/ quotes a Silicon Alley insider estimating him at $5 B. Whatever… anything over a billion is pretty much LOADED in my book

That aside, Newmark is indeed an inspiration. He’s got the “don’t be evil” routine down pat, long before Google made it popular — and it could be argued that Google has moved much closer to the line that Criagslist probably ever will. His talk about public service on NPR’s Forum this past fall was well timed with Obama’s campaign, and has us looking forward to his work on a service portal. It’ll be especially interesting if he helps tie together some of the existing excellent sources for giving and public service – you mentioned two in Kiva and Volunteer Match. It would be great to shop around for opportunities to be involved in our local community, as well as ways to be financially involved. All of this data is currently too fragmented to be easily browsed.