SAN ANTONIO — A San Antonio resident who helped shape the internet as we know it today nearly lost his home to foreclosure, but the internet came to his rescue.
“It hardly even feels like enough to say the words, but thank you so much,” Noah Grey said in a video on his twitter feed thanking the many people who came to his aid in his time of need.
Grey's story starts in the early days of the internet as we know it.
In 2000 he started Greymatter, one of the first blogging platforms and a foundation for much of the internet we see today.
In the past week, he came close to losing his home.
"We were terrified, because um, this is all we have," Grey told KENS 5 in a rare televised interview.
Grey is autistic. His disability check is all he and his sister, who is his caretaker, must live on.
Reluctantly, he turned to gofundme for help. He needed to raise 23 thousand dollars by May 3rd to prevent foreclosure.
"I got a message from a friend saying you need to look at this and it was, like at 12 thousand dollars,” Grey said. “And every time I would load it kept going up and up."
Donations started pouring in, Some as small as five dollars, some as big as $10,000.
Many of them with the hashtag #wilsentme.
One after another it’s ‘Wil sent me, Wil sent me, Wil sent me.’” Grey said. "Wil Wheaton has a posse."
The Star Trek and The Big Bang Theory actor shared Grey's fundraiser along with his personal experience using his software.
"I owe him a great lot,” Wheaton wrote on his Facebook page. “I am a New York Times best-selling author in part because of the work Noah Grey did over twenty years ago, and today I'm hoping you'll join me to give something back to him."
Grey said reading Wheaton’s words made him feel Incredibly humbled, astonished, surprised, and overwhelmed.
With the exposure, the fundraiser brought in over a hundred thousand dollars.
And as grateful as he is, he worries about people facing his situation without the same advantages.
"No one should need Gofundme’s, no one should need to know a celebrity or to have done a famous thing," he said. "I wish this was a country that wanted to take care of people, to take care of each other."
