Even the Koch brothers weren’t as brazen as the tech billionaires
Marc Andreessen has been feeling pretty good since Election Day, and at the end of November, he went on The Joe Rogan Experience to say as much. Sitting in the podcast studio, grinning, Andreessen told Rogan that he was “very happy” about the election and that it is now “Morning in America”—directly invoking the famous Ronald Reagan campaign ad.
Andreessen, a billionaire co-founder of the storied venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z), had put all his chips on Donald Trump. In July, on a podcast with his business partner, Ben Horowitz, Andreessen announced that he would be supporting the president-elect, and in total, he donated at least $4.5 million to a MAGA super PAC. Now, after publicly lobbying for deregulation in finance and tech, he’s poised to get his way. The Washington Post reported that he is helping Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy plan the Department of Government Efficiency, Trump’s proposed advisory body with a mandate to downsize the government. The vision is already starting to materialize: On Rogan, Andreessen harshly criticized the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a consumer-protection agency created in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Musk later concurred in a post on X that it was time to “Delete CFPB.”
Andreessen has long been interested in politics, and he’s never been shy about sharing his opinions. (Though he does seem to try to avoid encountering ideas he may not like: He’s a prolific blocker of journalists on X.) Even so, his full embrace of Trump and right-wing talking points—including the false claim that the government funded an “internet-censorship unit” at Stanford University—represents a definite shift that has become common among America’s plutocrat class. In addition to Musk, Ramaswamy, and Andreessen, other elites are boldly clawing their way into more political power. Last week, Trump announced that he had tapped the former PayPal executive and venture capitalist David Sacks—another prolific X user—to be his “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.” [Continue reading…]