What’s wrong with Marc Andreessen?

What’s wrong with Marc Andreessen?

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates, 399BC

Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

Marc Andreessen sounded angry. It was May 22, 2024, and he was venting to a table full of President Joe Biden’s officials in the West Wing office of Jeff Zients, then the White House chief of staff. The famed venture capitalist was in town with his longtime investing partner, Ben Horowitz, to discuss US tech policy, and the private lunch soon turned heated. Andreessen expressed his frustration about a slew of Biden administration initiatives and regulations, especially ones he believed were crippling the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries. Near the end of the lunch, he also launched into a tirade against a Democratic proposal to hike taxes on the wealthiest 0.01% of American households. “The billionaire tax seemed to offend him more than anything we’d done on AI or even crypto,” says Bruce Reed, one of the handful of White House advisers who had joined the meeting.

Andreessen’s free-market principles were no surprise, but it was odd that he acted as if those across the table were somehow his enemies. Zients, after all, had previously served with Andreessen on the board of Facebook. (Zients declined to comment.) Nevertheless, the officials were used to hearing business leaders advocate for their interests and mostly hoped to clear up the misconceptions Andreessen seemed to have about an executive order Biden had issued on AI safety. Tensions eventually eased, and the lunch ended cordially, according to people familiar with the discussion who asked not to be named discussing details of the private meeting. Andreessen had positive talks with different Biden advisers two days afterward. His visit was quickly forgotten amid the intensifying presidential race.

Forgotten, at least, until Donald Trump won the election months later and Andreessen revealed in the aftermath the crazy reason why he had unexpectedly plowed millions of dollars into the Make America Great Again movement during the campaign. Andreessen, who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and said back then that Trump’s immigration regime “makes me sick to my stomach,” explained on a podcast that he was compelled by “absolutely horrifying” discussions he once had with Biden officials. In his retelling, they divulged a top-secret plan for the federal government to take control of the AI industry and outlaw all startups and open-source software. “ ‘You guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet—those days are over,’ ” he remembered them warning in the meeting.

Andreessen was so aghast that he felt it was in the best interest of his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, which is known as a16z, to publicly endorse Trump. “They’re going to kill us,” Andreessen recalled thinking on Ross Douthat’s podcast in January 2025. “We walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, ‘Yep, we’re for Trump.’ ” (Horowitz later hedged his support when Kamala Harris replaced Biden in the race, and he made a significant personal donation to her campaign.)

The incident became Silicon Valley lore, but at first the Biden-Harris camp couldn’t even figure out what meeting Andreessen was referring to, according to four people familiar with the situation. When they finally realized he was talking about the lunch in Zients’ office, those who attended were baffled: Andreessen is prone to hyperbole, but this neared complete fiction. “It is simply false that the Biden administration told Andreessen and Horowitz that the government would ban all AI startups,” says Ben Buchanan, then a special adviser to the president on AI, who attended the May 22 meeting. It also made little sense why Andreessen hadn’t asked about this astonishingly draconian plan at a meeting on May 24 with national security advisers including Anne Neuberger. (Neuberger, whom a16z has since hired, declined to comment.) As another top Biden official familiar with their visits told colleagues of Andreessen’s version of events: “Total bulls—.”

A representative for Andreessen, Horowitz and a16z’s government affairs chief, Collin McCune, who also attended the contentious meeting in DC, has said the firm stands by their recollections. (Horowitz and McCune didn’t respond to requests for comment for this article.) Whatever actually occurred at that lunch matters less than what’s happened since: a16z, known for Andreessen once proclaiming that “software is eating the world,” is now eating the political world. The dominant VC firm, which manages more than $100 billion in assets, has gone from Valley kingmaker to DC power broker. Through political action committees and funding tied to its co-founders and partners, the Andreessen Horowitz team has poured at least $116 million into federal politics since Trump’s reelection. They have contributed more to campaign efforts for the coming midterms than George Soros, Miriam Adelson or Charles Koch.

A16z generally supports candidates whose views align with its priorities in AI and crypto. But since choosing Trump, Andreessen has contributed more in party-aligned donations than he did in the preceding three decades combined, with roughly 94% going to Republicans, including $6 million for the MAGA Inc. super PAC. This shift remains a subject of debate. In interviews, current and former a16z partners, firm-backed startup founders, fellow board members and VCs, political associates and old friends describe Andreessen as an undeniably brilliant industrialist, but also someone who is perpetually driven by grievances that don’t quite match reality. [Continue reading…]

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