Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen didn't lose the plot. He found one that pays better. That's why I pushed back when David called him and Ben Horowitz insane. Andreessen voted for Hillary in 2016. The turn came under Biden, driven by a stack of grievances: antitrust pressure, the SEC's crypto crackdown, the FTX fallout and, the real wound in my reading, the proposed billionaire minimum tax. The origin story he tells, a May 2024 West Wing lunch where officials supposedly revealed a plan to nationalize AI, is disputed by Bruce Reed, who was in the room and wrote that no such plan was discussed.

Here's the part people miss: the ideology came first. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto was published in October 2023, months before that lunch. Biden didn't radicalize him. He gave him permission and a team. When I sorted the cast on the show, Sacks was the ideologue and Chamath the opportunist. Andreessen was the wounded ego.

Credit where it's due. His belief that technology is the main event of human history isn't a pose. He's been saying it for twenty years, including before it paid to say it loudly. By the accounts I found, he's also fiercely loyal to a tiny circle and has a genuine soft spot for people from his Wisconsin roots.

My critique is that ideology and money now reinforce each other until you can't tell which is driving. The ideology is the story that makes the money feel like destiny. The acceleration instinct that built Netscape is now pointed at institutions instead of products, and he casts himself as a scrappy outsider while running one of the most powerful political operations in tech.

What would change my mind: a position that costs a16z's portfolio, or a public correction of the lunch story.