Two of Silicon Valley’s famous venture capitalists make the case for backing Trump: that their ability to make money is the only value that matters.
Last week, the founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz declared their allegiance to Donald Trump in their customary fashion: talking about money on a podcast.
“Sorry, Mom,” Ben Horowitz says in an episode of The Ben & Marc Show. “I know you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.”
Marc Andreessen and Horowitz insist they voted for Democrats until now. They are friends with liberals. They claim to be nervous about the social blowback they will receive for this, especially because of the historically progressive nature of the tech industry and the Bay Area.
But given the general movement among their class toward Trump, I think those claims about being nervous are overblown, if not performative. There is, for instance, Elon Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, which has support from Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire and 8VC’s Joe Lonsdale, among other notables. (The Wall Street Journal reported Musk is planning to donate $45 million a month, which Musk has denied.) There’s the $160 million the crypto movement has put forward in support of crypto-friendly candidates. We can’t forget their VC pal David Sacks speaking at the Republican National Convention. And last but not least, there’s Trump’s running mate choice of JD Vance, a former venture capitalist whose firm’s investors included Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and Andreessen himself.
This isn’t a movement. It’s a clique.
The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.
These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce. We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself — in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better.
For Horowitz, “probably the most emotional topic” is crypto — a16z started a $4.5 billion crypto fund in 2022, and the pair believe that the Biden administration has been deeply unfair to crypto. In Horowitz’s view, the Biden administration “basically subverted the rule of law to attack the crypto industry.”
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24204706/marc-andreessen-ben-horowitz-a16z-trump-donations