The year was 1995. The venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who recently made news by endorsing Donald Trump for president, was in his late twenties, working as a computer engineer for a software company in Silicon Valley. He was good at his job, but not obviously headed for great things. Marc Andreessen, on the other hand, was a legend in the making. He was only twenty-two, but had already co-founded Netscape Communications, the world’s first great web browser company. Andreessen had co-written the code for the first iteration of the browser, Mosaic, when still an undergraduate computer science major at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.
Horowitz interviewed with Andreessen for a job at Netscape—a story he relays in his 2014 book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things—and was astounded. “Interviewing with Marc was like no other job interview I’d ever had,” Horowitz writes. “Gone were questions about my résumé, my career progression, and my work habits. He replaced them with a dizzying inquiry into the history of email, collaboration software, and what the future might hold. I was an expert in the topic, because I’d spent the last several years working on the leading products in the category, but I was shocked by how much a twenty-two-year-old kid knew about the history of the computer business. I’d met many really smart young people in my career, but … Marc’s intellect and instincts took me aback.” After the interview, Horowitz called his brother and extolled Andreessen as possibly “the smartest person” that he had ever met.
Horowitz got the job, and he and Andreessen became close colleagues and then, after Netscape was sold to AOL, business partners. In 1999, the two men founded an early cloud computing company, selling it eight years later to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. In 2009, they founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which quickly became one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world. Over the past fifteen years, a16z has invested in an extraordinary run of successful companies, including household names like OpenAI, Facebook, Airbnb, Box, and DoorDash. As of last May, the company managed $42 billion of investments, making it either the largest or fourth largest venture capital firm in the world, depending on how you calculate.
Horowitz and Andreessen, in other words, have been at the white-hot center of Silicon Valley for decades, not just financially and technologically but culturally and intellectually as well. Andreessen is the far more famous and flamboyant of the two, a 6-foot-5, egg-headed mad prophet of technology and the future who “seethes with beliefs,” as New Yorker writer Tad Friend describes him in a 2015 profile. “He’s an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it.” In 1996, at the ripe age of twenty-five, Andreessen was on the cover of Time, anointed as one of the “Golden Geeks” who was leading us into the glorious digital future. His 2011 manifesto, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” is a canonical statement of the Silicon Valley belief that the tech sector is revolutionizing the world every bit as much as Gutenberg did with his printing press and Edison with his light bulb. In 2012, on the cover of Wired, he was dubbed “The Man Who Makes the Future.”
Horowitz is a quieter, steadier figure, the fixed point around whom Andreessen roams. He has not been on the cover of Time or profiled in The New Yorker. He writes not futuro-utopian manifestos but airport bookstore management books and, earlier in his career, an influential internal memo for Netscape he titled “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager.” It describes the differences between good and bad product managers.
Where Andreessen is brilliant and mercurial, in other words, Horowitz is disciplined and practical. Which is why, when the two men announced their support for Trump, it was such a potent gesture. Politically, Andreessen has always bounced around, his support shifting from one side to the other, and back again, depending on his moods and intuitions and the vibe of specific candidates. Horowitz, on the other hand, has behind him a lifetime of consistently and temperately supporting Democrats. Their alignment, and the scale of their financial commitment, is meaningful.
Horowitz and Andreessen have been at the white-hot center of Silicon Valley for decades, not just financially and technologically but culturally and intellectually as well.
Born in London and raised in Berkeley, Horowitz grew up in comfortable, if somewhat politically unusual, circumstances (more on this in a bit). After computer science degrees at Columbia and UCLA, he followed a rather conventional Silicon Valley arc to success, starting with a job doing technical work, moving on to management, launching a start-up of his own, transitioning to investing, and then aspiring to be a thought leader (with 2014’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers and 2019’s What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture).
His signature quirk as a Silicon Valley personality (since he’s become big enough to merit a signature quirk) is his connection to Black culture. Horowitz grew up hanging with a lot of Black kids. He was one of the few white kids on the Berkeley High School football team. His best friend is Black. His wife is Black, and he is the father of interracial children. He is an enthusiast of Black history. And he really loves hip-hop. Many of his blog posts, and most of the chapters of his two business books, begin with a rap lyric. He and the rapper Nas are friends (or maybe “friends”—it’s unclear).
Not too surprisingly, given that profile, Horowitz was for decades a standard-issue left coast Democrat, donating money exclusively to Democratic candidates and supporting a host of progressive non-profits and causes through the charitable foundation he runs with his wife, Felicia. Their donations to Democrats have been substantial—in the hundreds of thousands—but not extravagant, given their wealth.
More notable was their emergence as connectors in the Valley, where they became known for the salon-like barbecues they hosted at their home in tony Atherton, California, an almost straight shot down Alameda de las Pulgas to the Stanford campus. The elite of Hollywood, Manhattan, D.C., and Silicon Valley would mix there. The gatherings weren’t political, per se, but they had a blue vibe, and a Black one. Kamala Harris was a guest at one. Nas was a regular attendee. Other guests included San Francisco mayor London Breed, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah, P. Diddy, Arianna Huffington, Van Jones, Gayle King.
This context is all essential to understanding why, when Horowitz and Andreessen announced their support of Trump in July, it was something different than when, say, Elon Musk came out for Trump, or when other Silicon Valley tech bro royalty like Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, comic book villain Peter Thiel, and the Winklevoss twins have done the same. Horowitz and Andreessen seem to be in touch with the wellsprings of the American past and future in a way that few others are. Andreessen is the Innovator, able to see just a little bit further around the corner than anyone else. Horowitz (who declined my request for an interview) is the quiet but ruthlessly pragmatic man behind the scenes, as comfortable hanging with the homies from the street as the homies in the C suite.
The gatherings weren’t political, per se, but they had a blue vibe, and a Black one. Kamala Harris was a guest at one. Nas was a regular attendee.
Andreessen as weirdo prophet, Horowitz as demotic man on the street, every street. When they speak, people listen. They have big things to say; things that need to be Capitalized.
“The time has come to stand up for Little Tech,” they wrote in their recent manifesto, “The Little Tech Agenda,” published in June of this year, which set the stage for their Trump endorsement the following month.
Our political efforts as a firm are entirely focused on defending Little Tech. We do not engage in political fights outside of issues directly relevant to Little Tech. But we will fight for Little Tech—for the freedom to research, to invent, to create jobs, to build the future—with all of our resources.
We find there are three kinds of politicians:
Those who support Little Tech. We support them.
Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.
Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.
We support or oppose politicians regardless of party and regardless of their positions on other issues.
In that short essay, along with an affiliated podcast episode and Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” the two men offer a sweeping theory of American history and supremacy. America has long been great, per their story, because of the intertwined excellence of its technology, economy, and military. The fate of American power and economic health in the future will be dependent, as it has been in the past, on its capacity for technological innovation. And innovation begins with the little guys. “The vanguard of American technology supremacy has always been the startup,” they write. “From Edison and Ford to Hughes and Lockheed to SpaceX and Tesla, the path to greatness starts in a garage.”
On one level, theirs is a radically materialist and apolitical story of American history, with mention of neither God nor democracy. All that matters are the atoms. On a tonal level, however, it thrums with almost religious intensity. Its faith in the beneficence of technology is nearly absolute.
Horowitz is the quiet but ruthlessly pragmatic man behind the scenes, as comfortable hanging with the homies from the street as the homies in the C suite.
On his own, without the ballast of Horowitz, Andreessen makes what is implicit in the “Little Tech Agenda” extravagantly explicit. “Technology,” he writes in his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” “is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential. For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this—until recently. I am here to bring the good news. We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being.”
At stake is everything, but the drama will play out via the mundane regulatory climate in which the guys in the garage do their tinkering. So much depends, in particular, upon the regulatory climate for the leading-edge fields, like crypto and AI, into which a16z is investing billions of dollars. Horowitz and Andreessen opposed the candidacy of Joe Biden, who was the Democratic candidate when they announced their support for Trump, for three basic reasons. First, under the leadership of S.E.C. chair Gary Gensler, Biden’s administration has been brutal on the crypto industry, filing lawsuits against multiple crypto companies and working aggressively to bring cryptocurrencies under the strict regulatory regime that governs securities. Second, it has been more cautious on AI than Horowitz and Andreessen would like. Finally, it has proposed a new tax on unrealized capital gains—i.e. on the growth in the valuation of companies, even if the owner hasn’t yet cashed out—that threatens to undermine the whole VC profit model.
There may be a fourth reason too, connected to the other three but less fiscal, more emotional. After decades of warm relationships with Democratic leaders, Horowitz and Andreessen now feel spurned. They’re not the only ones. As tech reporter Ben Tarnoff recently wrote in The New York Review of Books: “What upsets the Trumpists of Silicon Valley is not only the policy … but, more broadly, the feeling that the Democrats have abandoned them.” He writes about Elon Musk’s fury at being conspicuously left off the guest list at an electric car summit the Biden administration hosted in 2021. He quotes venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar complaining to the Financial Times that the “Democratic party I knew under Obama doesn’t exist anymore.” In their podcast endorsing Trump, Horowitz and Andreessen express audible frustration that they have not been able to secure a personal sit-down with Biden. Their feelings are hurt.
A related problem for Horowitz, Andreessen, and their fellow billionaires-in-arms is that the Democratic Party isn’t turning against them in a vacuum. The party is responding to growing public skepticism of the tech sector. We the people like Silicon Valley less than we used to. We are angry about social media, scared of AI, anxious about our dependence on the little dopamine machines that keep beeping in our pockets, and annoyed by what seems to be the increasing “enshittification” of online services like Google search, upon which we could once rely. The long honeymoon with Silicon Valley is over, and Horowitz and Andreessen, who are used to being treated as the good guys, are clearly pissed.
At stake is everything, but the drama will play out via the mundane regulatory climate in which the guys in the garage do their tinkering. So much depends, in particular, upon the regulatory climate for the leading-edge fields, like crypto and AI, into which a16z is investing billions of dollars.
This may shift again, of course, at least among party officials. Kamala Harris, a Bay Area politician with strong ties to Silicon Valley, seems likely to have more enthusiasm for what tech has to say than Biden did. For Horowitz and Andreessen, however, the die has been cast for this election cycle. The Dems have stood athwart Little Tech, and therefore must be stopped. Donald Trump, though he was once critical of crypto, is now hugely supportive. A long lunch with Horowitz and Andreessen seems to have played a role, along with his own recent efforts to cash in on crypto products. Trump is also better disposed than Biden (and presumably Harris) to letting AI develop free of much regulation. He must be supported. “The glory of a Second American Century is within our reach,” Horowitz and Andreessen write. “Let’s grasp it.”
The FEC database doesn’t have a record yet of direct donations to Trump or Trump PACs from Horowitz and his wife, but the couple have donated more than $25 million over the past year to a host of candidates and PACs that predominantly support Republican candidates. Recipients include key Trump supporters like JD Vance, Elise Stefanik, and Ted Cruz. The lion’s share of the money has gone to Fairshake PAC, a crypto industry group that has raised more than $120 million to spend on supporting pro-crypto candidates and defeating anti-crypto candidates.
The money for Trump is almost certainly forthcoming.
I should confess to something. I was asked to write this piece not because I have great expertise on Silicon Valley or the tech world, though I have long been fascinated by tech world utopianism. It was because I am one of the world’s leading authorities on David Horowitz, Ben’s father. David was the subject of a chapter in my 2016 book on prominent American intellectuals who went from the left to the right of the political spectrum.
Raised in Queens in the 1940s and ’50s by communist party members, David Horowitz entered the public arena in the early 1960s as a key thinker and activist of the New Left. By the early 1970s, he had shifted much of his political activity to supporting the Black Panthers, raising money for them and providing counsel to their co-founder Huey Newton. In 1975, a friend whom he’d encouraged to take a job with the Panthers was murdered, almost certainly by members of the group, and David’s life was shattered. He cut all ties with the Panthers. He ceased almost all left-wing political writing and organizing. He had a series of affairs, leading eventually to divorce. He began drinking. He suffered from a severe depression that wouldn’t truly lift for years. Devastated by guilt, he lacerated himself, over and over again, for the ways in which his political ideology had blinded him to reality.
As he writes in his 1996 memoir Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey:
I had been betrayed by my community, and embarrassed by myself. I had helped to destroy an innocent life, and—who knew?—maybe others. My marriage, the rock on which I had built my family and my happiness, was split to its core, and I didn’t know if it could ever be made whole again. My defeats were so overwhelming that I felt powerless to affect them. I could not alter what had happened. I could not bear to look at what I had done. I was utterly and helplessly alone.
The murder started a process of alienation from the left that eventually took him all the way to the Morning in America right (and then beyond). In 1984, he cast a vote for Ronald Reagan for president, his first ever for a Republican, and he never looked back. In 2016, when many conservative intellectuals were wrestling with whether or how to support a vulgarian like Trump, he came out unabashedly for the man. Over the past eight years, he has published three books making the case for Trump’s election and agenda, most recently 2023’s Final Battle: The Next Election Could Be the Last.
There is a version of this essay that frames Ben Horowitz’s endorsement of Trump as another dramatic turn in an ongoing generational saga. And there are a few breadcrumbs one could plausibly pick up to make this case. “Sorry, Mom,” Ben says near the beginning of the podcast episode in which he announces his support for Trump. He’s aware that his turn to the right is a kind of rejection of her, and perhaps an acutely painful one, given that it aligns him with his dad. But this doesn’t do anything to explain why he turned, only what some of the personal consequences might be. I looked for more meaningful signs and symptoms of submerged family drama, and there simply isn’t much there. David’s story of political transformation is rich in drama, tragedy, history, intellect, and intimate relationships. Ben’s story is much simpler.
The truth of Ben’s story is that, whatever gifts he might possess—skill at management, capacity for strategic risk, deep knowledge of the tech sector—he is not that special. Above all, he is selfish, and he is lucky. And like most of us who are selfish and lucky (and who, in the upper middle class and above, isn’t a bit of both?), he prefers a narrative in which he deserves all that he has gotten, and in which what’s good for him happens to be good for the world.
Andreessen and Horowitz, like many very rich and powerful men and women before them, have authored a narrative of political economy that perfectly aligns their own personal and financial interests (as venture capitalist billionaires who make their money investing in technology firms) with the greater interests of the nation and the common man within it. What’s good for VC is good for a16z is good for America is good for humanity. To put it more generously, they are two men doing one of the most mundane and unsurprising things that human beings do, which is justifying the pursuit of their self-interest by veiling it—perhaps from themselves, above all else—in grand ideals and self-serving theories of history.
If this is interesting, and I think it is, it’s not because Horowitz is particularly compelling as a specimen, but because he’s not. His opinions were typical of his milieu when he was a liberal, and they are typical of the right flank of his milieu now that he’s supporting Trump. The milieu is interesting. Its power is immense. The money certain people within it are spending this election cycle to support politicians they see as favorable to their interests is astonishing. But we shouldn’t be fooled.
There’s less here than meets the eye. Andreessen is an important figure in the history of technology and business, but his explicit thinking on politics and the economy is quite shallow. Horowitz is a good entrepreneur and CEO. He is an excellent investor and self-promoter. His affection for Black culture is totally fine but also pretty unremarkable. His first book has some solid advice and a refreshing emphasis on candor. “A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news,” he wrote. “A company that discusses its problems freely and openly can quickly solve them. A company that covers up its problems frustrates everyone involved.” His second book was pleasantly breezy but quite silly; it strained to draw meaningful connections between the challenges facing modern business and, for instance, the code of the Samurai, the reformation of ex-gangster Shaka Senghor, and the strategies of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture (e.g., “The techniques L’Ouverture used with rare ingenuity and skill work brilliantly at modern companies”). Lao Tzu he ain’t.
What we’re seeing, with the a16z turn to the right, isn’t a glimpse into a new future. It’s a reaction, a highly explicable result of the disruption, perhaps the dissolution, of what turns out to have been a rather contingent equilibrium of the last few decades, in which the tech sector was more left-wing than one would expect from corporate America, and the Democratic Party was more business-friendly than it used to be. The recent shift away from that equilibrium shouldn’t be overstated, on either end. The Democratic Party isn’t going full Bernie any time soon, and Silicon Valley still votes blue overall. But the easy co-existence of the last few decades is probably gone forever. The tech industry is moving toward more conventional big business politics. The Democratic Party, of electoral necessity, is going to be more populist than it was in the Clinton-Obama era. We should expect to see more friction between the two over time.
Horowitz sees himself, and would have us see him, as a major character in the great drama of history: an innovator, risk taker, baller, world shaker. But he is better understood as a kind of stock character. He’s the rich guy who thinks that his taxes should be lower and that his experience in business equips him to know how the world should be run. He’s important in his way, because of the power he wields and the interests he embodies. But he’s not that interesting.