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Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is seen on April 13, 2024, at the Breakthrough Prize Ceremony, at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
A decade ago, Silicon Valley tech titans were fiercely libertarian, but as social liberals they most supported Democrats. Republicans, in turn, were hostile to many tech billionaires. Do-gooder Bill Gates of Microsoft was suspiciously liberal. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, kept it afloat financially, and supported its editorial independence. The Facebook leadership, Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, identified as Democrats and supported liberal causes.
There was just one far-right Trumper among the tech elite, and that was Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and an early financial patron of JD Vance. But in the past few years, there has been a notable shift. Prominent Trump supporters include Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, of the legendary Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz; the Winklevoss twins of Facebook and crypto fame; venture capitalists Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks, and several more.
Andreessen and Horowitz, in a podcast released in July, sounded positively apocalyptic. “The future of America is at stake,” Horowitz warned. He was referring not to Trump’s deepening dementia, but to President Biden’s proposal for a capital gains tax on unrealized assets. Andreessen went further: “Number one, you kill startups and venture capital. So congratulations, you kill the technology industry, essentially. Number two, you kill the California tax base—California is done!”
Horowitz cited another outrage—the effort to regulate crypto. “They’ve fought us every step of the way,” he said, accusing the Biden administration of “nuking” the crypto industry, and “using the administrative state to basically try to crush an industry.”
Andreessen and Horowitz are very heavily invested in crypto and in blockchain. As the Prospect keeps pointing out, crypto adds nothing of value to the financial system other than systemic risks. It simply creates opportunities for insiders and naïve investors to make bets on artificial pseudo currencies, and all of the computer power needed to “mine” Bitcoin worsens the climate crisis.
Both men also accused the administration of being hostile to AI, citing a very tame executive order of President Biden, directed at AI’s very real potential for abuse.
In fact, higher taxation is vanishingly unlikely to be approved by a closely divided Congress, which is also in the tank for crypto. The tech titans are livid at Biden not for imminent (and overblown) threats but for the presumption of trying to regulate tech at all.
When a progressive government gets even moderately serious about taxing capitalism or regulating its excesses, some billionaires opt for full-on fascism.
These guys have all the money and all the acclaim that anyone could possibly need. But they take it as a personal affront that anyone would presume to tax or regulate them. You just don’t do that to a master of the universe.
Ben Horowitz admired Al Gore and was close to Barack Obama. He endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. His conversion to Trumper and increasing hysteria runs in the family. His father, David Horowitz, now 85, was one of the most notorious cases of a true believer migrating from far left to far right.
David began as a journalist and wrote four serious books with Peter Collier on influential American families such as the Rockefellers. He went to work for Ramparts, and became enamored with the Black Panthers. But he had a moment when he recoiled against Panther violence, and by the 1980s was demonizing the moderate left along with the far left.
IT ISN’T JUST TECH TITANS WHO ARE SUPPORTING TRUMP. Others include private equity and hedge fund billionaires like William Ackman and John Paulson, and mainstream Wall Street financiers such as Blackstone co-founder Steve Schwarzman.
But the thinking of the Silicon Valley moguls provides an important window on something deeper and more alarming. In essence, when a progressive government gets even moderately serious about taxing capitalism or regulating its excesses, some billionaires opt for full-on fascism.
In this case, they opt for fascism as personified by a figure who is not only authoritarian but demented. Trump’s dictatorial temperament chimes with their own.
On their podcast, Horowitz and Andreessen fondly described a tête-à-tête dinner. Andreessen said, “Ben and I had dinner with the former president … at Bedminster, his golf club in New Jersey. We were really quite literally just with him and kind of got to know him as a person. And so it was, you know, he’s a very complicated guy.”
One thinks of Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich.
And it isn’t just narcissistic tech billionaires. With democracy itself at stake, where are Fortune 500 Executives for Harris? Nowhere. Maybe they are not supporting Trump as flagrantly and enthusiastically as Andreessen and Horowitz, but when push comes to shove they will take the tax cuts and the deregulation and not worry too much about the fascism.
There is of course an echo of 1933, when much of the German business elite cast their lot with Hitler. And for a few years, until Hitler’s own insanity led to a war that left Germany in ashes, the bankers and industrialists who were close allies of the Nazis did very well, as Hitler crushed the German trade union movement and embarked on a rapid rearmament program that was highly profitable for military contractors.
There is one other irony. Trump originally became a serious force in American politics as the tribune of the frustrations of disrespected and disaffected people, mainly white working-class men or small-businesspeople in towns that were being destroyed by globalism.
For that set of voters, “Make America Great Again” evoked an America were Blacks knew their place, wives tended to the kitchen and child-rearing, immigrant farmworkers came for the harvest and returned home, and well-paying factory jobs were plentiful. In office, he delivered little but deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and labor oversight positions staffed with brutal union-busters.
The voters attracted by the nostalgic, mid-20th-century version of MAGA have nothing whatever in common with the tech billionaires and corporate executives whose version of libertarian globalism keeps screwing ordinary workers. Hitler also oversaw a coalition of disaffected workers and wealthy industrialists, the latter of which got by far the lion’s share of his economic proceeds. The fact that both MAGA groups see salvation in the same führer is one more connection with fascism.
