This may be the most important piece I will write in a long time, so please try to stay with me. For over six months now I have been struggling to understand what has happened in this country, specifically what caused the massive shift to the Right which resulted in the election outcome that we are seeing implemented in policies every day now. Perhaps the most startling thing for people like me has been to see Silicon Valley and the Big Tech elite shift strongly into Trump’s camp. It’s not so hard to imagine outliers like Peter Thiel or even Elon Musk going hard right. We have all read about how John D. Rockefeller was pals with the Kaiser or how Charles Lindbergh was a Hitler fan. These things happen and they are often about the strange psychological forces that flow through people of extreme wealth. I feel I know this crowd very well by virtue of running a major global private banking business for over six years. I met a bunch of them and I got a decent understanding of the various things that can drive this small but powerful sub segment of global society. They really are different than you and me and that is often a direct result of the forces that act upon them. They may or may not have been born richer or smarter than you and me (I am a big believer in the randomness and importance of luck versus the certainty of bloodline or high intellect, or even hard work), but for sure they have had a very different nurturing experience than the rest of us by virtue of how the rest of the world targets and treats great wealth.
The inspiration for this writing is a LinkedIn comment I saw from a Cornell acquaintance named Gligor Tashkovic, who is a member of the Class of ‘87 and who has kicked around Cornell alumni circles and through various professional positions with pretty wide-ranging areas of focus. Gligor has 7,314 LinkedIn contacts and while I don’t pretend to completely understand what his main professional thrust is, it is certainly centered around the heart of the Balkans in Northern Macedonia. Gligor was, for a while, the Minister of Foreign Investments for North Macedonia, and from his LinkedIn profile, seems to have contacts all through the Balkan states of Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia. This is a part of the world where the notion of factions is central to the regional reality of balkanization. I don’t really know what that means in terms of how it impacts Gligor, but he sent out to his LinkedIn community a New York Times Opinion piece by Ross Douthat (January 17, 2025) that is a very long and involved interview with Marc Andreessen that explains his understanding of the shift by Silicon Valley tech moguls from being Bay Area liberals to right-wing Trump supporters. In other words, this is a piece that gets at the core of what’s been perplexing me for the last six months. This opinion piece may have explained more and spurred more thought by me than anything I have read since rereading Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth a few years ago.
To begin with, we need to establish Marc Andreessen’s bona fides. He was a Wisconsin farm boy who went to college at the University of Illinois at Urbana when that was one of the five schools that were funded by Al Gore and his fellow Senators to get a ten year jump on computing and this new thing called the internet. It did just that for Andreessen and I’m sure others, but it happened to cause Andreessen to create Netscape, the browser that changed everything. Netscape Navigator was a pioneering web browser that played a crucial role in the early commercial internet of the 1990s. It evolved from the Mosaic browser project and was developed by Andreessen and a guy named Jim Clark (someone I met twenty years ago through a mutual friend) through their company Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation). The browser was revolutionary for its time, introducing many features we take for granted today, like cookies, JavaScript (originally called LiveScript), and the ability to display images while pages were still loading. It made the worldwide web much more accessible and user-friendly for everyday people. Netscape dominated the browser market in the mid-1990s, at one point capturing around 90% market share. The company’s 1995 IPO was a landmark moment in tech history, with the stock price doubling on the first day of trading. This helped kick off the dot-com boom, and it made both Andreessen and Clark some of the early Silicon Valley billionaires.
However, Netscape’s dominance was challenged when Microsoft began bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and offering it for free. This led to the “Browser Wars” of the late 1990s, which ultimately resulted in Netscape losing significant market share. This competition also became a central part of Microsoft’s antitrust case. In 1998, Netscape made a crucial decision to release their browser’s source code, creating the Mozilla open-source project. This eventually led to the development of Firefox, carrying on Netscape’s legacy. AOL acquired Netscape in 1999 for $4.2 billion, though the browser’s market share continued to decline. The company’s story had a lasting impact on tech history – it helped establish many web standards we still use today, pioneered key business models for internet companies, and its decision to open-source its code influenced the modern open-source software movement.
But Andreessen was just getting started. After Netscape, he had several major roles that have gone on to continue to shape the tech industry. First, he co-founded Loudcloud (later renamed Opsware) in 1999 with Ben Horowitz and others. Loudcloud was one of the first cloud computing/automation companies, essentially pioneering infrastructure-as-a-service before that term existed. HP acquired Opsware in 2007 for $1.6 billion. Then, most significantly, in 2009, he and Ben Horowitz founded Andreessen Horowitz, which became one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capital firms. The firm has made numerous high-profile investments in companies like Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, Airbnb, and many others. Through AH, Andreessen has been instrumental in shaping modern tech investing, notably pioneering the concept of “founder-friendly” VC firms that provide extensive operational support, being early to recognize and invest in trends like social media, cloud computing, and cryptocurrencies and writing influential pieces about technology and startups. He has also served on several prominent boards, including Facebook (he’s known Zuckerberg a long time), Hewlett Packard and eBay. He has now made over 100 investments in various AI startups and is as close to being Silicon Valley royalty as anyone can be.
As a solid Wisconsin liberal, Andreessen was a big supporter of Clinton/Gore and Barack Obama. He and the rest of the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley (with the exception of several outliers like Peter Theil and Elon Musk) were big Democratic supporters until just recently. He and the rest of that pack are now solidly behind Donald Trump, as hard as that is to believe. What Changed? this is where the story gets interesting.
Apparently, Andreessen’s parter Ben Horowitz comes from a family heritage of extreme activism. Ben’s father is David Horowitz, who was originally a prominent leftist writer and editor in the 1960s and early 1970s before becoming a conservative activist and writer in the 1980s. He was involved with the New Left movement before dramatically shifting his political views. Ben Horowitz has discussed growing up with his father’s political evolution. Despite their different career paths – with Ben focusing on technology and entrepreneurship while his father focused on political activism and writing – Ben has occasionally written about how his father influenced his thinking, particularly around questioning conventional wisdom and being willing to change one’s mind when faced with new evidence. Andreessen says that he has spent a fair bit of time with David Horowitz and that he got him thinking over the last few years.
Andreessen claims that he was an avid consumer of MSNBC, literally watching Brian Williams for his evening news for over 500 days straight. Apparently, his troubles with the Democratic Party began during the Russiagate situation. He says he has read the Mueller Report and all the various investigative reports involving the claims about Trump and Russia and considers them to be highly suspect and more or less baseless. Then, in the post-COVID period he says that the entire atmosphere of Silicon Valley underwent a huge change that is well known and understood by almost all the tech leadership. Apparently, the incoming crop of fresh young minds from the best universities, literally the best and the brightest, came to Silicon Valley and brought with them a new attitude born of what Andreessen considers extreme privilege and radical liberalism that effectively made them anti-capitalistic. He estimates that that cadre represented about 20% of the employee base of most Silicon Valley startups-up and that they swayed another 60% of what he calls go-along-to-get-along folks, creating an overwhelming 80% majority that wanted their companies to do more for social justice and be less focused on profitability. What they failed to properly consider was that without profitability, companies, no matter what their social consciousness perspective, are simply not able to function for very long. In the fast-moving tech world (especially among start-ups), losing focus on profitability leads very quickly to losing the ability to innovate and thereby losing the ability to function as an ongoing concern that matters. Tech leadership started thinking that this had a decided Marxist bent and that the focus on social justice was overwhelming the raison d’etre of the enterprise. It is not coincidental that DEI and ESG have been at the center of this conundrum.
Strangely enough, it is the middle initial of both DEI and ESG that give managers the most agita. A manager can understand the economic value of diversity and righteousness of inclusion, but “equity” is a different world altogether. The world is, by its nature, not such an equitable place. The fittest do survive and the weaker do fall by the wayside. Even if you feel that enlightened people can afford some allowance for bootstrapping those less fortunate, it would be hard to ignore that the strongest and most able will likely prevail and excel…at least to some degree. Even if you agree that it all requires good fortune as well from start to finish, chance probably does favor the better prepared and my guess is that we all accept that. And as for ESG, the extreme Right may be in denial about the detrimental aspects of environmental damage leading to things like climate change, but the vast majority of the human race realizes that we need to be better stewards of our environment both for our grandchildren’s sake and even for our own. Good governance is also largely hard to argue with even if the term “good” has a certain amount of subjectivity. But if you eliminate the denial and gaslighting that gets driven by political tribalism, most people want good outcomes that are not so hard to define as such. But then we get to that damn middle initial S for social. There is an argument that companies prosper when they are better aligned with the social consciousness of their employees and customers. But suddenly we find ourselves back in Andreessen’s HR nightmare with staff members looking to tear down the fabric that he and others were trying to build. And that purpose may have had economic motivation, but it also had more than a fair share of societal value as well, just like, in theory, Elon Musk’s vision of life on Mars for the human race.
So it is at this point as we kick into the Biden Administration years that Andreessen and his co-moguls of Silicon Valley are scratching their heads about how they are supposed to feel about the political landscape. They don’t like the randomness of the Trump Administration years, but they are worried about the Millennial/Gen Z mindset as it strives for what feels like extreme social change, potentially at the cost of the very essence of Entrepreneurship, the great God of the Bay Area. That is when the regulatory machinery took over and called the ball for the entire game.
I have a friend who lives and runs a small successful, leading edge alternative asset infrastructure business in Utah. He is one of the smartest guys I ever knew in my working life and I have tons of respect for him, both intellectually and in business and ethical issues. Based on comments I see him make on LinkedIn, I have engaged him in several conversations about regulatory issues and have found his logical conclusions about the over-reach of the SEC, FINRA and Treasury Department over the past few years to be quite balanced. I also have enough first-hand experience with regulatory and prosecutorial over-reach to understand why some people consider the Deep State to be problematic. My wariness has never led me to a place of absolute conspiracy theories, suggesting that all things governmental are bad or corrupt or inefficient, but those attributes are not completely lacking in government by any degree. My Utah friend’s views and comments have tended to sound a lot like some of the admonitions of Marc Andreessen.
Andreessen’s experience with the regulatory juggernaut started with social media (mostly Facebook and Twitter, I imagine), went to cloud computing and digital security (Loudcloud) and then into Crypto infrastructure, finally landing in the AI world. It might be debatable as to why social media or cryptocurrency is a mainstream necessity in life (unless you think absolute freedom of speech and money movement are necessities), but it is very hard not to see at least cloud computing and AI as vital to the world on an ongoing basis. It seems that Andreessen’s direct interactions with high-ranking members of the Biden Administration were of great concern to him and others in similar leadership roles in Silicon Valley. What he describes about those interactions were akin to an effort for benign (though troublingly misguided, according to him) dictatorship by the Democrats and the Biden Administration. He vehemently denies that this concern was financial or even tax-driven (he would argue that tax has never been a drive to Silicon Valley types like him), but that he feels that the bureaucracy (sounding more and more like the Deep State to him) was trying to kill tech entrepreneurship and innovation much like the extreme activism by those radicalized employees was trying to do. This all came together into an “Aha!” moment in early 2024 that led to all his mogul brethren and him concluding that Trump was a better choice than the Democrats. Boom!
Perhaps I should just stop there since I’ve already gone on twice as long as my normal daily stories, but I have to add just a few postscripts. I am shaken by this revelation, but it also makes some sense to me. I feel it does not help justify all the bad things that flow from a Trump presidency, things that I will not repeat here since I invoke them so often in my writing. I also wonder whether the perception about those radicalized employees is as dramatically anti-capitalistic as they are being portrayed. But then I think about my old college friend Paul, who worked for a number of years (1976 ~ 1996) for Xerox. In those years (admittedly ones when I was fervent about my career and the importance of Wall Street for the human race … and the over-reaching impact of regulators from Washington), I used to marvel and scratch my head at how much Xerox management had allowed social consciousness (especially with regard to employee advancement) to overwhelm sound business priorities. And, indeed, we all watched as Xerox went from a $20 billion leader in the tech world to something far less relevant. It’s Xerox PARC was the center of Silicon Valley and it consistently ranked in the top 30 in the Fortune 500. Today it is barely a $1 billion company and while all great things go into decline, the possibility that it lost its MoJo at its peak in the late 1970’s is an unmistakable warning sign for what Andreessen says he saw happening over the past few years.
I will never be a Trump fan or even a supporter. I will never say that I distrusted that the direction Biden was trying to take the country with his bottoms-up, Middle Class emphasis was well-intentioned. I still fear that the biggest problem with Trump is how he does things and what makes me respect Biden was how he did things. But the process of governing has many bumps, obvious and hidden, and it may just be that some aspects of the Biden Administration got out of control in their zeal. Rather than treat this like a clear reason to change the course of my thinking, I prefer to think of it as a reminder that excesses always creep in and our job is to fight against them whether they come at us from the right or the left. From what I see of the first few weeks of Trump v2.0 (the disaster is becoming more and more apparent to the American people), it will be sooner rather than later that we will be allowed to rectify these mistakes on a more pragmatic and beneficial basis for our world. Pearl Buck remains my futurist guru… “When the rich get too rich, and the poor get too poor, things are bound to change…” That is my current understanding of reality.