<
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/29/vc-bros-claimed-they-backed-trump-to-protect-ai-trump-is-shutting-down-ai-it-was-always-about-access-power/>
"Back in July of 2024, when two of the biggest big shots in venture capital,
Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, explained why they had decided to go all in
to back Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election, they talked up a good game
about how they would support any candidate who supported their “little tech”
agenda. This always rang hollow — Andreessen has been on the board of Meta for
years, which is the most anti-little tech company around. They also whined
about the Biden administration tech policies, in particular around AI,
cryptocurrency, and antitrust. But the most telling part of the full podcast
had nothing to do with tech policy at all. Marc and Ben spent a bunch of time
positively
offended that Joe Biden and some (only some) of his agency heads
wouldn’t meet with them:
We have been spending a tremendous amount of time with Senators, Congress
people on both sides of the aisle. Mark mentioned we met with President
Trump. We did meet with White House officials, including Jeff Zients the
chief of staff, and Jake Sullivan the National Security advisor, Gina
Raimondo the Commerce Secretary and so forth. We have not met with
President Biden. We attempted and failed.
….
We tried to meet with Gary Gensler — he’s the chair of the SEC, he’s running
this campaign against crypto. We’re the largest crypto investors or largest
blockchain investors in the world, and we’ve requested meetings with him at
least a half a dozen times. I even was able to get in contact with his
office mate at MIT, who said ‘surely Gary will meet with you, it’s so
important that he meets with you’… and he couldn’t get us the meeting.
Meanwhile, they seemed to love the fact that Donald Trump would have dinner
with them, and Trump family members would vacation with them. Here’s Marc:
Ben and I had dinner with the former president 10 days ago at Bedminster,
his golf club in New Jersey, and had a three-hour dinner. And so, you know,
we were quite literally just with him… you know, he’s a very complicated
guy, people have a lot of opinions, but when you know somebody like that —
you know the family — it really hits hard
And here’s Ben:
Marc and I have both gotten to know the family, particularly Jared and
Ivanka and their kids — Arabella, Joseph and Theo. And in fact, like, Ivanka
and the kids were just at my house. We went to see David Copperfield, all
that.
The real complaint was never about
policy. It was always about embracing the
fascism of it all, in which they (Marc & Ben, not the wider tech industry)
would get to write the rules in a way that helped them personally, even if it
fucked over actual innovation. Indeed, they seemed tickled that after they had
dinner with Donald Trump, he rewrote part of his campaign policy platform.
These total political novices were so overwhelmed that they could get one side
to listen at all that they figured it was obviously the side to back. They seem
positively giddy that Trump was willing to make changes to his platform based
on their conversations."
Cheers,
** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
