Here’s a combination of words you rarely see together: Poor Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
And yet. It was less than two weeks ago that the Bert and Ernie of venture capital stuck their heads above their podcast parapet and declared themselves all-in for Donald Trump.
The endorsement — painted as a reluctant choice sure to enrage their friends — was framed as simple pragmatism. Trump was the only candidate with a coherent “pro-tech” policy on crypto (an industry to which Andreessen Horowitz has committed to investing at least $4.5 billion) and is opposed to Joe Biden’s proposal to tax startup valuations. Trump, they argued, would also not “over-regulate” artificial intelligence.
“Any limitations we put [on] ourselves are going to disadvantage the U.S. versus the rest of the world,” said Andreessen, with all the hubris money can buy.
What it certainly wasn’t — of course! — was an endorsement of Trump the man, the fraudster or the rapist. “We are non-partisan, one issue voters,” Horowitz wrote in December. “If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them.”
Trump had joined forces with Peter Thiel-backed J.D. Vance and embraced the crypto vote. He had also taken an — ahem — expansive view of hate speech as free speech, similar to a16z-backed Substack and X under Elon Musk.
In the blue corner? Biden. A man who has barely spoken about the crypto industry except to criticize it, who nominated a crypto villain, Gary Gensler, to be chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and who once wandered into a White House summit with the heads of the major AI companies, admitted his need to be educated on the topic, then promptly left. His administration might have solid tech policies (the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act among them), but Biden himself presents as the human incarnation of an inadvertently switched-on iPhone flashlight.
Framed purely in those terms, you can see how Andreessen and Horowitz felt they had cover to back Trump. And why the pundit class began to panic that more tech titans would follow suit.
And then came Kamala.
If you’re sincere in backing a tech optimist, then by any metric, Harris is your candidate. There has arguably never been a major-party candidate more pro-Silicon Valley than the Bay Area-born Harris. Her 2020 vice-presidential run was backed by significant donations from Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon — companies whose employees she has referred to as “family.” Harris is the administration’s “AI czar” and host of Biden’s White House summit on the subject. Unlike both Biden and Trump, she has not called for revoking Section 230 protections for social platforms; nor, unlike both those old men, has she ever publicly attacked the crypto industry. Her brother-in-law is the chief legal officer for Uber, for god’s sake. And of course, the Harris candidacy is powered by TikTok videos and Charli XCX tweets.
Tech, but with limits
Yet Harris’ love for the tech industry is not without limits. After meeting with those execs from OpenAI and co., she warned that AI could “increase threats to safety and security, infringe civil rights and privacy and erode public trust and faith in democracy.” She is widely credited as the architect of Biden’s executive order on the safe use of AI. As California attorney general, Harris led a pressure campaign to force her “family” at Google, Meta, et al., to ban revenge porn and sent its perpetrators to jail; she even suggested that Meta was a monopoly that should be broken up. Her support for Section 230 is mediated by her long-time support for laws criminalizing cyberbullying. Her family connection with Uber didn’t stop her from backing a bill to protect California gig workers. A decade ago, she secured a multimillion-dollar settlement against eBay for unlawful “anti-poaching” agreements.
In other words, Harris’ optimistic, friendly relationship toward tech can best be summed up as: “I will give you everything you want and let you continue to grow rich, but I’ll also come after you (gently) if you start harming or defrauding people.”
By contrast, Trump and Vance’s position can be summed up as: “What she said, except for the harm and fraud. We love that part. The more crimes the better! Also, killer drones.”
With Harris in the race, suddenly Marc ’n Ben’s decision to go all-in on Trump looks less like a reluctant vote for a pro-tech candidate and more like the calculated amorality of two billionaires who have tied their personal wealth to an industry riddled with grift and criminality and don’t want their cash cows to go to jail.
What it certainly isn’t is a vote for innovation.
“We reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or advance innovation,” Harris said last year. At one time, it wasn’t controversial in Silicon Valley to view lawlessness as the opposite of innovation. With the exception of a few outliers — Uber and Theranos — Silicon Valley founders didn’t aspire to be criminals or to enable Nazis and other bigots to spread hate without moderation. Not because the techies of old (2008) were inherently more moral, but rather because they understood that con artists rarely build good, sustainable companies. As any poet or user of old Twitter will tell you, the most creative thinking comes when you’re forced to operate within reasonable limitations. There’s a reason countries where oligarchs run riot rarely have the strongest startup ecosystems.
We have heard a lot in the last week about Harris’ campaign offering a turning point: for the Democratic Party, for the election and maybe for the country itself. Similarly, Harris’ run gives tech millionaires and billionaires a clear choice between two pro-tech candidates.
That choice: Which version of Silicon Valley do you want — the one that lets you get rich inside the law or outside it?
As a budding techno-optimist myself, I’m inclined to believe that most techies, even the gazillionaires, would prefer the “rich but lawful” path to the “rich and awful.” Hell, even Sam Altman has called for better regulation of AI.
Sure enough, in the days following Harris’ promotion to the top of the ticket, a flood of tech money has returned to the Democrats. Ron Conway — the archetypal Valley political power broker — has been busy behind the scenes telling would-be donors that Harris is the best candidate for tech. Box CEO Aaron Levie publicly set out the terms for Harris to double down on her pro-tech credentials by opening up more visas for skilled tech workers and removing the universally unpopular (among rich people) tax on startup valuations. What he pointedly has not done is threaten to vote for Trump if she doesn’t agree.
Conway, bless his heart, has reportedly even extended an olive branch to Andreessen and Horowitz to bring them back to Team Kamala.
Their response to that offer — and the response of other billionaire bros to Harris’ campaign — will speak volumes about how optimistic they really are about America’s tech future, versus their own continued ability to cash all the crypto checks without fearing any of the balances.
After all, the stakes just got much higher. Nobody wants to risk spending election night sharing the loser’s table at Mar-a-Lago with Elon, Chamath and David Sacks.
Paul Bradley Carr has written about Silicon Valley for 25 years. His book The Confessions will be published next year by Atria. paulbradleycarr.com