Marc Andreessen Rises as a MAGA Power Player for 2026 Midterms

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This is Bloomberg Businessweek Daily, reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead. With insight on the people, companies, and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus, global business, finance, and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Businessweek Daily Podcast, with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec.

Carol Massar (0:33)

He came from humbler beginnings. He grew up on the piney edges of New Lisbon, Wisconsin. It's a small town about two hours from Milwaukee. His childhood home was a split level about the footprint of one of his swimming pools today.

Tim Stenovec (0:48)

Okay. He was an early mentor to Marc Zuckerberg, and as Bloomberg's Austin Carr reports, in many ways, he was quote, the original hoodie wearing tech bro. Today's dominant VC firm manages more than $100 billion in assets, and it's gone from Valley Kingmaker to DC Power Broker.

Carol Massar (1:04)

We are talking about Marc Andreessen, the early investor associated with the who's who of today's tech giants, and writing about it and him for Bloomberg Businessweek is Austin Carr. He's Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer, joining us from Boston.

Man, you go deep on this one. Good to have you here. Marc Andreessen, very well known to the Bloomberg audience, very well known to Silicon Valley, but over the last few years, increasingly known to politics too.

Austin Carr (1:32)

Yeah, I mean, I cannot stress how famous this guy is in the tech world. You might remember him back in the late 90s on the cover of Time Magazine as one of the golden geeks, leading America into the future when he discovered, when he invented Netscape. And more recently, what people don't realize is after diving deep into the venture capital world, he's now funneling huge amounts of money into DC.

Between him and his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and their partners, they funneled at least $116 million leading up to the midterms. That's more than the Cokes. That's more than the George Soros. It's really only behind Elon Musk and his donations to federal politics that Andreessen is behind. And it's just this massive shift from someone who is really known, traditionally synonymous with Silicon Valley startups on the board of Facebook, now Metta. And now he's just become one of the biggest backers of the Trump 2 movement.

Tim Stenovec (2:25)

As you write, he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and said back then that the president's immigration regime quote, makes me sick to my stomach.

I love your story because you really get into something that in the last couple of years has become really lore around the narrative of Marc Andreessen's transformation from a Democrat to a Republican. It has to do with a meeting with the Biden administration about AI policy. I mean, I have heard so many times people explain a different version of what happened in that meeting and why it led to him supposedly embracing the Trump administration's policies. It really seems like though in this piece, Austin, you got to the truth of what happened in that room. Explain the context here and what happened.

Austin Carr (3:12)

Well, when we talked about the shift of the tech community to the right or to the support of Trump since his first term, it's very rare that you could actually pinpoint the day for someone. With Marc Andreessen, he actually has said it was May 22nd, 2024, and that's when he, his partner, his co-founder Ben Horowitz and their government affairs chief went for a West Wing visit when the Biden was still in office to discuss US tech policy with a number of Biden officials.

They met to discuss tech policy. The meeting was quickly forgotten. Fast forward, Trump wins the election, and then in early 2025 or late 24, he starts going on podcasts and describing this sort of insane meeting in which all these Biden officials apparently threatened to ban all AI startups. They were going to classify the underlying math behind, under AI. They were going to concentrate power into the hands of just two to three tech companies, which the federal government would oversee. And essentially, Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, according to their version of Vince, walked out of the West Wing and in that very day in the parking lot, they said, this is crazy. They're going to kill us. We have to vote for Trump.

Now, since that I've spent so long piecing what happened together, and I can tell you that a lot of people disagree, at least in the Biden and Harris, Kamala Harris camps about Marc's version of events. They say nothing of the sort happened. At no point did anyone ever threaten to say that they were going to ban all AI startups. And I would just say on the surface, I think it's worth thinking about, they already had a contentious relationship with Marc Andreessen. Why on earth would, at this sunnied point, they would reveal this Troconian plan out of the blue to an investor they're trying to essentially win over to support him in the coming presidential election. And suddenly they reveal this top secret plan to him, Ben and their government affairs chief and no one else. And then the other very unusual thing is two days later, we discovered Marc Andreessen goes back to have another meeting with different national security advisers and Biden officials at the White House. He doesn't bring this up at all. So it just raises a lot of questions to me about whether or not, there's no doubt that this was a contentious meeting, but whether or not he was looking for some sort of conversion event or sort of narrative to tell why he's switching over to Trump, I will just say people on the Biden side do not feel that that was an accurate depiction of what happened in that room.