Marc Andreessen

Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971) is an American software engineer and venture capitalist who cocreated the Mosaic web browser, cofounded Netscape, and in 2009 cofounded the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with Ben Horowitz. By the 2020s he had become the most prominent financial and rhetorical patron of effective accelerationism and a central figure, alongside Peter Thiel, in the Silicon Valley technology elite's turn toward the political right.¹²

Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz grew into one of the largest venture firms, with funds spanning consumer software, cryptocurrency, biotechnology, and, through its "American Dynamism" practice, defense and national-security technology, the same category that anchors the Founders Fund and Palantir Technologies businesses in the Thiel network. In March 2019 the firm renounced its venture-capital registration and registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a registered investment adviser, freeing it from the rule limiting venture funds to roughly twenty percent of holdings in liquid securities and letting it buy crypto tokens, public stocks, and secondary shares. In April 2024 it raised 7.2 billion dollars across five funds, including a 3.75 billion dollar growth fund and a 600 million dollar American Dynamism fund, and by January 2026 it had raised more than 15 billion dollars in a single round, taking assets under management above 90 billion dollars.¹⁵

Andreessen joined the board of Meta in June 2008, the company in which Thiel was the first outside investor, and held that seat into the 2020s; he also served on the boards of eBay from 2008 to 2014 and of Hewlett-Packard and its successor Hewlett Packard Enterprise from 2009. The firm co-invests with Founders Fund across the defense and crypto portfolios, including the funding rounds of Anduril Industries.⁶

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and e/acc

In October 2023 Andreessen published "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," a declaration that technology is an unalloyed good and that its acceleration is a moral duty, naming "existential risk," "sustainability," "ESG," "the precautionary principle," "trust and safety," and "tech ethics" among its enemies in a section headed "The Enemy." The document made him the leading establishment voice of effective accelerationism, the movement defined against the AI-safety and Effective Altruism wing that had grown out of the Rationalist Community, and Andreessen added "e/acc" to his social-media biography.²³

The manifesto closed with a list of "patron saints of techno-optimism" that included Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Hayek, John von Neumann, the neoreactionary accelerationist Nick Land, and the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and it paraphrased Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto of Futurism on technology as "a violent assault on the forces of the unknown." The critic Dave Karpf noted that Marinetti went on to co-author the 1919 Fascist Manifesto, and writers at Vice and Jacobin read the document as reactionary; the Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin published a measured rebuttal, "My Techno-Optimism," in November 2023.⁷

The Turn to Trump

Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced their endorsement of Donald Trump on their podcast on July 16, 2024, framing the shift around what they called the "Little Tech" agenda and opposition to the Biden administration's cryptocurrency and AI policy. Andreessen named the administration's proposed tax on unrealized capital gains as "the final straw," and the two each gave 2.5 million dollars to the pro-Trump super PAC Right for America, while a16z contributed tens of millions of dollars to the crypto-industry PAC Fairshake.⁴⁸

On Joe Rogan's podcast in late 2024 Andreessen claimed that more than thirty technology founders had been quietly cut off by their banks in what he called "Operation Choke Point 2.0," an assertion that Fortune and other outlets reported they could not substantiate. After the election he served as an unpaid adviser recruiting personnel for the Department of Government Efficiency run by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, said he was spending much of his time at Mar-a-Lago, and his a16z partner Scott Kupor was named to lead the Office of Personnel Management, placing the firm alongside Thiel and David Sacks in the network that staffed the second Trump administration.⁹¹⁰