The co-founders of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firm have announced their support for Donald Trump’s bid for re-election, and plan to make substantial donations to back him further.
Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, the heads of Andreessen Horowitz, commonly known as A16Z, revealed their plans in a sprawling 90-minute podcast, in which they argued that the future of “American innovation” required a Trump victory.
While their financial support is not expected to equal that of the billionaire Elon Musk, who announced plans to donate $45m a month in support of the former president, the two men are seen as intellectual centres of the burgeoning right wing of the American tech scene.
In a blogpost published in June, they argued that “bad government policies are now the #1 threat to little tech”; the startups they see as the engine of the US economy. They expressed concern about over-regulation, particularly of cryptocurrency, and proposals to tax unrealised capital gains, as well as criticising the US government’s failure to use its buying power to back startups over incumbents “in critical sectors like defense and intelligence”.
But in the blogpost, they fell short of actively backing either candidate. Now, they say, that has changed. “It’s clear now that, at least on little tech – we’re not experts on all things that the government does but on startups and technology we’re certainly among the best experts in the world – we think Donald Trump is a better choice than Joe Biden,” Horowitz said. “I’m going to have a lot of friends who are pissed off at me for saying anything nice about President Trump … I wish it wasn’t this way and we didn’t have to pick a side.”
Andreessen specifically highlighted Trump’s support of cryptocurrencies as a reason for supporting his re-election in November. “It’s a flat-out endorsement of the entire space, a complete across-the-board uniform embrace of the entire thing. It’s just an absolute 180 from what we’ve been experiencing … this has been a brutal assault on a nascent industry that I’ve never experienced before.”
The pair have been laying the ground for the announcement for a while. In December, Horowitz wrote: “We are non-partisan, one-issue voters: if a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them.”
Already, Andreessen and Horowitz, individually and through the venture capital firm they co-founded, have donated more than $24m in this election, but the majority has gone to a non-partisan campaign, Fairshake, aiming to back or oppose candidates based on their views on cryptocurrency.
Fairshake is the second best-funded Super Pac in the race so far, having raised just under the Trump-backing Make America Great Again Super Pac.
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A16Z was founded in 2009 and has backed a string of high-profile tech companies including Facebook, Instagram and Airbnb.
According to data from Follow the Crypto, cryptocurrency-focused political action committees have raised more than $187m for the 2024 US election and spent $38m of that. The funds have overwhelmingly gone to support Republicans and oppose Democrats, although some of that spending is in primary campaigns where the opponents are of the same party.
The crypto campaign has already claimed a political scalp, spending $10m to oppose the leftwing congresswoman Katie Porter in her attempt to become a Democratic candidate for the US Senate in California.