Top Line
Prominent venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz both plan to donate to a political action committee backing former President Donald Trump, multiple media outlets reported Tuesday, making them the latest tech giants to back Mr. Trump’s reelection.
Marc Andreessen (left) endorsed Donald Trump on Tuesday.
Key Facts
Andreessen and Horowitz, founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, have told employees they plan to donate to a political action committee supporting Trump, The Information first reported. Late Tuesday afternoon, the pair released a 90-minute podcast episode detailing their reasons for supporting Trump.
Anonymous sources told The Information and Axios that the duo’s motivation was primarily due to expected looser regulation in areas such as cryptocurrencies under the Trump administration.
Andreessen and Horowitz, whose fortunes are estimated by Forbes magazine at $1.9 billion, join a growing chorus of tech moguls in historically left-leaning Silicon Valley who have backed Trump.
The most famous is Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X. He said on Saturday:[s]The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Musk plans to spend about $45 million per month on a political action committee dedicated to Trump. (Musk responded to the report by calling him a “fake wildebeest.”)
According to the Financial Times, several other tech billionaires have recently donated to the upstart super PAC supporting Trump, including Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, cryptocurrency moguls Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and venture capitalists Antonio Gracias and Douglas Leone.
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Which billionaires support Trump?
In addition to the above, some surprising high-profile billionaires have backed Trump, including investors Bill Ackman and Nelson Peltz, and GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen. Billionaires who have donated more than $1 million to Trump’s campaign include the world’s richest self-made woman, Diane Hendricks, banking heir Timothy Mellon, and New York Jets owner Woody Johnson. Notable among them is PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, a former Trump donor who until last month said he would not donate to Trump’s super PAC, but whose former employee JD Vance was just named as Trump’s running mate.
Main Background
Andreessen and Horowitz are ranked 36th and 37th, respectively, on Forbes’ Midas List of top venture capitalists, and have made their fortunes with early investments in Coinbase, Instagram, OpenAI, and others. Andreessen sits on the board of directors of Meta, Facebook’s parent company. Andreessen Horowitz has close ties to Musk’s empire, investing in private aerospace giant SpaceX and financially backing Musk’s 2022 acquisition of X, then known as Twitter. Their view of crypto as a boon for Trump, who called the largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin a “scam” in 2021 and then vowed to be the “crypto president” during his election campaign, is clearly shared by the market, with Bitcoin’s price rising more than 10% in the past three days as election betting odds tipped in Trump’s favor.
Important Quotes
“Stop persecuting our entrepreneurs,” Jeff Skoll, a major Democratic donor and eBay billionaire who has reportedly donated $2 million to a political action committee supporting Democratic senatorial candidates, wrote on X on Saturday. In criticizing the Biden administration’s mistreatment of Tesla, Skoll offered perhaps the clearest example yet of the reasons behind Silicon Valley’s apparent rightward shift.
References
