Even the Koch Brothers Weren’t This Brazen
6 min read
Marc Andreessen has been feeling pretty good since Election Day, and at the end of November, he went on The Joe Rogan Experience to say as much. Sitting in the podcast studio, grinning, Andreessen told Rogan that he was “very happy” about the election and that it is now “Morning in America”—directly invoking the famous Ronald Reagan campaign ad.
Andreessen, a billionaire co-founder of the storied venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z), had put all his chips on Donald Trump. In July, on a podcast with his business partner, Ben Horowitz, Andreessen announced that he would be supporting the president-elect, and in total, he donated at least $4.5 million to a MAGA super PAC. Now, after publicly lobbying for deregulation in finance and tech, he’s poised to get his way. The Washington Post reported that he is helping Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy plan the Department of Government Efficiency, Trump’s proposed advisory body with a mandate to downsize the government. The vision is already starting to materialize: On Rogan, Andreessen harshly criticized the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a consumer-protection agency created in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Musk later concurred in a post on X that it was time to “Delete CFPB.”
Andreessen has long been interested in politics, and he’s never been shy about sharing his opinions. (Though he does seem to try to avoid encountering ideas he may not like: He’s a prolific blocker of journalists on X.) Even so, his full embrace of Trump and right-wing talking points—including the false claim that the government funded an “internet-censorship unit” at Stanford University—represents a definite shift that has become common among America’s plutocrat class. In addition to Musk, Ramaswamy, and Andreessen, other elites are boldly clawing their way into more political power. Last week, Trump announced that he had tapped the former PayPal executive and venture capitalist David Sacks—another prolific X user—to be his “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.”
Consider also the billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, who gained notoriety outside financial circles for driving an entire news cycle last winter with his aggressive social-media campaign against university presidents whom he saw as insufficiently cracking down on pro-Palestine campus protesters. (He went particularly hard on then–Harvard President Claudine Gay, elevating right-wing activists’ allegations of academic dishonesty against her. Gay admitted that she had duplicated “other scholars’ language, without proper attribution.”). Ackman has since used his public platform to exert pressure on politicians and administrators to scrap diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. In July, he formally endorsed Trump, and then spent the following months doubling down on MAGA talking points, including in an 1,800-word post on X that criticized alleged Democratic stances on fracking, protests, vaccines, and dozens of other issues, which received more than 9 million views (“Very well said!” Musk responded). In a CNBC interview, he talked about Trump’s commitment to economic growth and favorably cited Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s purported desire to tackle what Ackman described as “the 73-shot regime that we give our kids.”
Others in this orbit have demonstrated a willingness to take actions that would have previously crossed red lines. In October, the Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong and the Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos killed their newspapers’ planned endorsements of Kamala Harris. (Soon-Shiong said that Harris’s stance on the war in Gaza, along with a general sense that his paper’s opinion writers leaned too far to the left, motivated his decision, while Bezos wrote in an op-ed that his decision was an attempt to restore trust in the media that the public often perceives as biased.) Meanwhile, Musk has loudly lobbied for his policy preferences and has also worked not just as an occasional adviser but as a de facto staff member of the Trump campaign. On X, which Musk purchased for $44 billion in 2022, he repeatedly advocated for a Trump presidency to his more than 200 million followers and allowed far-right personalities and content to flourish—as my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote, effectively turning the platform into a white-supremacist site.
Of course, the hyperwealthy have always found ways to bend the political system. In a 2014 study, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page reviewed thousands of polls and surveys spanning more than 20 years and found that the preferences of the wealthiest Americans were much more likely than those of average citizens to affect policy changes. But influence machines were once subterranean: Few people would have known about the political influence machine that the Koch brothers built in the past several decades if not for the work of investigative journalists. The hedge-fund billionaire George Soros has long bankrolled liberal nonprofits. In 2016, Rupert Murdoch made it a point to say that he had “never asked any prime minister for anything,” after The Evening Standard reported that he had boasted about being able to tell the British government what to do: The media magnate wanted to at least partially conceal his influence. Until recently, elites and politicians who worked together feared the scandal of the sausage-making process being revealed, and the public backlash that could come with it.
The energy is different now. “There’s a real shift in ruling-class vibes,” Rob Larson, an economics professor who has written about the new ultrarich and Silicon Valley’s influence on politics, told me. Many of America’s plutocrats seem not to care if people know that they’re trying to manipulate the political system and the Fourth Estate in service of their own interests. Billionaires such as Andreessen and Ackman are openly broadcasting their political desires and “definitely feeling their animal spirits,” Larson said. Or, as the Northwestern University political-science professor Jeffrey Winters put it in a postelection interview with Slate, this feels like a moment of “in-your-face oligarchy.”
Part of the shift can be chalked up to the fact that many billionaires now come from tech, and Silicon Valley has a history of championing a unique kind of personality: “Brazenness has been a big piece of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship that’s been celebrated for a long time,” Becca Lewis, a researcher at Stanford who focuses on the politics of the technology industry, told me. “You’re supposed to be a disruptor or heterodox thinker.” For years, tech leaders may have thought of themselves as apolitical (even as the industry employed plenty of lobbyists), but now the winds have shifted: Technology such as crypto has been politicized, and they have brought the braggadocio of the Valley to fight for it.
That the ultrarich are richer than they have ever been may also be part of the explanation, Larson said. Having more money means exposure to fewer consequences. The last time elites were this vocal in their influence, Larson said, was during the Gilded Age, when multimillionaires such as William Randolph Hearst and Jay Gould worked to shape American politics.
Regardless of its provenance, the practical impact of this behavior is a less equal system. Many people are worried about President-Elect Donald Trump’s forthcoming administration’s corrosive effects on democracy. The corrosion is already happening, though. A particularly vocal subset of the ultrarich is steering the ship, and doesn’t care who knows.
