
Victor Reklaitis of MarketWatch reports that tech legend Marc Andreessen’s latest venture is rallying Silicon Valley around Trump’s stances on crypto, AI, and taxes. Reklaitis writes:
Marc Andreessen hit a home run three decades ago by co-founding a web-browsing pioneer called Netscape Communications. He has gone on to rack up more big hits in the tech sector as an investor and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, the venture-capital firm he launched 15 years ago with fellow entrepreneur Ben Horowitz.
Companies he has backed have turned into household names — think Airbnb, OpenAI, and Slack. He also serves on the boards of cryptocurrency company Coinbase and Facebook parent Meta Platforms, and he previously was a board member at eBay, Hewlett-Packard, and HP spinoff Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
This year, Andreessen has set out in a new political direction: backing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. He has promised to spend money in support of the former president’s White House bid, although disclosures showing the level of his financial support for Trump have not yet been filed. In addition, Andreessen is a major backer of the Fairshake super PAC, with his venture-capital firm donating at least $44 million to the political-action committee, which is working to defeat critics of the crypto industry and to boost the industry’s advocates in key congressional races. And he’s been one of the most prominent voices in a battle playing out in Silicon Valley over which presidential candidate deserves the support of the tech industry’s powerful and wealthy CEOs and VCs. […]
The Biden-Harris administration’s approach toward the crypto industry is a big reason Andreessen has backed Trump. Under the current administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is widely disliked by the crypto industry, has sued multiple companies backed by Andreessen Horowitz, which has described itself as the world’s biggest crypto investor.
“This has been a brutal assault on a nascent industry that I’ve just never experienced before. I’m in total shock that it’s happened. It’s been intensely frustrating that it’s been impossible to make progress on this with the White House. It’s a totally intolerable situation,” Andreessen said in the July podcast. […]
“I think every single thing we’ve mentioned here is optional. Like I think this has been an optional choice by this administration, and I don’t think they need to have any of these policies. They could have had an equally or even more successful presidency without all of this stuff,” he said.
“I would say the good news is all of these issues could be dropped, solved tomorrow.”
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