Andressen feels like Elon without ketamine - he doesn’t swing chainsaw or anything but his brain is equally fried by social media and his deep resentment to tech employee class.
And tbh this deep divide between tech employee class (very socially liberal) and some employer class (not all fwiw) is understudied I feel.
If anything, the absurd obsession of some tech companies to layoffs even after their financial numbers started to improve (or doing better than ever) - especially Meta keeps layoff people while they continue to hire new people (esp senior + level) is really absurd
Listen, I don’t like Elon, but at the very least the things that he has built have been genuine improvements to human humanity. Andressen is the complete opposite - he’s not interested in tackling hard technical problems. He just wants to build slop for an easy buck
That is very true! And I have (had more precisely) some respect to Elon for that regard - and you’re right his investment has been mostly easy bucks. And I guess another thing is, while I think he’s self sabotaging so much, at least I get to sympathize some of his upbringing (his dad sexually abused his kids, bullied prob bc of his autism etc). Andressen? Not so much tbh - he just looks like very entitled through and through
We only have Elon’s word on the bullying, and like many of his observations the example he gives of bullying is an inverse of reality. He claims he was bullied when a kid threw his ass down a stairwell and put him in the hospital yet he rarely explains why. The rest of the story is that Elon was bullying the kid! He was mocking the kid because the kid’s dad had died by suicide so the kid finally responded by throwing the bully (Elon) down a stairwell.
Look at how Elon behaves in business and on social media: he’s a bully, just like he was as a kid. The reality is that Elon is a sociopath who has perfected the victim inversion technique of “why did you make me hit you” into an art form.
Probably not, but Elon almost certainly took it out on his peers. He was a bully who always believed he’s a victim, same as he does now. It’s part of his sociopathic personality.
I believe that’s true, but there’s a point where everyone must take responsibility for their behavior, regardless of how it was informed. Bullying or criminality are typically informed by the same, and the tragedy of it is that those who engage in them must still face a reckoning so that it doesn’t continue indefinitely. It may not be their fault, but it is their responsibility.
It’s funny because many people on the left view themselves as the rational, intelligent ones, and yet they fall into the same traps that they accuse conservatives of
But especially easy for those certain of their moral superiority.
But to be fair, in this case of Musk they are merely claiming that someone successful that they (now) disagree with politically only got there from luck rather than skill.
Which is close to what they believe (except about their individual selves) in general.
And if the liberal worldview is that success is all luck and not skill plus hard work as major components, then socialism makes perfect sense, right?
P.S. To be fair to Jeremiah, whom I no doubt disagree with on most things, he himself does get Musk mostly right, as that piece he linked demonstrates. Even if some of the things he claims about Musk being “an idiot” are incorrect, there is no doubt that many of them are.
the jury is still out on that. If his pitch to Tesla to replace every human worker with robots as AI is successful, I'm not sure that is going to be good for humanity. Also, don't fall into the trap of equating his intelligence with his wealth. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers as or more intelligent than Elon working to improve humanity. They aren't as well known because they don't have $1000 of government subsidies to invest with every $1 of their own money/labor. in fact the recent big beautiful Bill takes billions of dollars away from the scientists and engineers working on human problems and gives it to Tech, which will further increase their dominance in our culture.
Sure, the jury is still out but with the things he already created. He’s already built genuinely innovative things. And of course, Elon didn’t do it alone. He has absolutely a team of wonderful and intelligent engineers. But I think we are underrating the skill and leadership. It takes to Marshall talent and run organization. Again, the proof is in the pudding.
Feels like there is a pendulum swing beginning here, but it's one from a larger clock than from woke to today. Societal decay (very moralist language which I support) has been an ongoing issue since maybe the 70s (so many problems find their start there), and that decay has accelerated with social media and Andreessen figures. Even woke had strong elements of this decay in that it made victimhood a virtue and ended up with "defund the police".
The fact that we're talking in a much older moralist tone of societal decay, and, hopefully eventually, of societal rejuvenation or renaissance, is perhaps a sign the pendulum is swinging back. That a potential event marking the start of this involves the Pope against a vice promoting billionaire is just *chef kiss*.
Mid 1970s is when we started seeing inequality increasing again, and pretty much every social decay metric that doesn't map to lead in gasoline maps to inequality.
Inequality is the single biggest cause of all badness in the world.
Sam Walton, e.g., made the poor and the lower middle class in the U.S. much worse off. He only got his billions by stealing from those on the bottom 50% of the income scale.
How dare you deny that violation of the Tenth Commandment is not the fundamental salvation of humanity!?!
However if there's no correlation you can safely assume that the is no causation. There is correlation, therefore the question of causation must be taken seriously and not just blown off with nostrums.
I have never been this kind of guy, but more and more often, whenever these billionaire dipshits open their mouths to make noise, my first thought goes to:
"Motherfucker, taxes *are" the compromise."
Even Sam Harris, who used to be friends with many of these guys until they all boarded the Trump train, made the point on a recent podcast that rich people being discrete personally and generous philanthropically is a good idea if for no other reason than self-preservation; not acting like a spoiled asshole and spending your wealth for the benefit of the poor goes a long way towards keeping the pitchforks at bay. I think he even mentioned that all these people building these compounds to protect themselves in the event of some societal collapse are deluding themselves if they think it will keep them safe.
This brought to mind a distinct confluence of events early this year which prompted me to write a very large post on the Ezra Klein subreddit. I deleted my reddit account not long after and began writing notes on substack here and there.
At the time, Ross Douthat of the NYT interviewed Marc Andreessen just as President Biden had given his farewell address — warning the nation of an oligarchy and (right wing) tech industrial complex. This is also around the time that I was beginning to piece together the Abundance movement and realized Andreessen represented what is now called “Dark Abundance”.
In pursuing this thread, it became clear to me and probably most (from Douthat’s interview alone) that Marc Andreessen is a reactionary, he himself admits it.
What makes Andreessen’s views problematic, at least in this interview, is how little epistemic humility he shows — he speaks as if he is certain about what is right, true and good, with almost no visible room for doubt or revision.
That lack of humility seems tied, at least in part, to his status as a titan of the dot-com era — and to a habit of treating what is good for his business interests as a reliable proxy for what is right.
See my reddit post from January 2025 below (~120 upvotes, ~180 comments)
Andreesen is my personal favourite tech pseud. He’s like Peter Thiel if he was somehow even less likeable and had a perfectly egg-shaped skull. I remember when he was on Lex Fridman explaining a book called The Ancient City by nineteenth century French classicist Fustel de Coulanges (which I am sure he, at best, read an AI overview of) and somehow managed to make it about the culture war and the evils of environmentalism.
He is also incapable of making his ideology sound like anything more than a way to make it easier for him to scam people. Because scamming people is in fact all he really cares about doing and he is too dumb and uncharismatic to hide it.
I legitimately don’t think there is any tech figure more unlikable and with a more negative impact on society than Andreessen.
Something Jeremiah Johnson did not touch on is that Andreessen just led the creation of the two new largest super PACs in American politics, one representing the crypto industry and one representing AI (Scott Alexander has written about this). Both PACs are dedicated to the sole purpose of lobbying against any and all possible regulation of their respective industries.
If you follow Zvi Mowshovitz, he also writes frequently about situations in which Andreessen habitually lies about anyone he dislikes to attempt to destroy their careers.
Oh cool, I only know of Zvi Mowshovitz because of his Magic: The Gathering achievements and writing, very cool to see he's become a respected voice in the tech space. Thanks!
Absolutely! Zvi’s Substack is almost certainly the most comprehensive and detailed place for coverage of AI development and the AI industry, so it’s well worth a read. I will warn that he does not have a reputation for brevity.
Ha, that rings true! In the early 2000s he wrote an article series called 'My Fires' that was widely poked fun at (in an endearing way) for how long and detailed it was.
I have to thank JVL from the Bulwark for pointing me to you. Your writing is so good, and connecting the dots to our social decay can honestly alkow Andreesen to claim the title as poster child of the "movement."
Was listening to a pod where Andreessen was talking about movies, he seemed to be making interesting points until he admitted to really, really wanting an AI-generated adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. It's hard to think of something I would like to see LESS, but this is where our tech overlords are at unfortunately.
Many of the Tech Bros are hardcore Randian libertarians. Andreessen has made it clear that he views any constraints on his business as "the enemy" and is quite happy to align with the worst people as long as they support his agenda.
a16z started to go off the rails with its heavy bets on crypto in the early 10s. You can certainly make the case that social media has gone in a toxic direction but it isn't an inherently toxic technology. Crypto tech (perhaps excluding Bitcoin) has been mostly garbage.
hardcore Randian libertarian sounds like there's a coherent ideology at play that may supercede self-interest. But surely, Andreesen is a fan of subsidies and regulations that benefit him
"The founding thesis of this blog is that posting is the most powerful force in the universe, and that even billionaires** can have their brains deeply poisoned by the infinite scroll if they’re not careful."
Honestly after the last several years of observing, I think it's ESPECIALLY billionaires.
Andressen feels like Elon without ketamine - he doesn’t swing chainsaw or anything but his brain is equally fried by social media and his deep resentment to tech employee class.
And tbh this deep divide between tech employee class (very socially liberal) and some employer class (not all fwiw) is understudied I feel.
If anything, the absurd obsession of some tech companies to layoffs even after their financial numbers started to improve (or doing better than ever) - especially Meta keeps layoff people while they continue to hire new people (esp senior + level) is really absurd
Listen, I don’t like Elon, but at the very least the things that he has built have been genuine improvements to human humanity. Andressen is the complete opposite - he’s not interested in tackling hard technical problems. He just wants to build slop for an easy buck
That is very true! And I have (had more precisely) some respect to Elon for that regard - and you’re right his investment has been mostly easy bucks. And I guess another thing is, while I think he’s self sabotaging so much, at least I get to sympathize some of his upbringing (his dad sexually abused his kids, bullied prob bc of his autism etc). Andressen? Not so much tbh - he just looks like very entitled through and through
We only have Elon’s word on the bullying, and like many of his observations the example he gives of bullying is an inverse of reality. He claims he was bullied when a kid threw his ass down a stairwell and put him in the hospital yet he rarely explains why. The rest of the story is that Elon was bullying the kid! He was mocking the kid because the kid’s dad had died by suicide so the kid finally responded by throwing the bully (Elon) down a stairwell.
Look at how Elon behaves in business and on social media: he’s a bully, just like he was as a kid. The reality is that Elon is a sociopath who has perfected the victim inversion technique of “why did you make me hit you” into an art form.
Elon is DARVO personified.
Great comment - poetry in its preciseness 🫡
Given that his father did some well documented fucked up shit, I’m inclined to believe his childhood wasn’t great
Probably not, but Elon almost certainly took it out on his peers. He was a bully who always believed he’s a victim, same as he does now. It’s part of his sociopathic personality.
I believe that’s true, but there’s a point where everyone must take responsibility for their behavior, regardless of how it was informed. Bullying or criminality are typically informed by the same, and the tragedy of it is that those who engage in them must still face a reckoning so that it doesn’t continue indefinitely. It may not be their fault, but it is their responsibility.
He has built NOTHING
HE IS A CON
As it turns out there's a classic bit on this:
https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/elon-musk-is-a-genius-hes-also-an
At some point, you have to acknowledge his track record of success lol
No you do not.
How dare you let anything like reality or facts get in the way of the leftist narrative.
It’s funny because many people on the left view themselves as the rational, intelligent ones, and yet they fall into the same traps that they accuse conservatives of
Projection.
Easy for we humans to do in general.
But especially easy for those certain of their moral superiority.
But to be fair, in this case of Musk they are merely claiming that someone successful that they (now) disagree with politically only got there from luck rather than skill.
Which is close to what they believe (except about their individual selves) in general.
And if the liberal worldview is that success is all luck and not skill plus hard work as major components, then socialism makes perfect sense, right?
P.S. To be fair to Jeremiah, whom I no doubt disagree with on most things, he himself does get Musk mostly right, as that piece he linked demonstrates. Even if some of the things he claims about Musk being “an idiot” are incorrect, there is no doubt that many of them are.
the jury is still out on that. If his pitch to Tesla to replace every human worker with robots as AI is successful, I'm not sure that is going to be good for humanity. Also, don't fall into the trap of equating his intelligence with his wealth. There are hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers as or more intelligent than Elon working to improve humanity. They aren't as well known because they don't have $1000 of government subsidies to invest with every $1 of their own money/labor. in fact the recent big beautiful Bill takes billions of dollars away from the scientists and engineers working on human problems and gives it to Tech, which will further increase their dominance in our culture.
Sure, the jury is still out but with the things he already created. He’s already built genuinely innovative things. And of course, Elon didn’t do it alone. He has absolutely a team of wonderful and intelligent engineers. But I think we are underrating the skill and leadership. It takes to Marshall talent and run organization. Again, the proof is in the pudding.
Feels like there is a pendulum swing beginning here, but it's one from a larger clock than from woke to today. Societal decay (very moralist language which I support) has been an ongoing issue since maybe the 70s (so many problems find their start there), and that decay has accelerated with social media and Andreessen figures. Even woke had strong elements of this decay in that it made victimhood a virtue and ended up with "defund the police".
The fact that we're talking in a much older moralist tone of societal decay, and, hopefully eventually, of societal rejuvenation or renaissance, is perhaps a sign the pendulum is swinging back. That a potential event marking the start of this involves the Pope against a vice promoting billionaire is just *chef kiss*.
Mid 1970s is when we started seeing inequality increasing again, and pretty much every social decay metric that doesn't map to lead in gasoline maps to inequality.
Few major problems have a single cause.
That is not a good way to argue that this particular major problem does not have a single cause.
That's because it's not an argument. I'll leave the arguing to folks that enjoy arguing on the internet. Over and out...
So it's a drive-by dismissal without engaging. Got it.
Incorrect.
Inequality is the single biggest cause of all badness in the world.
Sam Walton, e.g., made the poor and the lower middle class in the U.S. much worse off. He only got his billions by stealing from those on the bottom 50% of the income scale.
How dare you deny that violation of the Tenth Commandment is not the fundamental salvation of humanity!?!
Few major problems have a single cause.
Correlation is not causation
However if there's no correlation you can safely assume that the is no causation. There is correlation, therefore the question of causation must be taken seriously and not just blown off with nostrums.
I have never been this kind of guy, but more and more often, whenever these billionaire dipshits open their mouths to make noise, my first thought goes to:
"Motherfucker, taxes *are" the compromise."
Even Sam Harris, who used to be friends with many of these guys until they all boarded the Trump train, made the point on a recent podcast that rich people being discrete personally and generous philanthropically is a good idea if for no other reason than self-preservation; not acting like a spoiled asshole and spending your wealth for the benefit of the poor goes a long way towards keeping the pitchforks at bay. I think he even mentioned that all these people building these compounds to protect themselves in the event of some societal collapse are deluding themselves if they think it will keep them safe.
Great article.
This brought to mind a distinct confluence of events early this year which prompted me to write a very large post on the Ezra Klein subreddit. I deleted my reddit account not long after and began writing notes on substack here and there.
At the time, Ross Douthat of the NYT interviewed Marc Andreessen just as President Biden had given his farewell address — warning the nation of an oligarchy and (right wing) tech industrial complex. This is also around the time that I was beginning to piece together the Abundance movement and realized Andreessen represented what is now called “Dark Abundance”.
In pursuing this thread, it became clear to me and probably most (from Douthat’s interview alone) that Marc Andreessen is a reactionary, he himself admits it.
What makes Andreessen’s views problematic, at least in this interview, is how little epistemic humility he shows — he speaks as if he is certain about what is right, true and good, with almost no visible room for doubt or revision.
That lack of humility seems tied, at least in part, to his status as a titan of the dot-com era — and to a habit of treating what is good for his business interests as a reliable proxy for what is right.
See my reddit post from January 2025 below (~120 upvotes, ~180 comments)
https://www.reddit.com/r/ezraklein/comments/1i3i7i8/nyt_opinion_article_how_democrats_drove_silicon/
Andreesen is my personal favourite tech pseud. He’s like Peter Thiel if he was somehow even less likeable and had a perfectly egg-shaped skull. I remember when he was on Lex Fridman explaining a book called The Ancient City by nineteenth century French classicist Fustel de Coulanges (which I am sure he, at best, read an AI overview of) and somehow managed to make it about the culture war and the evils of environmentalism.
He is also incapable of making his ideology sound like anything more than a way to make it easier for him to scam people. Because scamming people is in fact all he really cares about doing and he is too dumb and uncharismatic to hide it.
Thanks for this. In my mind, I associated Andreesen mostly with his techno-optimist essay. I had no idea of the hypocracy. What an absolute shitstain.
I legitimately don’t think there is any tech figure more unlikable and with a more negative impact on society than Andreessen.
Something Jeremiah Johnson did not touch on is that Andreessen just led the creation of the two new largest super PACs in American politics, one representing the crypto industry and one representing AI (Scott Alexander has written about this). Both PACs are dedicated to the sole purpose of lobbying against any and all possible regulation of their respective industries.
If you follow Zvi Mowshovitz, he also writes frequently about situations in which Andreessen habitually lies about anyone he dislikes to attempt to destroy their careers.
Oh cool, I only know of Zvi Mowshovitz because of his Magic: The Gathering achievements and writing, very cool to see he's become a respected voice in the tech space. Thanks!
Absolutely! Zvi’s Substack is almost certainly the most comprehensive and detailed place for coverage of AI development and the AI industry, so it’s well worth a read. I will warn that he does not have a reputation for brevity.
Ha, that rings true! In the early 2000s he wrote an article series called 'My Fires' that was widely poked fun at (in an endearing way) for how long and detailed it was.
I have to thank JVL from the Bulwark for pointing me to you. Your writing is so good, and connecting the dots to our social decay can honestly alkow Andreesen to claim the title as poster child of the "movement."
Was listening to a pod where Andreessen was talking about movies, he seemed to be making interesting points until he admitted to really, really wanting an AI-generated adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. It's hard to think of something I would like to see LESS, but this is where our tech overlords are at unfortunately.
Many of the Tech Bros are hardcore Randian libertarians. Andreessen has made it clear that he views any constraints on his business as "the enemy" and is quite happy to align with the worst people as long as they support his agenda.
a16z started to go off the rails with its heavy bets on crypto in the early 10s. You can certainly make the case that social media has gone in a toxic direction but it isn't an inherently toxic technology. Crypto tech (perhaps excluding Bitcoin) has been mostly garbage.
hardcore Randian libertarian sounds like there's a coherent ideology at play that may supercede self-interest. But surely, Andreesen is a fan of subsidies and regulations that benefit him
Fair
The conehead line made me laugh. If you know, you know.
Why is Peter Thiel’s head shaped like the egg in Alien?
Like bro put on a hat, that thing is indecent.
Is his head really shaped like that? Definitely an alien!
a16z is also balls deep in facilitating north korean / russian / iranian / etc money laundering via its investment in Uniswap: https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/of-tech-bros-and-trumpers
"The founding thesis of this blog is that posting is the most powerful force in the universe, and that even billionaires** can have their brains deeply poisoned by the infinite scroll if they’re not careful."
Honestly after the last several years of observing, I think it's ESPECIALLY billionaires.
I conducted a longitudinal study on the effects of posting while wealthy.
Preliminary results suggest irreversible feedback loops beginning around Series C.
Subjects displayed accelerated meme uptake, moral inversion, and spontaneous hostility toward clergy.
Control group (three raccoons with reliable Wi-Fi) remains largely indifferent to the pope.
Peer review pending. Funding provided by Andreessen Horowitz. Raccoons on the loose.
His "we're endorsing Trump" video with Horowitz was completely unhinged. He's a damaged person.
Exactly!
Anyone who endorses Orange Man Bad and not the current leftist standard-bearer must by definition be damaged, if not unhinged.