Astral Codex Ten

Marc Andreessen

19 min read

Marc Andreessen

Article

Marc Andreessen is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between February 20, 2021 and October 22, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “venture capitalist Marc Andreessen makes a simple exhortation”; “The specific elites include Marc Andreessen”; “responses to Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”“. It most often appears alongside Elon Musk, California, A16Z.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: February 20, 2021
  • Last seen: October 22, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Ezra Klein On Vetocracy
February 20, 2021 · Original source
In a viral essay, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen makes a simple exhortation: It’s time to build. Behind the coronavirus crisis, he writes, lies “our widespread inability to build.” America has been unable to create enough coronavirus tests, or even enough cotton swabs to fully utilize the tests we do have. We don’t have enough ventilators, ICU beds, personal protection equipment. The government hasn’t built the capacity to quickly get money to people or businesses who need it.
23: California Dreamin'
September 04, 2023 · Original source
The specific elites include the Collison brothers, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman, Marc Andreessen, and others, led by the mysterious Jan Sramek. The specific land is farmland in Solano County, about an hour’s drive northeast of San Francisco. The specific utopian city is going to look like this:
Inline links: Jan Sramek
Links For November 2023
December 01, 2023 · Original source
27: Zan Tafakari has a roundup of responses to Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”; I think the thalidomide objections are bad (the backlash against thalidomide has harmed far more people than thalidomide itself, just like with nuclear power), but maybe there are some useful tidbits in there. Ezra Klein has a response of his own called The Chief Ideologist Of The Silicon Valley Elite Has Some Strange Ideas (I almost phrased that as “the chief ideologist of the Brooklyn elite has a response…”, but there’s no need to sink to their level).
Inline links: a roundup of responses to Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, The Chief Ideologist Of The Silicon Valley Elite Has Some Strange Ideas
What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?
December 07, 2023 · Original source
I’m lumping more general Marc Andreassen style “It’s Time To Build”-ism into this section too.
Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds
October 21, 2025 · Original source
I recently talked to some Silicon Valley political consultants who updated me on the status of this issue: Marc Andreessen tried this in 2024 and it basically worked. Now he is trying it a second time, it will probably work again, and Marc Andreessen will probably own every politician twice over.
Everyone else The partisan groups have lots of money but little distortionary effect. Democratic machines try to elect Democrats, Republican machines try to elect Republicans, but they don't push their chosen candidates towards any specific position besides the ones that play well with voters. They are, so to speak, priced in. AIPAC is a single-issue PAC aimed at supporting Israel. They are orders of magnitude more effective than any comparable political organization. Their advantage stems from the nature of political donations, which come in two types. "Hard money" is money given directly to candidates; strict campaign finance limits it to $7000 per donor. "Soft money" comes from SuperPACs and can evade most campaign finance laws; it can pay for ads but can't fund candidates directly. Candidates prefer hard money to soft money, but it's harder to get; a single billionaire can provide unlimited soft money, but you need a wide donor base to acquire hard money. But not too wide! When millions of waitresses and bartenders gave Bernie Sanders $25 each, that was impressive grassroots support - but each of those $25 checks only went 1/280th as far as one person giving the $7000 max, and all of these waitresses are hard to corral and coordinate for downballot causes. AIPAC's natural constituency, (((Middle Eastern democracy supporters))), are at the exact sweet spot of moderately numerous, moderately well-off, and very committed. This gives AIPAC unparalleled access to hard money, compared to other groups that are more reliant on single billionaires or masses of poor people. But also, AIPAC fights hard. If some random Congressman is anti-Israel, AIPAC will swoop down on their race in Middle Of Nowhere, Missouri and pour $10 million into electing their opponent. By now everyone knows this, and the mere threat of AIPAC action is enough to keep most politicians in line. Everyone else includes other industry groups, labor groups, and activist cadres. Probably on aggregate these people are destroying America, but as individual organizations they're miniscule compared to the first two categories. The biggest of these is a real estate group 25-50% the size of AIPAC that nobody's ever heard of. The average PAC strategy is this: when the incumbent will obviously win, donate money to the incumbent. When there's a tight race, donate money to both sides. Why does the first prong of this strategy work? If the incumbent will definitely win, why are they selling out for more cash? Safe-seat Congressmen want more hard money for a pretty good reason: they can transfer it to other politicians or the party apparatus in exchange for goodwill that can be cashed in later for leadership positions. Safe-seat Congressmen want more soft money because . . . the consultants I talked to didn’t have a great answer here. One ventured that he had seen Democrats in D + 30 states with 0.000% chance of losing run themselves ragged raising more and more money. Just as Substack bloggers may reload their browser again and again watching the likes and restacks come in, so politicians will reload their campaign metrics panel watching the flow of donations. Any politician who’s survived long enough to matter is a little bit paranoid and will never truly accept that their safe seat is safe. These people aren't corrupt. They're not spending the money on campaign Lamborghinis. They don't even necessarily have some future campaign they're saving it for. They're just addicted to fundraising. And why does the second prong work? Why does donating to a Congressman buy their goodwill if you also donated an equal amount to their opponent? Part of the answer is the same as above: it can buy leadership positions, it can satisfy an irrational addiction to money. But another part is that politicians don’t like thinking of donations as a corrupt quid pro quo. The AIPAC strategy, where you know the PAC will fund your opponent if you don't do what they want, is something of an exception. Usually it's just - you have a random bill on toilet regulation or something in front of you. A bunch of randos want to call you and give their advice. But you see that Americans For Innovative Toilets donated $3295 during your last campaign (and maybe also gave something to your opponent, but whatever, everyone does it). This catches your attention. So you make sure to take their call first, and listen the longest. This still doesn't entirely make sense to me. But it's how all PACs (except AIPAC and the machines) operated until 2024. III. In 2024, the crypto industry raised the stakes. Let's put numbers on all of this. In that year, AIPAC raised $87 million. The real estate group that usually plays runner-up raised $20 million. Marc Andreessen’s new crypto PAC, Fairshake, raised $260 million. Just a totally unheard-of amount of money for a single industry. How did they do it? In some sense, this isn't surprising. In case you haven't heard, Bitcoin did very well. Many people in the industry got rich. A16Z, Marc Andreessen's crypto-heavy venture capital firm, says they invested $8 billion into crypto. Coinbase, the biggest US crypto company, is valued at $85 billion. The richest crypto billionaires have 10-to-11 digit net worths. And government regulation is potentially an existential threat to crypto. So in some sense, it's the least surprising thing in the world that they could scrounge up $260 million to save their multi-hundred-billion-dollar industry. The only reason it's remarkable is that, for some reason which I still haven't figured out, nobody else - not the oil industry, not the firearms industry, not the defense industry - ever tried this before. How exactly did the industry pull this together? Andreessen personally donated $40 - $50 million (remember, the second-biggest industry PAC, real estate, raised only $20 million total from all donors, personal and business). Again, this isn't a crazy proportion of his net worth: he has $2 billion, so a $50 million expense hardly forces him back to ramen. It's just that no other billionaire of his stature is even in the game. Then his cofounder Ben Horowitz donated another $40 million. Then two big crypto companies (Coinbase and Ripple, both with A16Z links) donated another $40 - 50 million each. As the saying goes, sooner or later it all adds up to real money. Anyway, they won overwhelmingly. They combined the business-as-usual strategy of donating to safe incumbents and both sides of close races, with the AIPAC strategy of picking a few big opponents of their cause and airdropping massive sums on their rivals. For example, Representative Katie Porter (D-California) was an Elizabeth Warren ally and cryptocurrency critic. When she ran for Senate, Fairshake dropped $10 million into attack ads against her in the primaries - more than most candidates' total spending. The attack ads didn't say she was bad on crypto - something that approximately no voters care about. They were just normal attack ads on whatever aspect of her policy and personality focus groups said she was most vulnerable on (in practice, an accusation that she mistreated her Congressional staff). She lost badly, coming in third place. Although nobody can prove she wouldn't have lost anyway, conventional wisdom was that crypto had successfully made its point. According to SFGate: An unnamed political operative told the magazine: “Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you—we’ll kill your f—king family, we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.” The scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of cases, the New Yorker wrote. Now, neither presidential candidate wants to run astray of the industry: Donald Trump spoke at a crypto conference, and Kamala Harris signaled her support. And Porter is forced out of Congress. These are all important signs that crypto’s bet is paying off, but I think I know what metric the crypto barons themselves are watching, and if anything it’s even more bullish: Red arrow represents the 2024 election. Crypto titans had many valid complaints. The Biden administration’s crypto regulation policy was arbitrary and punitive, and occasionally skirted the border of illegality. It genuinely harmed innovation and held back important industries like remittances, digital payments, and (of course) prediction markets. As a crypto bag-holder myself, I can’t complain about all the beautiful verdant green on the chart above. Still, winning this hard is maybe a little humiliating. Does the government really need a strategic Bitcoin reserve? Should it really release economic data on three different blockchains? Must we really have a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol? We’re exploring bold new territory here. Give me your degens, your risk-seeking. Your huddled masses, yearning to bet free. IV. …and we’ll be exploring it a whole lot more, very soon. Last month, the AI industry announced a new SuperPAC called “Leading The Future” (a dumb name, but, in their defense, “AIPAC” was already taken). They start with $200 million in seed funding, led by a $50 million donation by Andreessen Horowitz, and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. (Why Brockman and not Altman, or OpenAI as a corporation? Because most people don’t know who Brockman is, so this keeps OpenAI’s hands clean. I imagine Altman going into a meeting, pointing at Brockman, and saying “I’m famous, you’re not, please cough up $50 million of your own money for the cause.”) On the same day, Meta announced their own SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across (META) California. Why two PACs? Opinions differ; one person told me that it lets the general PAC avoid the negative associations that Facebook has gathered over the years, but the Verge thinks that maybe everyone else in tech hates Zuckerberg too much to work with him. Meta has committed to spending “tens of millions”. Most likely, the new PAC will use the playbook pioneered by crypto: destroy any candidate who dares support regulations on AI, by funding attack ads that don’t mention AI in any way and, at best, briefly mention the name “Leading The Future”. Just the Andreessen/Brockman SuperPAC, without any help from Meta, is already twice as rich as AIPAC. Their existence sends a clear message: we are going to crush any politician who tries to regulate AI. V. …unless someone stops them. Leading The Future still only has 2% as much money as the almond industry. The tiny scale of US political spending is dangerous insofar as it means that one or two billionaires willing to go all-in can distort the national landscape. But it also makes it possible to oppose them. Certainly if you can get one or two billionaires of your own - but it might even be within the range of a committed group of ordinary people. Not waiters and bartenders, maybe. But if safe AI supporters were as committed as Israel supporters, they could probably make something happen. For a long time, the AI safety movement has underperformed politically. Effective altruism includes thousands of well-off people committed to spending 10% of their income on improving the world. If a thousand of them gave $7K each to political candidates, that would be $7 million of campaign-finance-compliant hard money - about as much as anyone can gather for anything. Hard money buys more influence per dollar than soft money, so this could be a big deal. All you’d need is the right people to coordinate it. So far, this has been slow going. Partly it’s because in the early 2020s, people affiliated with FTX took point on this effort; when FTX imploded, it not only took its incipient political infrastructure with it, but poisoned the well for future efforts. And partly it’s because EAs overlearned the lesson of the early 2010s, when we spoke out against AI capabilities efforts so “effectively” that a bunch of people thought “wow, AI capabilities companies must be a really big deal, maybe I should found one!”; the resulting institutional scar tissue biased us towards staying quiet about our concerns. Still, I wouldn’t be writing this if the consultants and activists weren’t gearing up for a bigger fight. They asked me to include some action items for readers who want to participate: Email aisafetypolitics@gmail.com to connect to the people organizing this effort and talk with them about what you can do, including potential future donation opportunities.
Inline links: According to SFGate, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bWaN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13d918d0-5918-4bf6-9dee-0a798c76ae82_706x499.png, strategic Bitcoin reserve?, release economic data on three different blockchains?, a twelve foot high golden statue of Trump holding a Bitcoin in front of the US Capitol?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!eZlq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa435a03-c505-4414-8be8-4a3b76dfad12_738x612.png, announced a new SuperPAC, Mobilizing Economic Transformation Across, the Verge thinks
My Antichrist Lecture
October 22, 2025 · Original source
Google says that the most common name meaning “son of man” is “Anderson”, from Greek “Andreas” + son. And Silicon Valley’s most powerful venture capitalist is named Marc Andreessen. Is there any venture capitalist who calls themselves the “Alpha and Omega”? Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and omega the last: “Alpha and omega” is an implicit claim to span all things, similar to the English phrase “from A to Z”. Marc Andreessen’s company, Andreessen Horowitz, is more commonly called A16Z - superficially a reference to its first and last letters, but also making the same implicit claim. Just as Ursula von der Leyen is a leader in AI regulation, Marc Andreessen is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, having recently founded a $100 million anti-AI-safety SuperPAC. If the fight for AI alignment is Revelation’s final fight of Good vs. Evil, then John was correct to name him as the leader of the evil side. During my original lecture, an audience member objected that Andreessen holds stakes in several other AI companies, but not Anthropic. In what sense, then, can he be said to be giving power to the Beast? This might be a reference to his general anti-AI safety lobbying activities. In 16:13, “three unclean spirits like frogs” emanate from the mouth of the Antichrist and his allies, which muster the kings of the world to the side of evil. I think this is a good match for Andreessen packing the Trump administration with lieutenants charged with turning the government against AI safety, and I tentatively identify the three spirits as David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, and Michael Kratsios. They are “like frogs” in that they act like MAGA populists, who use the frog as their symbol. Feels bad, man But it’s also possible that Andreessen will become a major Anthropic investor before the end. There’s some textual support here too, this time in Daniel 7, another apocalyptic prophecy generally considered to address the same events as Revelation from a different perspective. Daniel has a vision of four beasts: a winged lion, a bear, a leopard, and a many-headed monster. The monster is the worst and final beast, and it has ten horns. Then a “little horn”, a “horn with human eyes”, shows up, defeats three of the original horns, and takes over. Then the monster begins a reign of terror, and finally is defeated by God. If, as before, the beasts represent companies, then the four beasts of Daniel correspond to the four major AI labs: Google DeepMind, X.AI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. How? I think these correspond to the ethnicity of the founders: Bear = Google, founded by Sergey Brin (Russian)
Inline links: Marc Andreessen, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XBN2!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5be21f3b-4a53-4f47-ad78-6cb72e3ad264_965x525.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!iDdn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5e8b7216-eff2-48cf-bc36-0c5501494137_929x475.png, A16Z, is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FhC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2e5e8be9-ed2d-4f51-855c-f55deac58c02_976x850.jpeg
Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet and omega the last: “Alpha and omega” is an implicit claim to span all things, similar to the English phrase “from A to Z”. Marc Andreessen’s company, Andreessen Horowitz, is more commonly called A16Z - superficially a reference to its first and last letters, but also making the same implicit claim. Just as Ursula von der Leyen is a leader in AI regulation, Marc Andreessen is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, having recently founded a $100 million anti-AI-safety SuperPAC. If the fight for AI alignment is Revelation’s final fight of Good vs. Evil, then John was correct to name him as the leader of the evil side. During my original lecture, an audience member objected that Andreessen holds stakes in several other AI companies, but not Anthropic. In what sense, then, can he be said to be giving power to the Beast? This might be a reference to his general anti-AI safety lobbying activities. In 16:13, “three unclean spirits like frogs” emanate from the mouth of the Antichrist and his allies, which muster the kings of the world to the side of evil. I think this is a good match for Andreessen packing the Trump administration with lieutenants charged with turning the government against AI safety, and I tentatively identify the three spirits as David Sacks, Sriram Krishnan, and Michael Kratsios. They are “like frogs” in that they act like MAGA populists, who use the frog as their symbol. Feels bad, man But it’s also possible that Andreessen will become a major Anthropic investor before the end. There’s some textual support here too, this time in Daniel 7, another apocalyptic prophecy generally considered to address the same events as Revelation from a different perspective. Daniel has a vision of four beasts: a winged lion, a bear, a leopard, and a many-headed monster. The monster is the worst and final beast, and it has ten horns. Then a “little horn”, a “horn with human eyes”, shows up, defeats three of the original horns, and takes over. Then the monster begins a reign of terror, and finally is defeated by God. If, as before, the beasts represent companies, then the four beasts of Daniel correspond to the four major AI labs: Google DeepMind, X.AI, OpenAI, and Anthropic. How? I think these correspond to the ethnicity of the founders: Bear = Google, founded by Sergey Brin (Russian)
Inline links: A16Z, is the leader of the anti-regulation faction, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FhC5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2e5e8be9-ed2d-4f51-855c-f55deac58c02_976x850.jpeg
In what sense is Marc Andreessen a “little horn”? In traditional commentary on Daniel, this refers to the Antichrist starting as a seemingly-insignificant king, much weaker than those he ultimately defeats. This matches Andreessen, who, with a fortune of only $2 billion, seems an unlikely candidate to stand up to titans like Brin ($150 billion) or Musk ($400 billion).