© Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Michael Kovac/Vanity Fair/Philip Pacheco/AFP/Justin Tallis/WPA/Getty Images/KJNGeorge Soros • Marc Andreessen • Bill Gates • Elon Musk
With an estimated net worth of over $1 billion,
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the Netscape browser and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is far from an everyman. And yet Andreessen's biting criticisms of the "entrenched oligarchic structure of the present regime" have made him
one of the surprising figureheads of a growing anti-elite movement that could — depending on which side wins out —
reshape America's political and social future.Andreessen is one of the more prominent names in
a new class of tech wealth that includes figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel whose political vision and methods conflict both with dot-com tech titans like Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar, as well as with those of old world industry and media, like Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner. While it might seem strange, given his own position of power, for someone like Andreessen to criticize elites, the truth is that elites have cliques, just like the rest of us. And in the cafeteria of America's billionaires,
Andreessen and his peers are hurling food and spoiling for a fight, while the incumbents are calling in favors at the State Department and New York Times.Of course, neither camp is driven solely by high-minded ideals, but both maintain
fundamentally irreconcilable views of the kind of country they want to build. While
Reid Hoffman and Pierre Omidyar, respectively, founders of
LinkedIn and eBay, pledged $27 million to help artificial intelligence "vindicate social values of fairness ... and justice,"
Andreessen publicly laments the ill effects of training artificial intelligence on the "woke mind virus." Marc Benioff's company, Salesforce, announced last year that they would
tie executive pay to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives, which Andreessen has sharply criticized.
While these disagreements may look like a contest between conservatives and liberals, the reality is not that simple.
Comment: Again, the EU has shown that it cares not for reason nor justice if it means obeying their masters in the US and continuing with their pathological attack against Russia, and so any reluctance on a crackdown on diesel is because they know that it's currently just not viable: Russian oil floods global markets via major Asian intermediaries