In January 2026, Andreessen Horowitz hired Daniel Penny, the Marine veteran acquitted in the subway chokehold death of Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old homeless street performer. The hire was widely seen as a political statement. Andreessen himself framed the firm's controversies as providing 'this incredible competitive advantage' for attracting founders who want to work with investors who are 'brave.'
In leaked WhatsApp messages to a group chat with White House officials and tech leaders (July 2025), Marc Andreessen said universities will 'pay the price' for promoting diversity. He called Stanford and MIT 'mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation.'
Since Trump's November 2024 election, Marc Andreessen has been spending approximately half his time at Mar-a-Lago as an unpaid adviser, helping shape tech, business, and economic policy. He confirmed involvement in recruiting talent for Elon Musk's DOGE initiative and vetting administration candidates.
Marc Andreessen actively lobbied against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) while his firm Andreessen Horowitz had over $7 billion in crypto funds under CFPB jurisdiction. On the Joe Rogan podcast in November 2024, he called the CFPB an agency that exists to 'terrorize finance' and prevent fintech competition. The Trump administration subsequently hollowed out the CFPB. ProPublica documented that Andreessen-funded company Dwolla had been sanctioned by the CFPB in 2016 for deceiving consumers about data security.
In November 2024, Marc Andreessen suggested that advertisers who boycotted certain platforms could face criminal charges under the incoming Trump administration. Legal experts noted that the U.S. Supreme Court established in 1982 (NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware) that boycotts are protected expression under the First Amendment. Critics highlighted the contradiction between Andreessen's stated free-market principles and his advocacy for using government power to coerce businesses into advertising decisions.
$100.0M
In August 2024, Andreessen and Horowitz launched 'Leading the Future' (LTF), a super PAC focused on ensuring minimal AI regulation. Backed by OpenAI's Greg Brockman, Palantir's Joe Lonsdale, and Perplexity, it raised $100 million to influence AI policy in favor of industry.
Marc Andreessen donated $2.5M to Right for America PAC (2024), $844,600 to Trump campaign/RNC (2024), and $3M to MAGA Inc. (first half 2025). Since the election, he has been spending 'about half his time' at Mar-a-Lago as an unpaid advisor, helping vet candidates for DOGE and the administration.
In October 2023, Marc Andreessen published a 5,200-word manifesto calling social responsibility, sustainability, tech ethics, and trust and safety measures 'the enemies of techno-optimism.' He attacked universal basic income, claiming it would 'turn people into zoo animals farmed by the state,' and argued Earth is 'dramatically underpopulated.'
Throughout 2023-2024, Marc Andreessen consistently attacked AI safety and regulation efforts. In his October 2023 Techno-Optimist Manifesto, he called AI safety critics part of a 'cult' and wrote that 'regulation of AI (math) is the foundation of a new totalitarianism.' He stated that 'any deceleration of AI will cost lives' and framed deaths prevented by AI that was prevented from existing as 'a form of murder.' Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly rebuked Andreessen's argument that AI is 'just math' and should not be regulated.
In June-August 2022, Marc Andreessen and wife Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen wrote to Atherton Town Council expressing 'IMMENSE objection' to multifamily overlay zones, claiming they would 'MASSIVELY decrease our home values' and 'IMMENSELY increase noise pollution and traffic.' The town's proposal included only 58 multifamily units to meet state requirements for 348 new housing units. After Andreessen and 300+ residents submitted negative feedback, the town removed the multifamily rezoning feature. This contradicted Andreessen's 2020 essay 'It's Time to Build' where he identified lack of housing as the reason for skyrocketing Bay Area home prices.
Marc Andreessen co-authored NCSA Mosaic in 1993, the first widely used graphical web browser that made the internet accessible to non-technical users. He co-founded Netscape Communications in 1994, whose Navigator browser drove mainstream internet adoption. In 1998, Netscape released its browser source code as the Mozilla project, which eventually became Firefox. These contributions were foundational to the modern internet, democratized access to information, and made a significant contribution to open source software.