Democrats once seemed to have a monopoly on Silicon Valley. Perhaps you remember when Elon Musk bought Twitter and posted pictures of cabinets at the old office filled with “#StayWoke” T-shirts.

But just as the country is realigning itself along new ideological and political lines, so is the tech capital of the world. In 2024, many of the Valley’s biggest tech titans came out with their unabashed support for Donald Trump. There was, of course, Elon Musk. . . but also WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum; Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who run the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini; VCs such as Shaun Maguire, David Sacks, and Chamath Palihapitiya; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey; hedge fund manager Bill Ackman; and today’s Honestly guest, one of the world’s most influential investors and the man responsible for bringing the internet to the masses—Marc Andreessen.

Marc’s history with politics is a long one—but it was always with the Democrats. He supported Democrats including Bill Clinton in 1996, Al Gore in 2000, and John Kerry in 2004. He endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and then Hillary Clinton in 2016.

But over the summer, he announced that he was going to endorse and donate to Trump. Public records show that Marc donated at least $4.5 million to pro-Trump super PACs. Why? Because he believed that the Biden administration had, as he tells us in this conversation, “seething contempt” for tech, and that this election was existential for AI, crypto, and start-ups in America.

Marc got his start as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, which is said to have launched the internet boom. He then co-founded Netscape, which became the most popular web browser in the ’90s, and sold it to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion.

He later became an angel investor and board member at Facebook. And in 2006, when everyone told Mark Zuckerberg to sell Facebook to Yahoo for $1 billion, Marc was the only voice saying: don’t. (Today, Facebook has a market cap of $1.4 trillion.)

He now runs a venture capital firm with Ben Horowitz, where they invest in small start-ups that they think have potential to become billion-dollar unicorns. And their track record is pretty spot-on: They invested in Airbnb, Coinbase, Instagram, Instacart, Pinterest, Slack, Reddit, Lyft, and Oculus—to name a few of the unicorns. (And for full disclosure: Marc and his wife Laura were small, seed investors in The Free Press.)

Marc has built a reputation as someone who can recognize “the next big thing” in tech and, more broadly, in our lives. He has been called the “chief ideologist of the Silicon Valley elite,” a “cultural tastemaker,” and even “Silicon Valley’s resident philosopher-king.”

Today, Bari and Marc discuss his reasons for supporting Trump—and the vibe shift in Silicon Valley; why he thinks we’ve been living under soft authoritarianism over the last decade and why it’s finally cracking; why he’s so confident in Elon Musk and his band of counter-elites; how President Biden tried to kill tech and control AI; why he thinks AI censorship is “a million times more dangerous” than social media censorship; why technologists are the ones to restore American greatness; what Trump serves for dinner; why Marc has spent about half his time at Mar-a-Lago since November 5; and why he thinks it’s morning in America.

Click below to listen to the podcast, or scroll down for an edited transcript of our conversation.

Bari Weiss:I have never seen you with more of a pep in your step and more of a perma-smile on your face than I have over the last four weeks. What about Trump’s win felt so fundamentally important to you for America?

Marc Andreesen: It’s morning in America, so I’m very happy. I think the analogy for what’s happening right now is 1980—the transition from the ’70s to the ’80s and the Carter-Reagan race.

In this election, there was a dramatic shift to the right across broad swaths of the population, including in California. Even in places like San Francisco. And then the youth vote—the kids are changing. The new kids are not the same as the kids 10 years ago.

But even beyond the partisan politics of it, it feels like the last decade has been a very emotionally dark and repressive time. And Silicon Valley was on the vanguard of what you might call a soft authoritarian social revolution starting about 10 or 12 years ago. And that soft repressive authoritarianism had a real negative impact on my whole world—the tech industry, the country, and I think an entire generation of young people. It certainly feels like that’s cracked.

People are finally poking their heads out of the frozen tundra of the culture and realizing that it’s actually okay to build things, hire on merit, celebrate success, and fundamentally be proud of the country and be patriotic.

On his personal political transformation:

BW: When did you start to update your mental model of politics and what was going on in the country?

MA: I was completely shocked that Trump got nominated in 2015 and I didn’t understand it at all. I was completely shocked times 10 when he won the general election in 2016. And I felt very disoriented.

I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which is staunch Trump country, but I had lost touch with the culture and didn’t understand what was happening in that part of the world. I was a fully assimilated Californian and I no longer understood what was happening.

I spent 2015–2020 basically confused. I tried deliberately to reset my own psychology. I was just like, I need to go think about this hard, and I need to read a lot and I need to go back in history. I had to basically completely rebuild my worldview. And that took six years.

James Burnham was super helpful on these topics. He was one of the smartest political scientists, philosophers of the twentieth century on American politics. He was a full-on communist revolutionary activist and a personal friend of Leon Trotsky in the 1920s and ’30s, and then he broke from communism in the ’40s, and he went hard to the right. And he helped found the National Review with William F. Buckley.

He wrote these two books in the 1940s, when the heart of the big three-way battle between communism, fascism, and liberalism was raging in the world. One’s called The Managerial Revolution. And it basically says, these movements have real differences, but there is something in common, which he called “managerialism,” which is the establishment of an expert class. The expert technocrats, who are assumed to be able to steer society in healthy and beneficial ways, and then often lead you in very bad directions.

He wrote this other book called The Machiavellians, and he looks at politics structurally as opposed to ideologically, and one of the ideas is what he calls the “iron law of oligarchy.” Which says: Democracy is never actually a thing. There’s no actual system of democracy. Because you always end up with a small minority in charge of a large majority in basically every society in human history. And the reason is because small elites can organize and large majorities cannot.

It doesn’t matter what you think democracy should be. Any form of democracy is going to have an elite class that is going to be running things. And that elite class is either going to be good and beneficial and have the best interests of the population in mind, or it’s not. But to pretend that they’re voted in and out and that the people are in charge is just a myth.

BW: So are we living in a democracy in America or an oligarchy?

MA:An oligarchy. Every society in history has been an oligarchy.

BW: You supported Clinton in 1996, Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, Obama in 2008, Hillary in 2016, and then, of course, in this election, Donald Trump. Are you a turncoat or are you someone who saw the corruption of the old elite—the old oligarchy—and decided to switch into a new counter-elite, a new oligarchy?

MA:Both.

BW: Explain what causes someone to turn. Because only some of your class has.

MA: So there is something that was never written down, but everybody understood, which I call “The Deal.”