MarcAndreessen

Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm, a16z, is deeply invested in surveillance and weapons technology, and Andreessen himself is obsessed with “crime prevention” through technology.

a16z is a principal funder behind Flock Safety. Experts have warned of easily-exploited backdoors into Flock’s linked, AI-powered cameras. Flock’s technology has been abused to stalk romantic interests, surveil protestors, track women seeking reproductive care and more.

A16z’s portfolio includes a range of AI-powered “public safety” and defense technology, including Drone company Skydio, the emergency response company Prepared, and other technologies they see as a “stack” to create “predictive policing.” Think Minority Report, but with a track record of major errors.

It’s not just “criminals” who are targeted for surveillance by companies in Marc’s portfolio. Unless kids playing video games are committing crimes. Video game maker Roblox, a major a16z investment, is accused of illegally gathering and misusing children’s data without parental consent.

Andreessen is a long-time believer in “Network State” ideology. Alongside Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and others, Andreessen has helped found and invested heavily in efforts like Praxis, Prospera, and California Forever.

These projects and others backed by Andreessen and his allies aim to take create corporate-controlled cities from Gaza to Greenland to California where CEOs rule as kings and concepts like democracy, individual liberty, privacy and self-determination are distant relics of the past.

In an Oct. 16, 2023 post titled “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” Andreessen laid out a sweeping worldview that casts markets and technological acceleration as humanity’s only viable path forward. The essay rejects what he describes as a coordinated campaign of “mass demoralization” under banners such as “existential risk,” “sustainability,” “ESG,” “Sustainable Development Goals,” “social responsibility,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” “de-growth,” and “the limits of growth.”

Andreessen portrays these concepts not as policy debates but as moral failings and obstacles to progress. He calls the “Precautionary Principle”—the idea that new technologies should be restrained until proven safe—“deeply immoral.” In its place, he advocates unrestrained technological development, arguing that humanity must dominate nature rather than defer to it.

“We believe in greatness,” he writes. “We admire the great technologists and industrialists who came before us, and we aspire to make them proud.” The document frames technological entrepreneurs as heroic actors whose work transcends politics, and casts critics as enemies of human flourishing.

Last July, The Washington Post reported on leaked WhatsApp messages between Andreessen and Trump officials and tech industry figures. In the texts, Andreessen railed against American universities, claiming they had “declared war on 70% of the country” and would “pay the price.” He described Stanford and MIT as “political lobbying operations fighting American innovation” and argued that the National Science Foundation deserved “the bureaucratic death penalty… Raze it to the ground and start over.”

Andreessen focused particularly on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and immigration policy. “The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal,” he wrote. He argued that these forces “systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”

Referring to “my cohort of citizens,” Andreessen suggested that a once-complacent group had grown enraged. “The insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020, totally shredded that complacency,” he wrote, apparently referencing racial justice protests following George Floyd’s murder. “And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore.”

Andreessen, a Coinbase board member, was accused in a shareholder lawsuit of selling large quantities of Coinbase stock shortly after the company’s April 2021 direct listing, before negative financial information became public.

According to court filings, Andreessen Horowitz sold approximately $118 million in shares within days of Coinbase’s Nasdaq debut. The board opted for a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO and insiders collectively sold roughly $2.9 billion in stock before the company disclosed “material, negative information” in its first earnings report as a public company.

Within weeks, Coinbase’s market capitalization dropped by more than $37 billion, and the value of shares sold declined by over $1 billion. The lawsuit alleges that insiders, including CEO Brian Armstrong and board members such as Andreessen, were aware of the negative information at the time of their sales.

Andreessen has described anti-democratic writer Curtis Yarvin—a leading figure in the so-called “Dark Enlightenment” movement—as a friend. He has publicly quoted Yarvin in speeches and online posts and is an investor in Urbit, a company Yarvin founded to develop decentralized server infrastructure. Yarvin stepped down from Urbit in 2019.

Yarvin has argued that democracy is a failed system that should be replaced with a monarchy or CEO-style ruler. He has called for a “reboot” of the American political order, proposing “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law,” with power transferred to a “C.E.O.-in-chief.”

In a January 2025 speech at the Hoover Institution, Andreessen referred to Yarvin as a “friend” and quoted him: “We are living under the 80-year evolution of FDR’s personal monarchy, but without FDR.” On X, Andreessen defended reading controversial thinkers, writing: “You can read Rand without becoming an objectivist, Marx without becoming a socialist, Yarvin without becoming a monarchist…”