Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Marc Andreessen, one of the world’s most powerful venture capitalists, is playing a central role in recruiting for Elon Musk’s US government cost-cutting unit, in a sign of the deepening ties between Silicon Valley and Donald Trump’s incoming administration.
The billionaire co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz is helping interview and identify candidates for the Department for Government Efficiency (Doge), a new advisory body created by the president-elect and co-chaired by Musk, according to two people with knowledge of the talent search.
While having no formal role at Doge, Andreessen is suggesting potential candidates and introducing his own network as the department begins to hire staff, one of the people said.
Andreessen Horowitz declined to comment. Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Andreessen, who co-founded early web browser Netscape, already has close ties to the Tesla chief executive, having invested hundreds of millions of dollars in his start-ups including xAI and SpaceX, while also backing Musk’s $44bn takeover of X.
Musk, one of Trump’s closest advisers, has promised to cut $2tn from the US budget together with Doge co-head Vivek Ramaswamy, a former rival for the Republican nomination for president.
In mid-November, the Doge account on X encouraged any potential candidates to send in their CVs, posting: “We need super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.”
Andreessen is focused on bringing in higher-level candidates rather than assessing the pile of résumés sent in by hopefuls, one person said.
Andreessen and his co-founder Ben Horowitz came out in support of Trump in July, a move that shocked Silicon Valley and reversed years of support for Democratic candidates.
Horowitz later pledged support to Trump’s rival Kamala Harris, but Andreessen doubled down on his backing of the president-elect and has emerged as an important influence. “He is spending a lot of time over at Mar-a-Lago,” said a person with knowledge of the matter in a reference to Trump’s Florida estate.
In X posts and interviews, Andreessen has railed against some artificial intelligence companies for being too “woke”, and accused social media groups such as Google’s YouTube of “censoring” American voices in the past. These attacks echo similar refrains from Musk over recent months.
However, Andreessen also sits on the board of Meta, whose chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has been repeatedly criticised by Trump for allegedly blocking conservative comments on its platforms.
Trump already appears to have been influenced by Andreessen. In a post on his social media network Truth Social on Wednesday, in which he announced the nomination of Gail Slater to lead the antitrust division of the Department of Justice, Trump wrote: “Big Tech has run wild for years, stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”
Little Tech, a descriptor that refers to start-ups, is a term popularised by Andreessen, whose venture firm declared in July that its “political efforts as a firm are entirely focused on defending Little Tech”.
Andreessen and Trump are also both supporters of cryptocurrencies. Trump’s campaign rode a wave of support from crypto groups, which spent heavily to back his election campaign. Andreessen’s venture firm has raised billions of dollars to invest in crypto projects.
Source link
