Ben Horowitz

Ben Horowitz made the same political turn as Marc Andreessen, in the same July 2024 podcast endorsement, which he opened with "sorry, Mom." But I don't think he got there the same way. The money read applies to both of them. Their firm was heavily exposed to crypto and AI, the administration in power was tightening both screws, and the other candidate promised to loosen them. Backing him wasn't a conversion. It was a position. What sets Horowitz apart is the family precedent. His father, David Horowitz, was a prominent sixties leftist who moved to the right in the eighties with very similar justifications. Andreessen invented his flip. Horowitz inherited a template.

As a person, the accounts are warmer than the politics would suggest, and I want to give that full weight. Colleagues describe a shy outsider whose awkwardness turned into empathy: someone people want to work for and who can get rivals to work together. He personally teaches new a16z hires about the firm's culture. By most accounts he's genuinely kind, or works very hard at it, which he'd say is the whole job of a CEO.

My critique is the same structural one I make about a16z generally. They cast themselves as insurgents fighting a credentialed elite, but they are the establishment now. The only way to stay the rebel is to invent new dragons: the precautionary principle, AI safety researchers, EU regulators. You don't get to be the hero without an enemy.

On uncertainty, I've spent far less airtime on Horowitz than on Andreessen, and some of my read on him is inferred from the firm rather than from him. A public break with Marc on a real policy question would tell me his politics are his own and not the partnership's, and I'd revise this.