This Fucking Guy: Marc Andreesen

Over the weekend, I opened the WaPo and what was I assaulted with? This ginormous fucker, Marc Andreesen and a story about his loathing of DEI and education.

“Tech billionaire Trump adviser Marc Andreessen says universities will ‘pay the price’ for DEI” (gifted link)

What is this human nutsack whinging about? In a nutshell, he is lamenting that his experience in college as an out of state student at UIUC (University of Illinois Urbana Champaign) is no longer possible.

The crux of his antipathy was captured in a group text that includes members of the White House staff. Take a gander at this:

Yesterday, The Bulwark’s JVL posted his Triad “Marc Andreesen and the Billionaire Victim Club” (sadly, that is a paywalled article) that did an outstanding job of laying out the mega-hypocrisy of the Silicon Valley tech-bros.

Over the weekend the Washington Post got hold of a text chain in which Marc Andreessen explained some facts of life to his fellow travelers in the Trump White House.“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal,” Andreessen wrote. “When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”

Andreessen was especially concerned about the double effects of immigration and DEI on elite universities.

I know what you’re thinking: Geez, that sounds a little bit like weird racialist thinking.

Oh friend. It’s not a little bit like that.

No, this is full on racist fuckery of maximal proportions.

For the record, Andreesen was born in 1971 in Iowa, but was raised in Wisconsin. In the 70s and 80s, the upper midwest was, um, shall we say lily-white?

Mr. Last continues:

“They.” “My people.” “Us.” And yes, the 1970s were famously a time when discrimination was aimed at whites.

There are two things happening here. The first is the delta between Marc Andreessen’s self-mythologizing and reality. The second is the state of the real world as it exists today.

You may not know Andreessen; outside of tech circles, he’s not as famous as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. But like them, he is part of the Silicon Valley oligarchy that has thrown in with Trumpism.

In case you have a niggling tinge in the back of your neck, as the hairs stand up, yes, you should. Daniel Penney, the man who killed the homeless man on the NY subway and who was acquitted. He was hired by Marc Andreesen’s VC firm, A16Z. I am sure he’s doing great work as a research analyst looking at alphas.

Back to the story at hand. Marc likes to talk about his struggles, but the reality is a wee bit less sketchy:

It’s obvious how Andreessen views his own rise—as the story of a man who fought through a world stacked against him. Now let me tell you the real story.

Andreessen grew up, as he says, in Wisconsin. He then attended the University of Illinois. In 1989, out-of-state tuition + room and board at U of I was $9,312 per year.

How much of a bargain was this? That’s an inflation-adjusted $23,948 in 2025 dollars. Yet if you enroll as an out-of-state freshman at Illinois today, that will cost you $42,310.

While at Illinois, Andreessen was part of a team working on building the first graphical interface for the internet. It was called Mosaic. This project was funded by the National Science Foundation.

In 1993, Andreessen graduated, moved to California, and started a company called Netscape, which built on the (publicly funded) work he had done with Mosaic. Netscape became the world’s first commercially successful web browser. In 1999 Andreessen sold the company to AOL (at the top of the first internet bubble) for $4.3 billion.

He was 28 years old.

So, he (or his family) paid less than $10K a year for his tuition and board as an out of state student. He went to a school that hosted one of the Supercomputing sites funded by the Federal Government, and he happened to be part of the team that built the original MOSAIC graphical browser, that he then took to Silicon Valley and built Netscape, and sold it to AOL for a fuckton of cash.

All before he reached the ripe old age of 30.

And that wealth didn’t make him even a little bit circumspect.

If you’re not a subscriber, you may not be familiar with the format of JVL’s “Triad”. The usual format is 2 political adjacent topics, and the third is something fun. Watches, baseball, or anything else. Usually a palette cleanser xo to speak.

But not today. Mr. Last does a deeper dive into this wrinkled testicle headed couch-nozzle:

Let’s talk about Andreessen’s contention that the combination of DEI and immigration has “systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education.”

To start, I guess we have to assume that the “Trump voter base” here means “white people.”

Ya think? And why might he think that it used to be his people’s world? Glad you asked:

And at the dumbest, most superficial level, it’s true that the overall percentage of college freshman who are white has dropped significantly since the 1980s. Forty years ago close to 80 percent of the kids at universities were white. Today whites make up closer to 40 percent.

What happened? Four things.

(1) The overall percentage of the college-age population that was white dropped.

(2) The percentage of Hispanics in the American population tripled.

(3) Asians started going to college at amazingly high rates. But also:

(4) The total raw number of people enrolling in college increased by close to 50 percent.

So, for those keeping track, when he was in school, the racial makeup of university students was 80% white, but since then there has been an explosion of hispanics in the colleges trebled, and asians have enrolled at nearly 5X the rate. And in the general population the share of White citizens has declined drastically.

So, what he really wants is racial quotas of white people.

Fuck him.

But wait, there’s more.

In October 2023, Marc Andreesen drafted a putrid manifesto, basically a plan for the tech-bro elites to run society. If you want to read it, it is here: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/

At the time, the WaPo had an OpEd on it: https://wapo.st/3IsSUTx

If you want a long series of WTaF moments, read that self interested twaddle. That is why Marc Andreesen is This Fucking Guy.

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