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In the last few days, The Bulwark has published several meaty pieces that can help you to more deeply understand the ideas and the individuals defining this moment in our politics—the stories behind the news. Like this review of the new bio of William F. Buckley Jr., which explains the ideology of the new right. Or this big essay on the homepage today about Curtis Yarvin, the blogger whose far-out pro-monarchy ideas have bedazzled the tech right.
Today’s Triad is about another figure on the tech right—the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. You may not know his name, but he has the ear of people who are trying to remake the country. Think of this look at his background and his hypocrisy as another example of how The Bulwark can help you to see more clearly what’s right in front of you—and see around corners to what’s coming next.
Today’s full newsletter is for our paying members—and there’s no better time to join than today: We’ve got a 30-day free deal going, so you can sign up for The Bulwark today at no cost, enjoy our newsletters and podcasts for a month, and decide if you want to stick around. I hope you do.
–JVL
Marc Andreesen and the Billionaire Victims Club
The gripes of this bigwig of the tech right don’t stand up to scrutiny.
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1. White People
Over the weekend the Washington Post got hold of a text chain in which Marc Andreesen 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.”
Andreesen 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.
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“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 Andreesen’s self-mythologizing and reality. The second is the state of the real world as it exists today.
You may not know Andreesen; 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.
And understanding this Billionaire Victims Club is one of the keys to understanding our authoritarian moment.
2. Marc’s Kampf
It’s obvious how Andreesen 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.
Andreesen 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, Andreesen 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, Andreesen 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 Andreesen sold the company to AOL (at the top of the first internet bubble) for $4.3 billion.