Anyone surprised? My theory is that you don't become a billionaire by
being cute and cuddly.

On Mon, 1 Jul 2024, Ben Collver wrote:

> My Dinner With Andreessen
> =========================
> Billionaires I have known: Part One of a three-part series
>
> by Rick Perlstein
> April 24, 2024
>
> Marc Andreessen and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen arrive at the tenth
> Breakthrough Prize Ceremony on April 13, 2024, at the Academy Museum
> of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
>
> Recently, I read about venture capitalist Marc Andreessen putting his
> 12,000-square-foot mansion in Atherton, California, which has seven
> fireplaces, up for sale for $33.75 million. This was done to spend
> more time, one supposes, at the $177 million home he owns in Paradise
> Cove, California; or the $34 million one he bought beside it; or the
> $44.5 million one in a place called Escondido Beach. Upon reading
> this, I realized it was time to stop procrastinating and tell you all
> a story I've been meaning to set down for a long time now about the
> time I visited that house (the cheap $33.75 million one, I mean).
> Strictly on a need-to-know basis. Because you really need to know how
> deeply twisted some of these plutocrats who run our society truly are.
>
> <https://www.businessinsider.com/see-inside-investor-marc-andreessens-
> 33-million-house-for-sale-2024-3>
>
> <https://traded.co/deals/california/single-family-residence/sale/
> 27724-pacific-coast-highway/>
>
> It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book
> Nixonland with his book club, which also happened to be Marc
> Andreessen's book club. They offered a free flight and hotel; I
> accepted. We met in that house. I was vaguely aware of Andreessen as
> the guy who invented the first web browser, a socially useful
> accomplishment by any measure and a story I had long kept in the back
> of my mind as an outstanding proof text that useful invention often
> flourishes best when government subsidizes it, socialism-style--given
> that Andreessen had created it while a student at a public
> institution, the University of Illinois. Then I boned up on what he
> was up to now, courtesy of a gargantuan 13,000-word profile from two
> years earlier in The New Yorker.
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator>
>
> <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man>
>
> Andreessen, I learned, was "Tomorrow's Advance Man." He superintended
> the "newest and most unusual" venture capital firm on Menlo Park's
> Sand Hill Road. He "seethes with beliefs" and is "afire to reorder
> life as we know it." His enthusiasms included replacing money with
> cryptocurrency; replacing cooked food with a scheme called, yes,
> "Soylent," and boosting the now-invisible Oculus virtual reality
> headset.
>
> Zero for three when it comes to picking useful inventions to reorder
> life as we know it, that is to say, though at no apparent cost to his
> power or net worth, now pegged at an estimated $1.7 billion. Along
> the way, I also learned he was a major stockholder in Facebook and a
> member of the civilian board that helped oversee the Central
> Intelligence Agency. Much later, it was in a tweet of his that I
> first saw the phrase "woke mind virus." (He's not a fan.)
>
> Last year, a manifesto he published on the website of his VC firm
> Andreessen Horowitz got a good deal of attention. It includes lines
> like "Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the
> spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential." (The
> residents of Nagasaki and Hiroshima might once have wished to
> disagree.) "For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this--until
> recently." (Really? I only wish I could escape the glorification for
> one goddamned day.) "We believe everything good is downstream of
> growth." (Everything?) And "there is no material problem--whether
> created by nature or by technology--that cannot be solved with more
> technology."
>
> <https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/>
>
> The big idea: "Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle." Normal
> people define that as the imperative of seeking to prevent and
> contain certain potentially civilization-ending potentialities like
> nuclear holocaust and pandemic. Andreessen, conversely, calls
> precaution "perhaps the most catastrophic mistake in Western society
> in my lifetime ... deeply immoral, and we must jettison it with
> extreme prejudice."
>
> What ought be embraced in its stead, naturally, is markets, because
> "they divert people who otherwise would raise armies and start
> religions into peacefully productive pursuits." (The opening of
> markets, as all students know, having everywhere and always been the
> most peaceful pursuit known to humanity.)
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Victorian_Holocausts>
>
> <https://asiapacificcurriculum.ca/learning-module/opium-wars-china>
>
> What stands in the way of the recognition of this so self-evident
> truth? Ideas like "sustainability," "stakeholder capitalism," "social
> responsibility," "tech ethics," "trust and safety," and "risk
> management," which must be eliminated--"with extreme prejudice."
> According to the logic of the piece, I suppose, this must happen in
> order to nip in the bud the armies we can expect the avatars of
> ethics and responsibility to raise any day now.
>
> Basically, the manifesto is an argument, dressed up in the raiment of
> morality, about power: Andreessen and people like him should get to
> make decisions to reorder life as we know it without interference
> from anyone else. Which will be quite relevant to know for the saga
> ahead, once you see the style of moral judgment this most powerful of
> human actors displays behind closed doors.
>
> IT WAS A NICE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA DAY. I saw from the map that a
> rideshare trip from San Francisco to Atherton would be a good bit
> cheaper if I embarked from a freeway entrance a mile or so from where
> I was. I set off on one of those glorious walks that remind you why
> you can't help loving cities, in all their unplanned and unplannable
> charm. I strolled across one of the remaining shabby parts of San
> Francisco, untouched by the gentrifiers, and my stops included a
> glorious junk shop stuffed stem to stern with ghosts of San Francisco
> past, including a pile of wooden chairs tangled from floor to ceiling
> like they came from some ancient Gold Rush; and a street corner where
> a clutch of elderly Black men were singing doo-wop.
>
> I arrived at my destination in a good mood, electric with a writer's
> observant curiosity. The first detail I noted in Atherton was the
> gate where I was dropped off; it informed me that an armed guard was
> on duty 24 hours a day. The second was the hulking object standing by
> the front door: a sculpture by the French modernist master Jean
> Dubuffet (1901–1985), a smaller version of a massive, beloved
> downtown public monument Chicagoans call "Snoopy in a Blender."
>
> <https://blockclubchicago.org/2023/07/25/snoopy-in-a-blender-
> sculpture-moving-from-thompson-center-to-art-institute>
>
> That certainly made an impression: not the sort of thing one usually
> finds on front lawns.
>
> I rang the bell; an Asian man in khakis and a sweater answered. I
> snapped into guest mode, introducing myself enthusiastically. He
> responded with an odd coldness. Then I realized he was not a fellow
> guest but, I guess you'd say, the butler. A hundred years ago, he
> might have been referred to as "houseboy" and greeted me in a tux.
>
> I met Andreessen's wife. Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen is the daughter
> of a sharp fellow who began scooping up commercial real estate in the
> bedraggled lands around Stanford University that became Silicon
> Valley, becoming its pre-eminent landowner, which is kind of how
> aristocracies start in the dim mists of time. I reflected, perhaps
> unfairly, that marrying off their daughters to young men of talent
> and fortune is often how such families institutionalize their power.
>
> She showed me around her art collection. I tried not to gawk, and
> failed. "That's an Agnes Martin! ... A Claes Oldenburg maquette! He's
> one of my favorites!" And so on. I later learned that
> Arrillaga-Andreessen made a project of classing up the "cultural
> desert" of Silicon Valley--the "pop-up gallery" she organized with a
> Manhattan powerhouse art dealer at her father's Tesla dealership was
> covered in the art press as something like a philanthropic venture.
> But progress was apparently sluggish; Arrillaga-Andreessen seemed
> absurdly grateful to finally have a guest who knew who these artists
> were. Quietly, I reflected upon how odd it is that people who claim
> to love art, and sharing it with the world, would lock masterpieces
> away for only themselves and their guests to enjoy. Among
> aristocrats, I suppose, it has ever been thus.
>
> <https://www.google.com/search?q=%22pace+gallery%22
> +tesla+Arrillaga-Andreessen>
>
> There were also lots of books on many subjects, piled up in
> skyscraper-like stacks. Andreessen, you see, is an intellectual. That
> was why I was there.
>
> Andreessen wasn't, yet. I waited at the dining room table. A chef in
> starched whites (was there a toque?) served me something delicious.
> Then arrived in the room a "cranium so large, bald, and oblong that
> you can't help but think of words like ‘jumbo' and ‘Grade A'" (The
> New Yorker's words, not mine); and, one by one, his guests. My first
> impression of them came of their response to my small-talk
> description of my delightful afternoon. Jaws practically dropped,
> like I had dared an unaccompanied, unarmed stroll through Baghdad's
> Sadr City in the spring of 2004.
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Sadr_City>
>
> I had been told, via email, a little about the people I would meet:
> mostly fellow investment magnates, but also an extra person added at
> the last minute. She was a woman researching life extension,
> something that, at the time, the world was just learning was a Valley
> plutocrat obsession. A woman, it was subtly emphasized. The times
> we're living in: you know.
>
> I can be slow, but I got it. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was enmeshed in
> a scandal over endemic sexism, and it had suddenly seemed imperative
> to de-bro-ify the local culture a bit. Thus, this late-breaking
> ringer. She was young, very pretty, and seemed to have practically no
> spoken English.
>
> <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-reckless-rise-and-fall-of-
> ubers-ceo-travis-kalanick-sml9p3q2k>
>
> The chef served us a lovely meal. I couldn't help but notice that he
> was treated rather like a pizza delivery guy.
>
> I see from a follow-up email that among the things discussed were
> David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in
> America, on the geographic patterns of American political culture and
> their persistence; the anti-Enlightenment philosopher Julius Evola (I
> had just begun exploring the explicit anti-liberalism of those close
> to Trump, like Steve Bannon); 1970s New Left historiography on
> regulatory capture; Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind; Jimmy
> Carter's embrace of austerity; the magnificent volume Strange Rebels:
> 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (I was hard at work then on my
> book about the 1976–1980 period); and Jonathan Haidt on personality
> type and ideology (someone else must have brought him up; I can't
> stand him). I don't remember much of the discussion at all. But
> certain telling sociological details will always stick with me. My
> close friends have frequently heard me tell the tale.
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed>
>
> <https://www.amazon.com/Strange-Rebels-1979-Birth-Century-ebook/
> dp/B00H6UMGVI>
>
> ONE PARTICIPANT WAS A BRITISH FORMER JOURNALIST become computer
> tycoon who had been awarded a lordship. He proclaimed that the
> Chinese middle class doesn't care about democracy or civil liberties.
> I was treated as a sentimental naïf for questioning his blanket
> confidence.
>
> Another attendee seemed to see politics as a collection of
> engineering problems. He kept setting up strange thought experiments,
> which I did not understand. I recall thinking it was like talking to
> a creature visiting from another solar system that did not have
> humans in it. I later conveyed my recollection of this guy to an
> acquaintance who once taught history at Stanford. He noted a
> similarity to a student of his who insisted that all the age-old
> problems historians worried over would soon obviously be solved by
> better computers, and thus considered the entire humanistic
> enterprise faintly ridiculous.
>
> I also remember I raised an objection to Silicon Valley's fetish for
> "disruption" as the highest human value, noting that healthy
> societies also recognize the value of preserving core values and
> institutions, and feeling gaslit in return when the group came back
> heatedly that, no, Silicon Valley didn't fetishize disruption at all.
>
> The subject of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came up. They rose up in
> thunderous hatred at her for blocking potential "innovation in the
> banking sector." (She'll make a similar cameo in Part Two of this
> series.) I suffered an epic case of l'esprit d'escalier at that.
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier>
>
> I thought it was pretty much universally understood by then that the
> fetish for "innovation in the banking sector" was what collapsed the
> world economy in 2008. Had I not been stunned into silence, I could
> have quoted Paul Volcker that the last useful innovation in banking
> was the automatic teller machine, and pointed out that it was only by
> strangling "innovation in the banking sector" that (as Elizabeth
> Warren always points out) the New Deal ushered in the longest period
> of financial stability in American history, and the golden age of
> global capitalism to boot. It was only when deregulation broke down
> banking's vaunted "3-6-3" rule (take deposits at 3 percent, lend them
> at 6 percent, and be on the golf course by 3 o'clock in the
> afternoon) that financial collapses returned as a regular feature of
> our lives. Silicon Valley, alas, would never learn.
>
> <https://nypost.com/2009/12/13/the-only-thing-useful-banks-have-
> invented-in-20-years-is-the-atm/>
>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_Bank#Collapse>
>
> Anyhoo.
>
> The evening progressed. The man with or without the toque cleared the
> plates. This is when, as I've learned at hyper-elite confabs I've
> attended, things tend to get down to brass tacks. Come with me, then,
> inside that $33 million manse and hear what this extraordinarily
> powerful individual who helped oversee the CIA and one of the most
> powerful instruments of communication in human history (Facebook,
> whose decisions the previous year had helped make Donald Trump
> president) said when the subject turned to rural America. It was like
> the first scene in an episode of Black Mirror.
>
> I KNEW FROM THE NEW YORKER THAT ANDREESSEN had grown up in an
> impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it.
> But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject.
> He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places
> deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and
> alienation they suffered.
>
> It's a libertarian commonplace, a version of their pinched vision of
> why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response
> to oppressive conditions on the job: If you don't like it, you can
> leave. If you don't, what you suffer is your own fault.
>
> I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft,
> memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and
> other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human
> beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in
> the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture
> that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community
> passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures
> finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life ...
>
> And that's when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said
> it.
>
> "I'm glad there's OxyContin and video games to keep those people
> quiet."
>
> I'm taking the liberty of putting it in quotation marks, though I
> can't be sure those were his exact words. Marc, if you're reading,
> feel free to get in touch and refresh my memory. Maybe he said
> "quiescent," or "docile," or maybe "powerless." Something, certainly,
> along those lines.
>
> He was joking, sort of; but he was serious--definitely. "Kidding on
> the square," jokes like those are called. All that talk about human
> potential and morality, and this man afire to reorder life as we know
> it jokingly welcomes chemical enslavement of those he grew up with,
> for the sin of not being as clever and ambitious as he.
>
> There is something very, very wrong with us, that our society affords
> so much power to people like this.
>
> From: <https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andreessen/>
>