Tech billionaire Trump adviser Marc Andreesen says universities will ‘pay the price' for DEI

Washington Post

18 hours ago

Influential tech investor and Trump adviser Marc Andreessen recently said universities will 'pay the price' for promoting diversity and allegedly discriminating against supporters of President Donald Trump, according to messages he sent to a group chat with White House officials and technology leaders reviewed by The Washington Post.
The billionaire's messages also cited Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, a respected institution at the heart of Silicon Valley that has incubated tech companies such as Google. Andreessen and his wife have donated millions of dollars to the school.
'I view Stanford and MIT as mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point,' Andreessen wrote in screenshots of messages sent May 3 and reviewed by The Post.
The investor described a 'counterattack' against universities in his messages and called for the National Science Foundation, a federal research funding agency, to receive 'the bureaucratic death penalty.'
Andreessen co-founded one of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture capital firms, Andreessen Horowitz, which embraced President Donald Trump's candidacy last year. While Elon Musk was the most visible tech mogul in Trump's orbit until he split with the president, Andreessen has quietly helped shape the administration's hiring and policy decisions.
The tech investor is known for making controversial statements, including to his 1.8 million followers on X, and has criticized universities and government agencies in media appearances, but his comments in the private chat went beyond his previous statements.
In addition to criticizing Stanford and MIT, Andreessen sent a rapid-fire series of messages, according to the screenshots and two members of the chat, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
'The universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack' from Trump voters, Andreessen wrote, alleging colleges favored immigrants over Americans and promoted DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies intended to increase race and gender representation.
'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 did not respond to requests for comment through his venture firm. He quickly deleted many of the messages after sending them, according to the screenshots and the two members of the chat.
Andreessen sent his messages to a WhatsApp group used by Trump officials to discuss artificial intelligence policy with dozens of tech figures and academics, according to screenshots of the chat from May and June reviewed by The Post.
The group, whose members have varied political views, predates the current Trump administration. It was established in 2023 to connect investors and others with a shared interest in open development of AI.
A White House official said members of the Trump administration in the group participated in their personal capacity, no official policy was discussed, and that Andreessen was not an official adviser to the president.
Andreessen in his messages did not suggest any action against Stanford and MIT. The Trump administration has targeted the University of Virginia, Harvard and Columbia over issues including DEI initiatives and alleged antisemitism, moving to cancel funding and student visas.
'They declared war on 70% of the country and now they're going to pay the price,' Andreessen alleged of universities, without calling out a specific school.
'MIT is merit-based and affordable, driven by innovation and entrepreneurship, and committed to excellence — all with a mission of national service,' said its spokesperson Kimberly Allen in an email statement. A spokesperson for Stanford, Dee Mostofi, declined to comment on the message Andreessen wrote about the university.
Andreessen grew up in rural Wisconsin and rose to prominence in Silicon Valley in the 1990s as co-creator of Netscape, one of the first popular web browsers. His influence and wealth has grown during the past decade through Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in Facebook, Twitter and Airbnb. The firm financially backed Musk's 2022 takeover of Twitter, which Andreessen said would encourage free speech.
The investor has supported Democratic presidential candidates, including Hillary Clinton in 2016, but backed Republican Mitt Romney in 2012. Andreessen and his firm backed Trump after his attempted assassination in July last year, an endorsement the firm said could protect tech start-ups from hostile policies pushed by the Biden administration.
In a company blog post, Andreessen and his co-founder wrote that their firm's political efforts were 'entirely focused' on helping start-ups, including through 'expansion of high-skilled immigration to encourage foreign graduates of American universities' to build companies in the United States.
Andreessen has previously criticized DEI, affirmative action, federal agencies and universities, alleging colleges radicalized young tech workers and were 'unfixable,' including on his firm's podcast and in podcast interviews after the election. The investor in January told podcaster Lex Fridman he was rethinking his support for high-skilled immigration, which the tech industry uses to source talent, because he thought it had disadvantaged native-born Americans.
Andreessen's message to the group about subjecting the NSF to 'the bureaucratic death penalty' alleged that the agency, a major funder of university science and tech labs, backed projects that led to online censorship of American citizens — a talking point among some Trump supporters. The investor added: 'Raze it to the ground and start over.'
Some members of the group chat found Andreessen's comments discussing immigration and attacks on universities extreme and out of character with the chat's usual tone, the two members of the chat said.
AI insiders have often used the chat to impress on Trump officials that alienating immigrants and attacking universities will undermine the ability of the U.S. to maintain its lead in technology by attracting and training top talent, the two members said.
Andreessen ceased participating in the group soon after his messages in early May, the two members said.
The chat is moderated by Sriram Krishnan, a White House senior policy adviser on AI, according to screenshots and the two group members. Krishnan created the group before Trump's second term, while he was working as a partner at Andreessen's firm. Dean Ball, another White House adviser on AI, is also a frequent contributor, the two chat members said.
AI experts in the chat include Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, a professor at New York University, who supported Kamala Harris's presidential bid; and Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor and robotics entrepreneur, who worked with the Biden administration to promote government funding for public sector AI projects. Steven Sinofsky, a partner at Andreessen's firm, is also in the group.
LeCun and Krishnan declined to comment for this article. Ball, Li and Sinofsky did not respond to requests for comment.
In recent months the group has argued over Trump administration budget cuts at the NSF, and whether the government should place export restrictions on Chinese AI company DeepSeek, the two members told The Post. In January U.S. tech stocks crashed after the company claimed it could achieve similar results to American rivals with fewer resources.
Andreessen has said that encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal, which allow users to set up disappearing messages, have become a safe outlet for tech elites to share polarizing views likely to meet public backlash, a trend he called 'the group chat phenomenon' in the January podcast interview with Fridman. Andreessen is on the board of Meta, which owns WhatsApp.
Group chats took off in Silicon Valley during the political upheaval of 2020, spurred by pandemic lockdowns and the murder of George Floyd. 'The great culture wars of 2020 meant people, especially in tech, weren't comfortable sharing their views in public lest they get various online mobs after them,' Krishnan wrote on his personal blog last year.
The chats provide venues to workshop those ideas before they're shared on social media, Krishnan said, functioning as 'the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion.'
Group chats helped forge a new alliance between tech elites and Trump before Silicon Valley elites publicly declared their support and Andreessen was at the center of many of those messaging threads, Semafor reported in April.
The tech industry has historically lobbied in favor of government funding for scientific research and high-skilled immigration, which some studies show has been crucial to the sector's flourishing. A growing number of tech figures such as Musk and venture capitalist David Sacks, now Trump's AI and crypto czar, have broken with that received wisdom in recent years, celebrating Trump's moves to slash government funding and target Harvard and other schools.
Andreessen's comments against Stanford in the group chat pit a high-priest of Silicon Valley against a beloved local school that has served as a crucial pipeline for the industry, providing ideas, research funding and technical talent, including the founders of Instagram and LinkedIn. MIT has long been a top recruiting ground for the tech industry. Two pension funds for MIT employees have invested in venture funds managed by Andreessen's firm, according to federal filings.
Andreessen's comments in May came after another member of the chat group expressed skepticism that diversity policies or environmental and workplace regulation had reduced economic growth. When Krishnan, the investor turned Trump official, invited Andreessen to offer an opposing view, Andreessen fired off his comments about immigration and diversity.
The billionaire also mentioned a personal disagreement with Stanford, alleging that his wife, philanthropist Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, was forced to leave her position as chair of its Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, which she co-founded and helped fund. Arrillaga-Andreessen did not respond to requests for comment.
'[T]hey forced my wife out of Stanford without a second thought, a decision that will cost them something like $5 billion in future donations,' Andreessen wrote in his messages to the group, without specifying the cause of the dispute. Arrillaga-Andreessen's LinkedIn profile indicates she stopped being chair of the philanthropy center in 2024.
Mostofi in an email statement praised Arrillaga-Andreessen's philanthropic and academic contributions to the university. 'Her initiative as the founder and longtime chair of [the center] was instrumental in driving attention to these important topics,' Mostofi said, adding that Arrillaga-Andreessen will teach at Stanford's business school in the fall.
The couple's names were included in the job titles of academics who led the philanthropy center. They donated almost $28 million to Stanford Hospital in 2007 and $2 million to Stanford Healthcare in 2020.
Andreessen, who was born in Iowa, went to the University of Illinois, and built his businesses in California, suggested in his messages that he was among a large group of Americans tired of perceived injustice.
'My cohort of citizens,' he wrote, had once been willing to accept diversity policies as the cost of prior bigotry in American society, 'even though the discrimination was now aimed at us,' according to the screenshots.
'The insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020, totally shredded that complacency,' Andreessen added, apparently referring to protests and discussion of diversity after the death of Floyd. 'And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore,' he wrote.