Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think the danger is there with power. It’s flat out there. I would say with Elon, we’ll see. I would say with Elon, and I would say by the way, overwhelmingly, I would say so far so good. I’m extremely, extremely thrilled by what he’s done on almost every front for the last 30 years. But including all this stuff recently. I think he’s been a real hero on a lot of topics where we needed to see heroism. But look, I would say, I guess the case that he has this level of power is some combination of the money and the proximity to the president. And obviously both of those are instruments of power. The counter argument to that is I do think a lot of how Elon is causing change in the world right now … There’s the companies he’s running directly where I think he’s doing very well, and we’re investors in multiple of them and doing very well. But I think a lot of the stuff that gets people mad at him is like, it’s the social and political stuff, and it’s his statements, and then it’s the downstream effects of his statements. So for example, for the last couple of weeks, it’s been him weighing in on this rape gang scandal, this organized child rape thing in the UK. It’s a preface cascade. It’s one of these things where people knew there was a problem, they weren’t willing to talk about it, it got suppressed. And then Elon brought it up, and then all of a sudden there’s now in the UK this massive explosion of basically open conversation about it for the first time. It’s like this catalyzing, all of a sudden everybody’s woken up and being like, “Oh my God, this is really bad.” And there will be now pretty clearly big changes as a result. And Elon, he played the role of the boy who said, the emperor has no clothes. But here’s the thing, here’s my point. He said it about something that was true. And so had he said it about something that was false, he would get no credit for it. He wouldn’t deserve any credit for it. But he said something that was true. And by the way, everybody over there instantly, they were like, “Oh, yeah, he’s right.” They’re just arguing the details now. So number one, it’s like, okay, he says true things. And so it’s like, okay, how far … Put it this way. How worried are we about somebody becoming corrupt by virtue of their power being that they get to speak the truth? And I guess I would say, especially in the last decade of what we’ve been through where everybody’s been lying all the time about everything, I’d say, I think we should run this experiment as hard as we can to get people to tell the truth. And so I don’t feel that bad about that. h where everybody’s been lying all the time about everything, I’d say, I think we should run this experiment as hard as we can to get people to tell the truth. And so I don’t feel that bad about that. And then the money side, this rapidly gets into the money in politics question. And the money in politics question is this very interesting question because it seems like there’s a clear cut case that the more money in politics, the worse things are and the more corrupted the system is. That was a very popular topic of public conversation up until 2016 when Hillary outspent Trump three to one and lost. You’ll notice that money in politics has almost vanished as a topic in the last eight years. And once again, Kamala raised and spent 1.5 billion on top of what Biden had spent. So they were at, I don’t know, something like three billion total and Trump, I think spent again, a third or a fourth of that. So the money in politics topic has vanished from the popular conversation in the last eight years. It has come back a little bit now that Elon is spending. But again, it’s like, okay, he’s spending, but the data would seem to indicate, at least in the last eight years, that money doesn’t win the political battles. The voters actually have a voice and they actually exercise it, and they don’t just listen to ads. And so again, there, I would say, yeah, clearly there’s some power there, but I don’t know if it’s some weapon that he can just turn on and use in a definitive way. I don’t know if there’s parallels there, but I could also say just on a human level, he has a good heart and I interact with a lot of powerful people, and that’s not always the case. So that’s a good thing there. If we can draw parallels to the Hobbit or whatever. Who gets to put on the ring?…

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