How Biden Lost Ben Horowitz

The cofounders of one of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalist firms detail why they just endorsed Trump.

How Biden Drifted Too Far Left For Ben Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz might the be the last person a Democratic Party pollster would expect to vote against Biden: he's well-educated, Jewish, raised in ultra-liberal Berkeley California by leftists, and married to an African American woman.

And yet the Biden administration has drifted so far to the left that Ben Horowitz, the grandson of communists, just compared Biden's policies to those of the Soviets persecuting the kulaks: 

When the Bolshevik revolution happened, Lenin's first idea was to kill all the rich people. But you run out of rich people pretty fast, it turns out, particularly if you're killing them...so he ended up killing the kulaks, who were the farmers with two horses, two cows, that kind of thing. Because you need more people to kill, so you can seize more stuff. 

Andreessen and Horowitz say that Biden's proposed tax on unrealized capital gains would put their firm and most technology startups out of business. 

This is an extraordinary own goal by the Democratic Party, and it illustrates how far the party has drifted to the left. And it happened on the same day that Elon Musk just announced he was moving X's and SpaceX's respective headquarters to Texas.

The Podcast 

The full podcast is over 90 minutes long, but below are time signatures where you can find the specific topics. The quote about Lenin and the kulaks comes during the "Biden admin's destructive tax policy for startups" section. 

• Topics Covered: 00:00:49 

• Intro to Little Tech Agenda and presidential election impact 00:03:33 

• Involvement in presidential politics 00:11:24 

• Importance of Little Tech 00:24:01 

• Blockchain, crypto and stakeholder capitalism 00:28:52 

• Challenges faced in the crypto industry  00:35:59 

• Trump's stance on emerging industries 00:37:20 

• Biden admin's assault on a nascent industry 00:38:51

• Significance of AI in America 00:42:42 

• Discussion on Executive Order limiting math operations in AI 00:53:33

• Trump's position on AI 00:55:17

• AI regulation 00:58:24

• Earnin 01:04:20

• Biotech and the Biden administration 01:06:06

• AI and military technology 01:09:48

• Biden admin's destructive tax policy for startups 01:23:13

• President Trump and Little Tech 01:24:38

• Assassination attempt on President Trump 01:31:13

• The strength of American presidents 01:32:35

• Closing remarks 01:36:41

Biden, Trump, And Crypto 

In their podcast, Andreessen and Horowitz also detailed the Biden administration's destructive regulatory policies toward crypto. This explains why Bitcoin has rallied after Trump survived Saturday's assassination attempt, as his display of courage in the immediate aftermath of it increased the likelihood of Trump winning the election in November. 

In my post on the assassination attempt on Trump over the weekend, I included a link to a Bitcoin-related trade we placed in the Portfolio Armor Substack earlier this month. As of this week, that trade is currently on track for a 200% gain, so I have removed the paywall on it: Trade Alert: Crypto Pullback. 

You can read the details at the post, but that trade was a bullish options bet on Block, Inc. (SQ 0.00%↑), which offers crypto trading via its Cash App and holds more than half a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. If Block is trading above $70 on August 2nd, we will exit that trade for a 200% gain. Block closed at $72.07 on Tuesday.