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Anyone who follows the Sage of Sand Hill Road on Twitter is accustomed to Marc Andreessen’s 140-character monologues on Silicon Valley’s economy — often ridiculing those who think the tech sector is in the midst of another investing bubble.
But lately, another obsession has taken hold: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Andreessen can’t seem to fathom how the billionaire real estate mogul who says such provocative — and, some would say, offensive — things remains the GOP front-runner, months before the New Hampshire primary in February.
Consider Friday’s installment, in which Andreessen talks about Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich, who emigrated from Germany to the U.S. at the age of 16 to chase the American dream. For granddad, opportunity took the form of leasing a restaurant in Seattle’s red-light district and providing food, booze and “private rooms for ladies” (code for prostitutes), Politico reports.
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When Trump talked about creating a mandatory database of Muslims in the United States in the aftermath of the Paris bombings, Andreessen amplified the voices of critics by retweeting comments to his 440,000 followers.
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Andreessen recognizes that Twitter provides a pulpit to share his views. In an interview with The New Yorker, he described how the platform was the surest way to get reporters’ attention.
Andreessen says that he loves Twitter because “reporters are obsessed with it. It’s like a tube and I have loudspeakers installed in every reporting cubicle around the world.” He believes that if you say it often enough and insistently enough it will come — a glorious revenge. He told me, “We have this theory of nerd nation, of forty or fifty million people all over the world who believe that other nerds have more in common with them than the people in their own country. So you get to choose what tribe or band or group you’re a part of.” The nation-states of Twitter will map the world.
This time, Andreessen appears to be aiming for the beltway crowd, not the scribes in Silicon Valley. Or maybe he’s just hoping to reach anyone who’s willing to listen.
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Andreessen doesn’t appear to be using the old-fashioned approach for capturing the ear of politicians, via campaign donations.
Federal Election Commission records indicate the influential venture capital investor has yet to back a candidate in the 2016 presidential race (he was a major supporter of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, donating $100,000 to the “Restore Our Future” super PAC created by former aides to the Massachusetts governor).
Andreessen seems to suggest he’d even consider backing Democratic candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, if Trump emerges as the Republican party’s standard-bearer in 2016. He didn’t respond to a direct message asking if he was serious — or lampooning Clinton, who has also been the focus of his Twitter ruminations.
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
