Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen hit out at elite U.S. universities for allegedly discriminating against children of conservative Trump voters.
The leaked comments from a private WhatsApp group chat that included several Trump administration officials indicate a broader backlash among wealthy elites against many of the institutions where they got their degrees.
“They declared war on 70% of the country and now they’re going to pay the price.”
Fortune reached out to Andreessen Horowitz for comment and clarification but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
“I was born in 1971 in Iowa and grew up in Wisconsin,” Andreessen continued in his messages. “My cohort of citizens was told that we just had to put up with this as a cost of prior American bigotry, even though the discrimination was now aimed at us.
“The insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020 totally shredded that complacency. And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore,” Andreessen snapped in his group chat messages.
Andreessen’s comments were privately made, shared among an elite circle of high-ranking administration officials in Trump’s government.
As a result they were very direct in nature, attacking universities like Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT], as well as the National Science Foundation [NSF].
“I view Stanford and MIT as mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point,” he confided.
Fortune has reached out to Stanford and MIT for comment.
The Washington Post article itself was inundated with reader comments, nearly 5,000 in total, “overwhelmingly” negative, according to the paper.
While the crypto economy is a key focus at Andreessen Horowitz, often shortened to a16z, the company is also heavily invested in AI and led the $2 billion funding round for Mira Murati’s new artificial intelligence startup, Thinking Machines Lab.
