Tech Billionaire Trump Adviser Marc Andreessen Says Universities Will ‘Pay the Price’ for DEI

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.”

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“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.”

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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