Ben Is Boring
I just can't leave the Horowitz family alone!
I have a new piece out in Arc, the magazine formerly known as Religion and Politics. The new/old magazine has recently come under the editorship of brother-of-the-’stack
.Normally one might worry that this mixing of the personal and professional would generate a faint but discernible stench of nepobaby-ism, but in this case my brother wanted an essay on the venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who has recently made news by endorsing Donald Trump after a lifetime of being a Democrat. And who better to take on such a task than the guy who went deeper into the life and psyche of Ben’s father, David Horowitz, than anyone else? Me, in other words.
In the new essay, “Ben Horowitz Is Boring,” I write:
Born in London and raised in Berkeley, Horowitz grew up in comfortable, if somewhat politically unusual, circumstances. After computer science degrees at Columbia and UCLA, he followed a rather conventional Silicon Valley arc to success, starting with a job doing technical work, moving on to management, launching a start-up of his own, transitioning to investing, and then aspiring to be a thought leader (with 2014’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers and 2019’s What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture).
His signature quirk as a Silicon Valley personality (since he’s become big enough to merit a signature quirk) is his connection to Black culture. Horowitz grew up hanging with a lot of Black kids. He was one of the few white kids on the Berkeley High School football team. His best friend is Black. His wife is Black, and he is the father of interracial children. He is an enthusiast of Black history. And he really loves hip-hop. Many of his blog posts, and most of the chapters of his two business books, begin with a rap lyric. He and the rapper Nas are friends (or maybe “friends”—it’s unclear).
Not too surprisingly, given that profile, Horowitz was for decades a standard-issue left coast Democrat, donating money exclusively to Democratic candidates and supporting a host of progressive non-profits and causes through the charitable foundation he runs with his wife, Felicia. Their donations to Democrats have been substantial—in the hundreds of thousands—but not extravagant, given their wealth.
More notable was their emergence as connectors in the Valley, where they became known for the salon-like barbecues they hosted at their home in tony Atherton, California, an almost straight shot down Alameda de las Pulgas to the Stanford campus. The elite of Hollywood, Manhattan, D.C., and Silicon Valley would mix there. The gatherings weren’t political, per se, but they had a blue vibe, and a Black one. Kamala Harris was a guest at one. Nas was a regular attendee. Other guests included San Francisco mayor London Breed, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah, P. Diddy, Arianna Huffington, Van Jones, Gayle King.
This context is all essential to understanding why, when Horowitz and Andreessen announced their support of Trump in July, it was something different than when, say, Elon Musk came out for Trump, or when other Silicon Valley tech bro royalty like Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, comic book villain Peter Thiel, and the Winklevoss twins have done the same. Horowitz and Andreessen seem to be in touch with the wellsprings of the American past and future in a way that few others are. Andreessen is the Innovator, able to see just a little bit further around the corner than anyone else. Horowitz (who declined my request for an interview) is the quiet but ruthlessly pragmatic man behind the scenes, as comfortable hanging with the homies from the street as the homies in the C suite.
Read the piece, which is good. I’ve also been posting on Notes about it, and related themes, over the past few months. Some interesting thoughts/links/discussions below.
It's funny I come at it from right of center and largely agree with your second to last paragraph on the politics of Silicon Valley. I would've talked more about the material factors of production; how Crypto and AI require more energy per marginal product than big software and thus align with other heavy industry GOP business interests for growing cheap base load electricity. That is more interesting to me than whether Ben personally is more selfish now versus in the past when he donated center-left. I suspect it's a wash.
But on the boring remark; more boring businessmen donating to Republicans is probably a good thing for the country. Elon Musk is not boring, and while I'm grateful for SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink, I wish he was more boring. It would be good if he spent more time on those projects to help people and hired some conventional PR agent and or funded some conservative magazine instead of amplifying extreme rightists with racist views on the internet.