Welcome to Qualified at the Intersection. It’s Monday, and the number of topics I could talk about today is honestly overwhelming, from the Epstein files to Trump-world implosions, and even Rosie O’Donnell. But there’s one story, buried beneath the headlines, that I need to bring into the light.
The Washington Post quietly reported on it, and it reveals something bigger: what powerful tech billionaires and senior officials are saying behind closed doors about race, class, and their fear of losing control.
A Hidden Chatroom.
The Washington Post recently broke a story about Marc Andreessen, the billionaire co-founder of the Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, in a private group chat facilitated via WhatsApp, a chat reportedly supported by the Trump administration.1
In it, Andreessen launched into a tirade about colleges being “biased against Trump voters,” and claimed:
“My people are furious.”
Let’s be honest: “His people” are white men. The chat, which included tech investors, entrepreneurs, and political influencers, some of whom are senior government officials with the Trump administration, was supposed to stay hidden. But someone leaked it.
And what was in it is instructive.
DEI + Immigration = “Lethal”?
According to those who saw the messages, Andreessen wrote:
“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal.”2
Let that sink in.
He’s equating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which is about expanding opportunity and immigration, which this country was built on, with a threat to the very fabric of America. And not just any threat. A lethal one.
He claimed that for “the last 60 years,” and especially over the past decade, DEI and immigration have been:
“Two forms of discrimination… that have systematically cut out most of the children of the Trump voter base from any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”3
That’s not just a lie; it’s designed to trick poor white folks as to who the enemy really is.
We’ve made incremental progress over the past 60 years. Black folks haven’t suddenly taken over. Financially, we’re functionally close to where we were post-slavery. Yet Andreessen, from his billionaire perch, sees any Black success as an existential threat.4
Who’s In This Chat?
The group included:
Sriram Krishnan, a senior White House official born in India, is now a naturalized American citizen and is a former general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
Yann LeCun was born and educated in France.
Others from the tech elite, including billionaires and venture capital leaders.
Yet they sat in a chat where Andreessen spewed conspiracy-level racism, accusing universities of ruining kids’ minds, and calling for what he termed a:
“Bureaucratic death penalty.”
And yes, there were people in the group who disagreed, and likely, those are the ones who leaked this. But that doesn’t change the fact that these conversations are happening in the dark, among people with power.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: But Andreessen Does
Andreessen argues that elite universities like Stanford and MIT are unfairly blocking white students in favor of Black and Brown ones. But here’s the truth:
“The percentage of Black students in the Ivy League is traditionally 6% to 14%, with an average around 8% — and it’s actually dropping.”5
That’s not domination. That’s underrepresentation.
I wrote about this in my book, Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work, about how white people often overestimate the presence of Black people in spaces. They see two Black folks and multiply it by twenty. There’s data to back this up; it’s real cognitive bias.6
Andreessen doesn’t see his own inherited advantage as being white, male, and from a family that likely benefited either from free land grants to settlers in Wisconsin, taken from Indigenous people, or simply from being in the “white space” at the right time.
The Horowitz Double Life
Let’s talk about Ben Horowitz, Andreessen’s partner. His wife is a Black American woman. They were once the darlings of the Black elite, hosting parties with Gayle King and Van Jones. He quoted rap lyrics in his business book. He was "in."7
But here’s the thing:
“Just because someone can rap lyrics… just because they know Black people — hell, even if they marry Black people — does not mean they aren’t racist.” Shari Dunn
This is the fallacy. Many in our community opened their arms to this family, only to see them turn their backs. According to multiple reports, she’s now all in on MAGA. What changed? Billions of dollars and delusion are at stake.
“A founder who has received money from Andreessen Horowitz said that the firm’s two founding partners “feel like they are these bullied victims who are making a lone stand.”8
Don’t Be Fooled by the Image
It’s easy to pay attention to Elon Musk; we see him coming. But Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz operate in the shadows.
Horowitz and his wife once had credibility in the Black community. And now? They’re actively part of conversations to erase our presence in higher education and corporate life.
Andreessen wants to:
Burn Stanford and MIT to the ground (figuratively).
Erase DEI from federal agencies.
Push universities and companies to drop any policies that promote fairness.
Destroy the few fragile pathways we’ve built.
This isn’t a policy disagreement. It’s fear-mongering, backed by billions.
And Let’s Not Ignore This:
Horowitz is Jewish-American, and yet is supporting and funding political factions that:
Platform white nationalists,
A Vice-President who demanded that Germany platform Neo-Nazis,
Hire people who’ve done Nazi salutes,
And publicly circulate antisemitic rhetoric.
I guess you can be brilliant in one area and idiotic in another because he clearly doesn’t know history.
So What Do We Do?
This wasn’t a viral story, so most people don’t know what Andreessen and Horowitz are saying, but we need to. It reveals what the billionaires are plotting in private and what they will do with their power unless we act.
Here's what we must remember:
💰 They are billionaires. But together, we are trillionaires.
We must:
Learn where they invest.
Use our collective economic power to pressure the institutions that platform and benefit them.
Hold tech accountable not just for algorithms, but for ethics.
Refuse to fund our own erasure.
These men are not misunderstood. They are intentional. And as always, it will take intentional action to stop them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/07/12/marc-andreessen-private-chat-universities-diversity/
Ibid
Ibid
“The disruption of generational wealth can be seen in the racial wealth gap, which Calvin Schermerhorn, a professor of history at Arizona State University, writing in the Washington Post, says has remained functionally stagnant since emancipation. According to Schermerhorn, “The typical Black family today has just 1/10th the wealth of the typical white one. In 1863, Black Americans owned one-half of 1 percent of the national wealth.” Schermerhorn goes on to say, “The cause of that stagnation has largely been invisible, hidden by the assumption of progress after the end of slavery and the achievements of civil rights. But for every gain Black Americans made, people in power created new bundles of discrimination, largely hidden from sight, that thwarted, again and again, the economic promise of emancipation.” Calvin Schermerhorn, “Why the Racial Wealth Gap Persists, More than 150 Years After Emancipation,” Washington Post, June 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/06/19/why-racial-wealth-gap-persists-more-thanyears-after-emancipation/ in Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/30/black-college-student-enrollment-declines-affirmative-action-strike-down
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-think-minority-groups-are-bigger-than-they-really-are/
https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/16/felicia-ben-horowitz-party-switch/
Ibid
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