In the course of the interview (the audio of which is available in full as an episode of the paper’s Matter of Opinion podcast), Andreessen laments the pressures of a socially conscious press, college students, social media activists, and activist shareholders. He evokes a genuinely paranoid fantasy that tech workers were once on the verge of a violent labor uprising: Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your keyboards! He appears to claim that, at some point in the years 2016 to 2020, “the federal government radicalized hard under Hillary.” It’s unclear what he was referring to. The Times, in any case, removed the offending quote in its print edition.
Andreessen himself long supported Democrats, but he grew incensed by the Biden administration’s mild skepticism toward and willingness to regulate cryptocurrency, eventually embracing a belief that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the deep state were engaged in a deliberate program to “debank” conservatives and cryptocurrency investors. Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously cultivated a studiously apolitical public image, killed all DEI initiatives at Meta (blaming them on his departed female COO, Sheryl Sandberg) and went on the Joe Rogan show to propose a need to bring “masculine energy” back to the workplace. Elon Musk was once a darling of liberals and environmentalists, but his various musings on “free speech”; his chummy social media interactions with online Nazis, “race realists,” and other such strange creatures; and, of course, his spectacular embrace of Donald Trump have disabused the center and the left of any notion that he might be on their side.
Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, a new book by the journalist Eoin Higgins, is an attempt to understand how a collection of unimaginably wealthy, increasingly angry titans of technology and finance were able to acquire loud allies among journalists who had, until relatively recently, been largely associated with the political left. Higgins previously covered this beat in his work for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and for his own newsletter, The Flashpoint. Some of that work is repurposed here, but the book expands on it, taking a broader look at the sociocultural and political currents that have brought new alignments of writers, audiences, and funders.
Greenwald and Taibbi arrived at their journalistic celebrity through different paths. Greenwald, a civil libertarian and (usually) strident critic of U.S. military and intelligence policy, cut his teeth as a blogger and Guardian columnist before rocketing to international fame by acquiring and publishing the Edward Snowden National Security Agency leaks and founding The Intercept with backing from billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Taibbi started as a kind of new gonzo journalist—will no one free young men from the curse of Hunter S. Thompson?—but became famous and respectable through excellent and trenchant reporting for Rolling Stone, particularly on the 2008 financial crisis.
Both of these main characters became uncomfortable in the liberal media around the time of “Russiagate,” a sprawling, incomprehensible liberal conspiracy theory that blamed Trump’s 2016 victory on Russian state malefactors. Both were deeply skeptical of the theory, while major left-leaning outlets like MSNBC, where Greenwald had once been a greenroom fixture, went particularly big on it. Ironically, however, both Greenwald and Taibbi took an almost conspiratorial view of the media’s commitment to Russiagate, treating the dissemination of the theory as a media conspiracy in and of itself, with Taibbi going so far as to compare it (with caveats, to be fair) in scale to the “WMD affair heading into the Iraq war” rather than as desperate wish-casting by liberals for some explanation, any explanation, for the election of Trump. Both men found friendlier audiences at Fox, where Greenwald became a regular guest of Tucker Carlson, and eventually as far abroad as the hair-sprayed Technicolor studios of Newsmax.
These positions brought both men into alignment with a tech elite who increasingly saw value in an unfettered, (mostly) uncensored, alternative online media. Both publish primarily on Substack (Taibbi has over 500,000 subscribers, and Greenwald over 300,000), the newsletter platform that received substantial funding from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz. Greenwald has also built an impressive audience for his System Update news show on the Thiel-funded, right-wing YouTube alternative, Rumble—a friendly arena for figures with contrarian viewpoints, a maximalist view of free speech, and a reflexive anti-liberalism.
Many idiosyncratic figures on the right have long benefited from the largesse of conservative millionaires and billionaires who fund think tanks and institutes and support conservative media from Fox News to The Federalist. But while the ascendant tech industry elite have invested strategically in alternative media and platforms—from Andreesen’s early-round support of Substack and Thiel’s fundraising for Rumble, to Sacks’s podcasting platform, Callin—their direct subsidy of new contrarian media is harder to find. The story of tech in new media is more the tale of investors strategically seeding a friendly ecosystem than it is of rich men simply buying friends and allies. (If anything, the most salient example of a tech billionaire intervening directly in the media was an act of destruction: Thiel’s bankrolling of the lawsuit that crushed the left-wing Gawker Media empire.)
It’s possible instead that, in their overtures toward the right, both sought a way to recapture the feeling, the spirit, the frisson of having once been enfants terribles—of reporting on secret documents, as Greenwald did, or partying in Moscow or naming Goldman Sachs a “great vampire squid,” in Taibbi’s case. These were great shots across the bow of the establishment, rude and necessary eructations in a media clubhouse where the biggest newspaper in the country sat on revelatory and necessary stories—exemplified most damningly by The New York Times’ decision to hold back blockbuster revelations of massive domestic spying by the NSA at the behest of its contacts in the government. Such opportunities often come only once or twice in a lifetime, in a career, and there is something sad in desperately chasing the high of another hit.
As for Bari Weiss, she, like Taibbi, took a flyer on the Twitter Files, using revelations from the documents to pump subscriptions to her newsletter, which she rebranded from Common Sense to the Free Press and began to build out as something closer to a journal of news and opinion, with a growing stable of contributors. (Notably, according to Higgins’s reporting, Musk gave her access at the behest of Andreessen.)
The pining for the excitement and relevance of a lost, revolutionary, mythic personal past seems likewise to stalk many of the tech moguls who populate Owned and who appear to long for a media full of pliant mythmakers, what tech investor Balaji Srinivasan calls “a ‘full stack narrative’ of tech coverage.” Where at one time they might have stayed up all night coding or devising exit strategies for investments, now a figure like Andreessen is “an up-all-night group-chatter and Signaler,” corresponding with “everyone from Nate Silver to the economist Tyler Cowen” and doing online battle with journalistic detractors like Taylor Lorenz.
There is nothing quite so menacing in this second Trump era as powerful men with a bottomless need for external affirmation.
There is nothing quite so menacing in this second Trump era as powerful men with a bottomless need for external affirmation. Higgins deliberately and explicitly offers no prescription, no pat and upbeat concluding chapter full of chipper solutions. He’s right not to. The “loudest voices” of new media are loud indeed, but the fortunes in the tech world are even vaster and louder, and it is hard to imagine a way to argue or engineer our way beyond them.
If there is to be a way out of this morass of ugly grievance and misdirected rage, then it may simply be that the combination of enormous ambition and desperate need for validation will burn fuel like a rocket and then burn out like one. It is an increasingly common observation that, after more than eight years of crying that Trump is not normal, the resigned attitude of much of the country and the lackadaisical response of Democratic Party leadership to Trump’s return suggest that, on the contrary, he and his political tendency have become if not normal then, at least, expected. Perhaps that is a form of hope against hope as well. The loudest voices of contrarian dissent have become what they hate the most: mainstream.
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