Marc Andreessen sounded angry. It was May 22, 2024, and he was venting to a table full of President Joe Biden’s officials in the West Wing office of Jeff Zients, then the White House chief of staff. The famed venture capitalist was in town with his longtime investing partner, Ben Horowitz, to discuss US tech policy, and the private lunch soon turned heated. Andreessen expressed his frustration about a slew of Biden administration initiatives and regulations, especially ones he believed were crippling the artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency industries. Near the end of the lunch, he also launched into a tirade against a Democratic proposal to hike taxes on the wealthiest 0.01% of American households. “The billionaire tax seemed to offend him more than anything we’d done on AI or even crypto,” says Bruce Reed, one of the handful of White House advisers who had joined the meeting.