# Ben Horowitz Co-founder and General Partner of [[Andreessen Horowitz]], one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world. Former operator (Netscape → Loudcloud → Opsware, sold to HP for $1.6B in 2007). Author of *The Hard Thing About Hard Things*. With co-founder [[Marc Andreessen]], anchors the firm's identity, capital, and political posture. In the [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] context, Horowitz is the **Las Vegas / Nevada wing** of the broader migration: he physically relocated from the Bay Area to Las Vegas in 2022, then in 2024 — along with Felicia Horowitz — executed one of the most visible political flips of the cycle, going from decades of progressive giving to backing [[Donald Trump]], then back to backing [[Kamala Harris]], in the span of three months. ## Career Highlights - **Netscape** (1995–1999) — Product manager under Andreessen. - **Loudcloud / Opsware** (1999–2007) — Co-founder with Andreessen; sold to HP for $1.6B. - **Andreessen Horowitz** (2009–present) — Co-founder; firm AUM grew from $300M (Fund I, 2009) to a multi-billion-dollar platform by the 2020s. - **Crypto fund** — Led a16z's $4B+ crypto fund commitments, making the firm one of the largest crypto VCs. - **[[American Dynamism]]** — Anchored the firm's defense-tech / national-strategic-industries thesis alongside [[Katherine Boyle]] and the rest of the partnership. ## The Las Vegas Move (2022) - Moved to Las Vegas in 2022. - Positioned in a blog post as a direct critique of Bay Area dominance: a16z would no longer be tethered to Sand Hill Road. - Andreessen also bought Las Vegas property around the same time but kept Atherton as primary residence — a parallel hedge, not a synchronized exit. - **a16z corporate domicile** was subsequently moved from Delaware to Nevada (announced separately), partially insulating the firm from Delaware corporate-law shifts while signaling alignment with Nevada's regulatory posture. ## The 2024 Political Whiplash The cleanest documented case of a tech-billionaire political flip during the 2024 cycle: - **Pre-2022** — Neither Ben nor Felicia Horowitz had ever donated to a Republican. - **2022–2024** — Felicia Horowitz quietly began donating to Republican politicians and PACs, including [[JD Vance]]; 11 such donations through May 2024. - **July 16, 2024** — Ben and [[Marc Andreessen]] publicly endorse [[Donald Trump]]; each donates $2.5M to a pro-Trump super PAC ($5M combined). - **October 4, 2024** — Ben publicly announces he is also making a "significant" donation to the [[Kamala Harris]] campaign; cites longtime personal friendship with Harris. - **Oct–Nov 2024** — The Horowitzes are donors to both campaigns simultaneously. Public rationale: a Trump-policy preference on crypto and AI regulation, combined with a personal Harris loyalty. Critics read it as a hedge: secure access to whichever administration won. ## The 2026 cycle: from hedge to largest donor The 2024 whiplash resolved into something simpler. By mid-2026 Andreessen Horowitz was the single largest institutional donor of the midterm cycle. Public Citizen's June 30, 2026 tally put the firm's own giving at **$51.65M** — $50M to the pro-AI-industry super PAC Leading the Future and $1.65M to the Congressional Leadership Fund — and the *New York Times* put the firm plus the co-founders' personal donations at roughly **$115M**, with about 40% tied to crypto (the firm had pledged $23M to [[Fairshake PAC]] for 2026 back in November 2024). The firm's stated emphasis shifted from crypto to AI regulation over the cycle. Detail and running totals are on [[a16z 2026 Midterm Donation Aggregate]]. The Harris donation of October 2024 now reads as the outlier, not the pattern: Horowitz's money follows the firm's regulatory interests, and in 2026 those interests were being served by one party. ## KB Relevance Horowitz sits at the intersection of three KB trackings: 1. The [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] — physical move to Las Vegas, firm domicile move to Nevada, public statement framing. 2. The [[American Dynamism]] political-investment thesis — a16z as the institutional vehicle. 3. The Trump-pivot wave of 2024 — most cleanly documented in the Felicia / Ben donation record. Expansion candidates: detailed a16z portfolio mapping in defense tech, Horowitz's *Hard Thing About Hard Things* worldview as a political-managerial text, the relationship to [[Tech Oligarch Media Map]] (a16z's in-house podcast network and Future publication). ## See Also - [[Marc Andreessen]] - [[Andreessen Horowitz]] - [[a16z 2026 Midterm Donation Aggregate]] - [[Fairshake PAC]] - [[American Dynamism]] - [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]]