Marc Andreessen blasts elite colleges over DEI policies in leaked messages

The leaked comments from a private WhatsApp group chat that included several Trump administration officials indicate a broader backlash among wealthy elites against many of the institutions where they got their degrees.

Ivy League graduate and fellow tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has been a frequent and vocal critic of higher education as a hotbed of leftist political ideology, while billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman repeatedly attacked his alma mater, Harvard University, over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies. 

“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal,” Andreessen wrote in messages from May uncovered by the Washington Post. “When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.

“They declared war on 70% of the country and now they’re going to pay the price.”

What he specifically meant by this demographic majority is unclear. But from the context, his comments have been seen as a reference to white America. The latest U.S. Census Bureau figures for 2024 put the percentage of white Americans in the population at 75.3%.

Fortune reached out to Andreessen Horowitz for comment and clarification but did not receive a response at the time of publication. 

“I was born in 1971 in Iowa and grew up in Wisconsin,” Andreessen continued in his messages. “My cohort of citizens was told that we just had to put up with this as a cost of prior American bigotry, even though the discrimination was now aimed at us.

“The insanity of the last 8 years and in particular the summer of 2020 totally shredded that complacency. And so now my people are furious and not going to take it anymore,” Andreessen snapped in his group chat messages.

The reference to 2020 is most likely meant to be the nationwide protests that erupted after the murder of black American George Floyd by a white police officer.

Andreessen’s comments were privately made, shared among an elite circle of high-ranking administration officials in Trump’s government.

As a result they were very direct in nature, attacking universities like Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [MIT], as well as the National Science Foundation [NSF].

“I view Stanford and MIT as mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point,” he confided.

Fortune has reached out to Stanford and MIT for comment.

The messages have sparked heavy criticism, in part because the NSF helped fund his research on computers through a large grant in 1994 that led directly to Andreessen’s fortune as creator of web browser Netscape Navigator. 

The Washington Post article itself was inundated with reader comments, nearly 5,000 in total, “overwhelmingly” negative, according to the paper.

After long supporting the Clinton-era Democrats, Andreessen previously said he no longer saw his interests reflected by the party’s leadership amid an embrace of DEI and identity-based policies.

He then endorsed Trump’s campaign last year, arguing the Biden administration’s hostile approach to crypto—where his VC firm is the industry’s leading investor—would stifle America’s economic innovation.

While the crypto economy is a key focus at Andreessen Horowitz, often shortened to a16z, the company is also heavily invested in AI and led the $2 billion funding round for Mira Murati’s new artificial intelligence startup, Thinking Machines Lab.