The power elites have a Signal group chat, too – and the ones that seem to be reshaping the government, according to a recent report, are the ones Marc Andreessen created to bring the American right wing and the technocracy together.
Semafor’s Ben Smith published a massive article on Monday detailing an ecosystem of private, disappearing group chats between hundreds of powerful Silicon Valley figures and high-profile right-wing pundits and academics. Though Smith himself was unable to get many of the texts – they were all set to “disappearing” mode – several members of the groups shared details of the nature of the chats, some of them on the record, while other members have described the chats on podcasts and blogs.
The existence of private Signal group chats for extremely powerful people has only become public knowledge after the White House accidentally added a journalist to one, but they have, apparently, existed for years. This particular network, spawned by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen beginning in 2018, has become the backbone of the technocratic right currently gaining dominance in Washington. These chats were known for holding nothing back between its participants: In one chat called “Chatham House,” for instance, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale accused Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase’s former chief of technology, of being “taken over by a crazy China mind virus.” The ideological spectrum was notable, too: earlier in the chat, billionaire Mark Cuban was debating pundit and Daily Wire cofounder Ben Shapiro over work ethics.
At first blush, it may appear that these figures had little in common: Chatham House included Vivek Ramaswamy, Larry Summers, and Niall Ferguson, and other chats listed by Smith included Tucker Carlson, Richard Hanania, and Chris Rufo. But they were drawn into the network by the active engagement of Andreessen himself, who began the group chats starting in 2018 and would often directly add the right-wingers to chats or create groups around them himself. “He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group — which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one member told Smith.
At present, the chats seem to have developed a fissure between the tech right and the conservatives over Trump’s tariffs, for obvious reasons. But if there was any connective tissue to the network beyond Andreessen, it was a desire to air their opinions and debate their peers in the way they used to on Twitter, but in a manner that would avoid widespread public criticism and professional consequences.
While some of the groups’ members found the freedom refreshing, comparing it to the intellectual salons of 18th century Europe, others, such as Hanania, believed that the insularity became a “vehicle for groupthink” and turned the tech right explicitly partisan. Hanania, who left a group founded by Andreessen that included Carlson, used his criticism of Trump’s election denialism as an example: “I’d say, ‘That’s not true and that actually matters.’ I got the sense these guys didn’t want to hear it,” he said. “There’s an idea that you don’t criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left.”