00:56:14 · Teddy Schleifer, Max Read
[00:56:14] S3: Yeah. I mean I mean... And and the reason why Fair Shake got involved in such a significant way at all this cycle was because they encountered this pushback you're speaking to. I mean, basically, September, it was not clear whether or not the crypto industry was gonna spend all this money they had. Basically, the way that these super PACs tend to work now, which I think is kinda interesting, is they raise a ton of money, and then it's sort of in this bank account. And they don't necessarily always spend it. It's just like this, like, permanent looming threat, like, you know, shame if something happened to you. And they basically, Democrats blocked this crypto policy bill, called the Clarity Act in in September. And then like that, the next day, was time to punish the Democrats, and they spent all this money against Brown. So, like, right. If you're a believer that, you know, the crypto industry is overrated politically, obviously, you'd be emboldened by Brown staring down $45,000,000 and winning. [00:57:06] S1: Yeah. Let's talk about another set of donors to, the fair shake super PAC. Yeah. Andreessen Horowitz. This is one of the Silicon Valley's most famous and prestigious, VC firms, but also quite memorably a conservative one. [00:57:19] S3: Mhmm. [00:57:19] S1: Mark Andreessen, obviously, one of the loudest sort of pro Trump voices in the valley. They were big donors on this. They've donated to Fair Shake, but they also were donating to an AI super PAC called Leading the Future. Tell me a little bit about, the money they were spending and where that was.
00:57:35 · Teddy Schleifer, Max Read
[00:57:35] S3: Sure. I mean, it's fascinating for people who are in the Andreessen, who've read his biography or or or if, you know, familiar with this oeuvre kinda politically. Because this is somebody who, like, what... In his twenties was like a... Like, an institution in democratic fundraising. I mean, Andreessen's been around for forever. And now he and his firm, you know, for a while until Elon Musk entered the picture, like, we're we're the biggest political donors in the entire cycle, and and I've a story about kind of earlier this year about how they got into this. The AI stuff they do is the most interesting. Yeah. Because basically, after Fair Shake spends all this money in 2024, then the crypto industry is seen as political savants. They basically say, hey. Let's do the same thing with AI. Mhmm. The AI industry in 2024 is is nascent. But in 2025, 2026, it's becoming this huge thing. And they they... It's the exact same model. You know? Obviously, it's not crypto companies that are funding it. It's it's AI firms like OpenAI's cofounder Greg Brockman and Andreess Horowitz, which has a ton of investments in AI, and they basically run it back, with AI. The difference, as probably was... Is predictable in retrospect or or foreseeable, is that people have a lot stronger opinions about AI than they do about crypto. [00:58:50] S1: Right. I mean, it's it's funny to sort of say that AI feels more toxic than crypto right now, but if... As we're making our losers list, it feels a bit like that's what we're learning.
00:58:50 · Max Read, Teddy Schleifer, Ezra Klein
[00:58:50] S1: Right. I mean, it's it's funny to sort of say that AI feels more toxic than crypto right now, but if... As we're making our losers list, it feels a bit like that's what we're learning. [00:58:58] S3: Yeah. I mean I mean, on crypto, there is... There's... I do I do think there's some political upside on crypto [00:59:03] S2: Yeah. [00:59:04] S3: For for people, especially because there's... The downs... The downside is it's not a salient issue for people. Right. So, like, taking money from crypto, can be a net positive decision strategically. [00:59:15] S1: Right. But let's keep talking about AI because I think perhaps even below Andreessen Horowitz on our list is Greg Brockman, cofounder of OpenAI, president, one of the most prominent people at the company after Sam Altman Yeah. And a major donor to Leading the Future. You reported, and I found this story incredibly fascinating, on the controversy that spurred inside OpenAI. Yeah. Tell me about that.
00:59:37 · Teddy Schleifer, Max Read
[00:59:37] S3: I was gonna say, you know, he's the biggest donor... One of the biggest donors to Leading the Future, asterisk, which is the... That it was pledged. Mhmm. And this shows how quickly the politics of AI have changed. Greg Brockman in 2025 and his wife, Anna, commit to getting $50,000,000 to leading the future, and it's matched by $50,000,000 from Andreessen Horowitz. Only the latter actually happened. Because Brockmans... The Brockmans gave the first $25,000,000 in 2025 when AI is, you know, it's an... It's a... It's a policy issue, but it's not like it is today. And then a year later, they back out of the second 25 they're gonna give. So that instead of being two installments of '25, it becomes one. And that's in part because Greg Brockman said internally inside the company that he was upset that his support for the super PAC was becoming a distraction. We've also seen this with, not totally the same, but Meta, as part of their political engagement this cycle, also retracted about 20 to $25,000,000 from their state political giving. It was timed in the same way that the that the Brockman gift was, which is to say, as the politics were getting worse, they want to spend less money. [01:00:43] S1: Right. [01:00:44] S3: So this is tough, and and it just shows how quickly things have changed.
01:00:44 · Teddy Schleifer, Max Read
[01:00:44] S3: So this is tough, and and it just shows how quickly things have changed. [01:00:46] S1: Yeah. I mean, it does seem like we're seeing a revival of some of the, internal employee pushback that was really common in the tech industry at the end of the 2010, say, and then got really quashed in in the in the in the... During the Biden administration and the second Trump administration. But, seems clear that if you're an executive, you wanna be careful about what kinds of causes your name is getting attached to and what kind of politics it's getting attached to. [01:01:10] S3: Yeah. And that... And that's why we have the beauty of dark money groups, which is if you wanna do something, there's a way to do it. And I I mean, that's a joke, but it's also that, like, you know, we're talking about gifts to disclosed vehicles, and so much of the world of of money and politics and billionaire influence now funnels through things that are undisclosed. And if you're Greg Brockman out there and you're listening to this and you wanna get another $25,000,000 in the political system, there's a nonprofit out there waiting to take your money. [01:01:39] S1: Okay. So we've we've kind of constructed a list here. We've got a couple people who got what they wanted and then a lot of people who really didn't, who spent their their money in different ways. I think at the very bottom of our list, no matter what [01:01:49] S3: Yeah.
01:01:49 · Teddy Schleifer, Max Read
[01:01:49] S3: Yeah. [01:01:49] S1: Is Elon Musk, who spent 400 plus million dollars, and didn't... I don't know that he won any... A single race that he spent money towards. He got a positive outcome out of it. Beyond that, even more than somebody like Greg Brockman who became a story when he didn't want to, Elon became an enemy, especially in Texas when he was constantly invoked by Zafoyl in the senate race. I don't even know where to begin with this. Sort of what happened with Elon's money here, and why did it turn out so poorly in your estimation? [01:02:19] S3: Yeah. Let's let's let's roll back the clock to last spring, the spring of twenty twenty five, when this special election in Wisconsin. Musk... This is a random election. People probably don't even remember it. But, like, Musk spent, a ton of of of capital literally and also in terms of his time on this judicial race in the state where he, again, became the main character in the race. This is at the time he was leading the Department of Government Efficiency. After the guy lost in Wisconsin, his name is Brad Schimel, Musk kind of realized, I think, based on some reporting, that this was not working out to be so visible in his political support. And he tried to be a much... Want to take a much, much lower profile going forward. That election, I think, was basically why Musk, for over a year, was was not really doing much at all in the in the public eye. He was talking at one point about starting a third party. Never did that. Never recanted it, I should also add. He's still technically a live situation.