Tech billionaires and iconoclast journalists suddenly see eye to eye.
Jacob Bacharach at TNR:
A few weeks into 2025, Ross Douthat, The New York Times’ idiosyncratically conservative columnist, interviewed Marc Andreessen: Netscape co-founder, venture capitalist, general Silicon Valley gadabout, and, lately, fixture in Trump-adjacent Washington, where he has reportedly been interviewing candidates for top agency positions and promoting rollbacks of Biden-era cryptocurrency guardrails. O tempora, o mores. In the course of the interview (the audio of which is available in full as an episode of the paper’s Matter of Opinion podcast), Andreessen laments the pressures of a socially conscious press, college students, social media activists, and activist shareholders. He evokes a genuinely paranoid fantasy that tech workers were once on the verge of a violent labor uprising: Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your keyboards! He appears to claim that, at some point in the years 2016 to 2020, “the federal government radicalized hard under Hillary.” It’s unclear what he was referring to. The Times, in any case, removed the offending quote in its print edition. Andreessen is far from alone in his embattled posture. A set of increasingly vocal, increasingly right-wing tech billionaires has come to share with some segments of the left (or, as we shall see, the former left) an almost obsessive concern with the hypocrisies and shortcomings of modern liberalism. Some of these figures, like PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, have long been associated with the political right, and Thiel’s 1998 attack on “multiculturalism” in elite universities, The Diversity Myth (co-written with current Trump “crypto czar” David O. Sacks), presaged today’s great national DEI freak-out. Others were more ambiguous, political agnostics in the vast, squishy center of American politics who have only more recently drifted into the embrace of a newly dynamic right unbound by its stodgy past.
Andreessen himself long supported Democrats, but he grew incensed by the Biden administration’s mild skepticism toward and willingness to regulate cryptocurrency, eventually embracing a belief that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the deep state were engaged in a deliberate program to “debank” conservatives and cryptocurrency investors. Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously cultivated a studiously apolitical public image, killed all DEI initiatives at Meta (blaming them on his departed female COO, Sheryl Sandberg) and went on the Joe Rogan show to propose a need to bring “masculine energy” back to the workplace. Elon Musk was once a darling of liberals and environmentalists, but his various musings on “free speech”; his chummy social media interactions with online Nazis, “race realists,” and other such strange creatures; and, of course, his spectacular embrace of Donald Trump have disabused the center and the left of any notion that he might be on their side.
This rightward turn has drawn noisy criticism. Yet the tech barons, platform operators, and publishers had already found a new set of friendly voices in the media. As it turned out, there was a pool of ready-made scribes, who, like them, had soured on the Democratic Party, on speech codes they perceived as a regime of censorship, and on the perceived excesses of DEI, and who were eager to take advantage of the new, growing platforms that billionaires like Thiel, Musk, and Andreessen acquired or funded.
Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, a new book by the journalist Eoin Higgins, is an attempt to understand how a collection of unimaginably wealthy, increasingly angry titans of technology and finance were able to acquire loud allies among journalists who had, until relatively recently, been largely associated with the political left. Higgins previously covered this beat in his work for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and for his own newsletter, The Flashpoint. Some of that work is repurposed here, but the book expands on it, taking a broader look at the sociocultural and political currents that have brought new alignments of writers, audiences, and funders. His two main subjects are the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, although a number of other new-media all-stars and hangers-on make appearances, most notably Free Press founder and former Times columnist Bari Weiss, who, while lacking Greenwald’s or Taibbi’s superstar-journalist quality, comes across as a much cannier operator with a longer and more strategic view of her project.
Greenwald and Taibbi arrived at their journalistic celebrity through different paths. Greenwald, a civil libertarian and (usually) strident critic of U.S. military and intelligence policy, cut his teeth as a blogger and Guardian columnist before rocketing to international fame by acquiring and publishing the Edward Snowden National Security Agency leaks and founding The Intercept with backing from billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Taibbi started as a kind of new gonzo journalist—will no one free young men from the curse of Hunter S. Thompson?—but became famous and respectable through excellent and trenchant reporting for Rolling Stone, particularly on the 2008 financial crisis. Neither writer was ever a doctrinaire leftist, but it is fair to say that, even when criticizing Democrats and liberals (for example, for continuing the war on terrorism and the use of drones, or for favoring banks over homeowners during the Obama years), their critiques appeared to emerge from positions further left. But over the course of the first Trump term and subsequent Biden presidency, they gradually, then swiftly, drifted into the inchoate, mercurial world of “heterodox” thinking and writing—a sprawling and capacious complex of pontificators, with tendencies that range from fairly standard Silicon Valley sci-fi libertarianism to fantasy-genre monarchism to hard-right ethnonationalist neofascism.
Both of these main characters became uncomfortable in the liberal media around the time of “Russiagate,” a sprawling, incomprehensible liberal conspiracy theory that blamed Trump’s 2016 victory on Russian state malefactors. Both were deeply skeptical of the theory, while major left-leaning outlets like MSNBC, where Greenwald had once been a greenroom fixture, went particularly big on it. Ironically, however, both Greenwald and Taibbi took an almost conspiratorial view of the media’s commitment to Russiagate, treating the dissemination of the theory as a media conspiracy in and of itself, with Taibbi going so far as to compare it (with caveats, to be fair) in scale to the “WMD affair heading into the Iraq war” rather than as desperate wish-casting by liberals for some explanation, any explanation, for the election of Trump. Both men found friendlier audiences at Fox, where Greenwald became a regular guest of Tucker Carlson, and eventually as far abroad as the hair-sprayed Technicolor studios of Newsmax.
In the years that followed, both men took positions of reflexive hostility to mainstream media and contemporary liberal values. During the pandemic, for example, Taibbi criticized the legacy press for its “censorship of ivermectin news.” In the Biden years, he grew increasingly critical of any attempts to prosecute Trump for various crimes, arguing, as many conservatives did, that such attempts were inherently politically motivated and would set up cycles of revenge prosecution. Both men evinced growing concern with “cancel culture”: Taibbi created a regular feature on his website called Meet the Censored, in which he interviewed supposedly canceled writers and public figures, and Greenwald lamented that one of his own passion projects, a documentary about the tennis player Martina Navratilova, had been derailed at least in part by the unreasonable objections of trans activists.
These positions brought both men into alignment with a tech elite who increasingly saw value in an unfettered, (mostly) uncensored, alternative online media. Both publish primarily on Substack (Taibbi has over 500,000 subscribers, and Greenwald over 300,000), the newsletter platform that received substantial funding from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz. Greenwald has also built an impressive audience for his System Update news show on the Thiel-funded, right-wing YouTube alternative, Rumble—a friendly arena for figures with contrarian viewpoints, a maximalist view of free speech, and a reflexive anti-liberalism. Taibbi, along with Bari Weiss and the reporters Lee Fang and Michael Shellenberger, among others, benefited from a more direct relationship with the tech oligarchy.
When did Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who both have had lefty credentials at one point, become de facto right-wingers? Sometime in the late 2010s-early 2020s.
Taibbi and Greenwald’s moves to the right mirrored those of Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Elon Musk’s moves to the right.
