Global elites are rotting their brains in group chats

Worse, they're not even funny

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Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today’s newsletter is about the many group chats of venture-capitalist Marc Andreessen.

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Way back in 2018, I wrote a column for New York magazine called “Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again.” The thrust of the piece was that Facebook and Twitter and other default-public “news feed” social networks had become too hostile and inane for pleasurable use--subject to all the well-documented problems of “context collapse” and the dynamics of an attention economy. As people who had once built lives and careers on these sites began to disengage (one component of a broad “techlash” that took place under the first Trump administration), group chats had emerged as the most important site of sociality online: places where people with the time and inclination could gather to interact, waste time, share memes, etc., away from the watchful eyes of haters and losers and free from algorithmic imperatives of the megaplatforms. And wasn’t this--I essentially argued--a good thing?

The answer, we can say with a few years’ distance, is “no, not really.” Compared to, e.g., Twitter, group chats have been good for me and my ability to procrastinate without making myself despondent or furious. But I didn’t really think about what group chats would do for and to our beautiful billionaires, other members of the business and political elite, and the ghoulish reactionaries who circulate around them seemingly at all times. As Ben Smith reports in a great new Semafor piece, billionaire group chats--and the kind of reactionary psychosis they seem to enable and inculcate in the most powerful people in the country--have become an era-defining threat to the republic:

[T]heir influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. […T]hey are made visible through a group consensus on social media. Their effects have ranged from the mainstreaming of the monarchist pundit Curtis Yarvin to a particularly focused and developed dislike of the former Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz.

Ben’s piece is largely about the extensive group-chat networks of the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, “a nuclear reactor who powered many groups” and seems to be effectively addicted to group chats himself. (“My impression is Marc spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time,” a source tells Smith.) A quick-hit reference guide to the Andreessen chats can be found at the end of this newsletter or at this link, but the most prominent of them--by fame and influence of its members, at least--is one called “Chatham House,” a Signal group started last year by the entrepreneur Erik Torenberg, and populated by some 300 investors, academics, journalists, podcasters,¹ and including, until recently, at least two Social Network characters: Larry Summers and Tyler Winklevoss, a screenshot of whose dramatic departure from the chat alongside Sacks and Tucker Carlson is reproduced in the Semafor piece.

But as Smith suggests, Andreessen and his friends are far from the only elites to be DMing each other constantly to deleterious effect on democracy, freedom of speech, the global economy, etc. Over the past decade, WhatsApp and Signal have become key spaces for business and political elites and ideologues to coordinate, organize, mobilize, and radicalize their less frothing peers, and unlike Bohemian Grove (or even a no-frills, entry-level smoke-filled room), no overhead is required.

Reported examples of this phenomenon (and there are surely many more still unreported-upon) include:

• A WhatsApp group “with 200+ tech founders” seems to have been instrumental in causing the bank run that destroyed Silicon Valley Bank in 2023.

• A chat called “Israel Current Events,” featuring “some of the nation’s most prominent business leaders and financiers” including “more than a dozen” billionaires, coordinated pressure campaigns on politicians and college administrators to shut down anti-Israel protests and channel donations to pro-Israel American politicians in 2023 and 2024, according to reporting from The Washington Post’s Hannah Natanson and Emmanuel Felton.

• Last year, Ken Silverstein described in The New Republic a group chat called “Off Leash,” founded by the mad condottiere Erik Prince, consisting of some 400 international right-wing politicians, journalists, business leaders, mercenaries, and other Blofeld types:

  Among the group’s hottest topics [… is] The shortcomings of democracy that invariably resulted from extending the franchise to ordinary citizens, who are easily manipulated by Marxists and populists. “The West is at best a beautiful cemetery,” lamented Sven von Storch, whose aristocratic German family fled the country after World War II to Chile, where their son was raised before returning to the land of his ancestors, where he married the granddaughter of the Third Reich’s last de facto head of state, who was convicted at Nuremberg. […]
  
  Prominent figures in the Off Leash crew are well known for their paleoconservative political views, but the private opinions expressed in the group chat are even more extreme and jarring than we normally see voiced publicly. Participants chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad. The group’s overall bloodlust periodically proved to be too much for a few more judicious individual members, who in almost any other setting would be considered ultraconservatives but in the context of Off Leash sound like hippie peaceniks‎. […] Many other Off Leash participants have also stated that they don’t view the group chat as merely a forum to exchange ideas but want it to become a vehicle to put their theories into action. “If we band together … we can damage the other side like no one has ever seen before!” exclaimed Jeff Sloat, who worked with a U.S. Army psyops unit in Central America during the Reagan era.

I love stories like these--not just exposés on elite group chats but really any glimpse inside the texts of powerful people. To the extent we can get access to them, Signal and WhatsApp records are extremely valuable journalistic and historical documents--small windows into the thought processes and backroom deals of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. Whatever advantages group chats might provide the wealthy people who congregate in them, they also create a record of personal networks and private conversations that would have previously disappeared immediately from the historical (not to mention the public) view.

There’s also, I admit, the grim entertainment of reading, e.g., the Elon Musk text messages made public during his lawsuit against Twitter, and seeing precisely how dull and spiritless the people who rule us are, how unfunny and uncurious they are even at their most private and unguarded. One thing you learn from these text chains is that, at least over WhatsApp, the rich powerful are not that different from you and me. Their group chats may be, in the abstract, sites of literal conspiracy, but as a practical matter they’re extremely familiar: People argue, joke, waste time, annoy each other; they change the group name frequently and quit in a huff. The main difference between their group chats and ours is that they have a lot of money, which makes the stakes of those arguments that much higher.

In some sense this has always been the case. Members of the elite have, of course, always talked: in boardrooms and cloakrooms, on yachts and mountain retreats, over power lunches and gala dinners. But these meetings were until recently necessarily limited by the practical constraints of life: Even if there was a smoke-filled room big enough for 400+ politicians and bankers and C.E.O.s, it would be impossible to sync up their schedules. Group chats eliminate the little frictions involved in speaking with and learning from your peers. You can spend more time talking to your fellow masters of the universe and less time hearing from anyone outside those small circles.

The use of elite group chats for political persuasion--or radicalization--is a running theme in Smith’s piece. Torenburg tells Smith he started Chatham House as “a left-right exchange where we could have real conversations because of filter bubble group chats,” and in general many of the people in Andreessen’s orbit suggest to Smith that they were driven to private fora by the violently woke atmosphere of Twitter--only on Signal, the idea goes, can you talk frankly about politics without risking cancellation.

But others see it slightly differently: “Two of its conservative participants said they see [Chatham House] as a way to shift centrist Trump-curious figures to the Republican side,” Smith writes. The race-science enthusiast conservative Substacker Richard Hanania recounts for Smith a group chat “of smart right-wing people” he created at Andreessen’s behest. “Marc radicalized over time,” Hanania tells Smith, no doubt helped along by the “elite law students and federal court clerks” in the chat, not to mention Tucker Carlson. The right-wing activist Chris Rufo is (as always) particularly explicit: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right,” he says.

I’m not sure you’d even need an organizer like Rufo to produce a more unified reactionary business class. Another way of putting it might be that these group chats, easily accessible from the private jet, the boardroom, the self-driving Tesla, constantly thrumming with exhortation and argument, are a way to take a sociologically similar but politically uncoordinated group of people and get them all on the same ideological and strategic page--what Marxists might call “class formation.” To the extent they are “safe spaces,” it’s this process of political education and mobilization that they’re “safe” for.

1. Interestingly, the art for Smith’s piece includes stylized portraits of four people not specifically named in the column but who are presumably part of the Andreessen group-chat universe: Stripe founder Patrick Collison (lower right), G.M.U. economist and blogger Tyler Cowen (upper right), Facebook memoirist Antonio Garcia Martinez, and former Boris Johnson advisor Dominic Cummings (both center).