Trump boosters are expecting some big returns on their investment
Tycoons in line to profit from lavish donations
By Eric Lipton, New York Times

WASHINGTON — Limit the reach of federal regulations on artificial intelligence.

Make room for cryptocurrencies to thrive.

Ease the antitrust crackdown on big-tech companies.

Buy more military drones.

And don’t raise taxes on billionaires.

The to-do list for President-elect Donald Trump from Marc Andreessen, the venture capital billionaire from California, is long but quite specific.

Now, after donating big money to Trump, Andreessen is eager to see his candidate work through the list.

“It felt like a boot off the throat,’’ Andreessen said about Trump’s victory during a podcast conversation this month with his business partner. “Every morning, I wake up happier than the day before.’’

Andreessen’s excitement is a hint of just how broadly the victory by Trump has resonated with business executives who invested millions of dollars in his candidacy and now stand to profit from his policies.

Theirs is a circle of deep-pocketed industry winners that extends far beyond Elon Musk. It is a more diverse group, at least in terms of business interests, than the one that surrounded Trump in his first administration, where executives from the oil, gas, and coal industries were particularly dominant.

Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of the Oklahoma-based oil and gas giant Continental Resources, is still in a position to benefit from regulatory rollbacks that he and an affiliated trade association are already pushing.

But the list also includes:

– Joe Lonsdale, a defense technology executive who wants to help the Pentagon revamp the way it fights wars;

– Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who were known for their battle with Facebook, then became cryptocurrency investors and now want to shape the industry’s rules;

– Brian Evans, the chief executive of Geo Group, the private prison giant that could benefit if Trump carries out his promise of large-scale deportations;

– John Paulson, the hedge fund billionaire who could cash out of his investment in the federal government’s housing finance companies, Freddie and Fannie, if they are privatized under Trump.

“It will be a billionaires’ ball,’’ said Robert Reich, who served as secretary of labor during the Clinton administration and has long been critical of the income disparity in the United States.

A spokesperson for Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment.

Andreessen, who donated at least $4.5 million to a super political action committee named Right for America that supported Trump, illustrates the alignment of corporate and political agendas.

For more than a year now, Andreessen, who was a big Democratic fund-raiser during Al Gore’s presidential campaign, has made his frustration clear with many Biden administration policies that affect his tech-sector investments.

Perhaps most fundamentally, Andreessen believes that Biden-era regulators, in their zeal to fight dominant tech giants, have complicated the ability of startup companies to return profits to their investors by selling off their growing businesses to larger tech companies.

“Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech,’’ Andreessen wrote on Substack in July, adding later in the post, “Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries.’’

Andreessen and his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, declined requests to comment.

Andreessen, whose venture capital firm has invested billions of dollars in startups that specialize in AI tools, also criticized President Biden’s executive order late last year that requires companies to file reports to the government about risks that their AI systems could help countries or terrorists make weapons of mass destruction.

Trump, at a rally late last year, vowed to “cancel Biden’s artificial intelligence executive order.’’

That led Andreessen, after Trump’s victory this month, to indicate that the Biden-era rules were effectively dead: “Stick a fork in it, it’s over.’’