Billionaire investor says 30 tech founders have been ‘debanked’ in last four years

Dozens of tech founders have been targeted as part of a shadowy campaign waged by the Biden administration against its “political enemies”, a billionaire has claimed.

Dozens of tech and crypto start-up founders have been “debanked” and forced out of the industry over the past four years as part of a shadowy pressure campaign waged by the Biden administration against its “political enemies”, a prominent billionaire has claimed.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and a key ally of Elon Musk, left podcast host Joe Rogan stunned on Wednesday after revealing the scale of “raw administrative power” quietly being wielded behind the scenes by “unaccountable” agencies.

Mr Andreessen said tech founders worth millions of dollars had been forced to change fields and in some cases leave the country entirely to escape the “Eye of Sauron”, in the hope of eventually being able to use banks again.

“We’ve had like 30 founders debanked in the last four years,” Mr Andreessen said.

“It’s been a big recurring pattern. This is one of the reasons why we ended up supporting Trump. We just can’t live in a world where somebody starts a company that’s a completely legal thing and then they literally get sanctioned, embargoed by the US government. No due process, none of this is written down, there’s no rules, there’s no court, there’s no decision process, there’s no appeal. Who do you go to to get your bank account back?”

Did you know that 30 tech founders were secretly debanked? https://t.co/gmnCir43XD

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2024

The prominent Silicon Valley investor was one of a number of high-profile entrepreneurs from the so-called “PayPal Mafia” — former founders or employees of the payments platform — who publicly backed Donald Trump this election, in part due to his tech and crypto-friendly policies.

Mr Musk has been tapped by Mr Trump to lead a cost-cutting and deregulation drive dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and has previously expressed astonishment that there are more than 450 US federal agencies, more than the number of years the country has existed.

Mr Andreessen said much of the debanking had been driven by “independent federal agencies” like the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), which was used to “basically terrorise financial institutions (to) prevent new start-ups, new competition that want to compete with the big banks”.

“Under current banking regulations after all the reforms of the last 20 years, there’s now a category called a politically exposed person, PEP, and if you are a PEP you are required by financial regulators to kick them out of your bank,” he said.

“My partner Ben’s father (conservative activist David Horowitz) has been debanked for having the wrong politics. No one on the left gets debanked. I have not heard of a single instance of anybody on the left getting debanked.”

“How is that legal?” Rogan asked.

Marc Andreessen speaking to Joe Rogan. Picture: YouTube

Mr Andreessen noted that while the US Constitution prevented the government restricting speech, “there’s no constitutional amendment that says the government can’t debank you”.

“They don’t have to debank you, they just have to put pressure on the private company banks to do it,” he said. “So it’s basically a privatised sanctions regime that lets bureaucrats do to American citizens the same thing that we do to Iran.”

He added, “When Trump says the ‘deep state’, the way we would describe it is it’s administrative power. It’s political power being administered not through legislation, there’s no defined law that covers this, it’s not through regulation, you can’t go sue a regulator to fix this, it’s not through any kind of court judgment, it’s just raw administrative power.”

He explained that the process began around 15 years ago under the Obama administration’s “Operation Chokepoint”, which targeted “legal fields of economic activity they don’t like” such as medicinal marijuana, prostitution and guns.

“And then this administration extended that concept to apply it to tech founders, crypto founders and then just generally political opponents,” he said.

“Chokepoint 2.0 is primarily against their political enemies and disfavoured tech start-ups. It’s hit the tech world hard.”

Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Picture: Brandon Bell/Getty Images/AFP

Mr Andreessen blamed much of the slowdown in the crypto space in recent years on debanking.

“The last four years, the crypto thing everybody got excited, NFTs and all that stuff, and then it just stopped,” he said.

“The reason it stopped is because basically every crypto founder, every crypto start-up, they either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry, or their company got debanked so it couldn’t keep operating, or they got prosecuted and charged.”

He said one of his own employees had lost his bank account simply for having the word “crypto” in his job title.

“(The bank) did a screen across their customer base,” he said. “Anybody with ‘crypto’ became a ‘politically exposed person’, because crypto was politically controversial.”

“If someone has $30 million in the bank and they get debanked what do they do with their money?” Rogan asked.

“You go to cash. Diamonds, art. You go overseas somewhere,” Mr Andreessen said.

“When we think about totalitarianism we think about World War II, Nazis and jackboots with tanks and guns. You might call that hard totalitarianism. But there’s this other version you might call soft totalitarianism, which is just rules and power exercised arbitrarily that just simply suppresses everything. This is speech control and debanking and all these other things.”

Mr Andreessen claimed the Biden administration had planned “full government control” over AI companies to enforce a “censorship regime”.

“If you thought social media censorship was bad this has the potential to be 1000 times worse,” he said.

“Social media is important but at the end of the day it’s just people talking to each other. AI is going to be the control layer on everything — how your kids learn in school, who gets loans, does your house open when you come to the front door. So if that gets wired into the political system … we are in for a very bad future. The Biden administration was explicitly on that path, it’s crystal clear that’s where it was headed.”

Mr Andreessen joked that like in a science fiction movie the timeline had “split twice in the last nine months”.

“The first was when Trump got shot ... it could have gone horrifically bad for the entire world,” he said. “And then the timeline split again on election day.”

Originally published as Billionaire investor says 30 tech founders have been ‘debanked’ in last four years