“Turns Out, Presidents Matter”: Marc Andreessen Calls For US Strategy To Address China’s Manufacturing Dominance

Marc Andreessen, the billionaire investor and co-founder of the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, joined the host of Uncommon Knowledge, Peter Robinson (former Reagan speechwriter), to discuss his pivotal role in shaping Silicon Valley and politics. 

For decades, Andreessen has supported Democrats, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. However, a troubling 2024 spring meeting with Biden administration officials spooked the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He said Biden officials explained their plan to control AI through government regulatory capture—a strategy reminiscent of Communist policies in China. 

Andreessen told Robinson that President-elect Donald Trump’s knowledge about problem-solving in business and energy is “extremely sophisticated” and “world-class on real estate and communications.” 

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— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2025

“My analysis would be he is world-class in real estate and on communications … and he’s world-class on both which is like probably the first person in the world to be world-class on both of those things, right? The real estate industry is not historically known for its great communicators,” Andreessen continued. 

Robinson and Andreessen also discussed Silicon Valley’s technological and political evolution, Andreessen’s shifting political alliances from Clinton, Obama, and Biden to MAGA, and his vision for harnessing cutting-edge technology to advance societal progress. They also addressed energy challenges, border security, and national defense. 

In particular, Robinson and Andreessen spoke about China’s manufacturing dominance. 

Andreessen explained: 

And I’ll just tell you where I’m worried right now, where the problem is compounding. So you mentioned the, sort of, iPhone assembly, and that’s a big deal. But basically, there’s three industries that sort of follow phones that are kicking in right now.

So, one is drones. And it’s sort of in a bizarre turn of events, the Chinese basically own the global drone market for all, basically, the consumer drones, all the cheap drones. Which by the way, numerically then are the drones that all the militarys also use in overwhelming numbers. And something over 90% of all drones used by the US military are made in China.

No, no, it gets worse, it gets worse, it gets worse, it gets worse before it gets. So the drone thing is not just a company, it’s an entire ecosystem. It’s all of the componentry.

He continued: 

We have a drone company that’s been trying to compete with the Chinese company. Number one, the Biden FAA has been trying to kill us this entire time, trying to do all kinds of things to make sure that American drone companies can’t succeed as part of their war on tech. It’s literally just another in the long list of ways that they’ve been just trying to absolutely kill us.

But two is, China has figured this out. And so, the US has been sanctioning AI chips going to China, China is now sanctioning, they sanction our drone company for the battery, [LAUGH] cuz the battery is made in China, right? And so they have like significant leverage, not just for the drones, but for the entire supply chain.

By the way, the drone supply chain is very analogous to the car supply chain. A self driving electric car is very similar to a drone, or for that matter, to an iPhone. It’s an electrical mechanical device, but it’s a lot of the same kind of battery technology, chip technology, sensor technology.

So they now have their version of what the Germans used to have, which is sort of, the thousands of mid market companies that make all the parts that go into a car. But the German ecosystem is still making them for old internal combustion cars, the Chinese ecosystem is making them for electric cars and self driving cars.

And of course, that means the new Chinese cars that are coming out are really good and they have a giant advantage on cost. And they are starting to bring to market cars that are equivalent in quality to western cars at a third or a fourth of price. So that’s coming. And then the big one that follows phones, drones, and cars, logically, is robots.

Robinson asked Andreessen:

And the Chinese are ahead of us there?

Andreessen responded: 

100%, now, we have the leading, this is important, we have the leading software,like we have the leading R&D.

Like, we have the smartest, I’m convinced we have like the smartest robotics AI people. We have the best people, specifically for the design of the systems, but we don’t have anything resembling the manufacturing capability at all.

Andreessen noted that these technologies are upstream from all the military applications because they are intertwined in the same supply chains. He said the US must confront this and reverse the fragmented approach, where the Biden administration would “hate the domestic American technology industry and is trying to kill it” one day and then, on other days, “thinks we’re gonna somehow develop some sort of competitive response to China on cars or on weapons in the future.” 

NEW: Marc Andreessen on China’s manufacturing dominance

“There’s three industries that follow phones that the Chinese own the global market at:

1) Drones
Something over 90% of all the consumer drones are made in China. Which is what the US Military also uses. It’s the whole… pic.twitter.com/e94C927MMU

— Autism Capital (@AutismCapital) January 15, 2025

The takeaway from the interview is clear: Trump 2.0 must craft a coherent, competitive response to advancing technology under an ‘America First’ agenda. This is in contrast to the radicals in the Biden-Harris regime, who focused on de-growth policies (under the guise of climate change) that have allowed China to advance ahead of the US. 

“What’s the whole of government strategy on China? Zero, right? It turns out the president matters,” Andreessen concluded. 

Watch the full interview here: 

Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) is a prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneur, investor, technologist, and co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. In this @UncKnowledge discussion, Andreessen reflects on his journey—from growing up in rural Wisconsin to founding Netscape… pic.twitter.com/10fgVlqpW8

— Hoover Institution (@HooverInst) January 14, 2025

One must ask: whose team was the Biden-Harris administration on? It doesn’t appear they prioritized an ‘America First’ agenda. This will change under Trump.