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Being a gazillionaire means you have a lot of enemies.
It also means you have a lot of free time to rage at everyone on X, the Everything App.
Take Marc Andreessen, the billionaire cofounder of the venture capital firm a16z, who seemed to have a mini-meltdown after falling for obvious ragebait posted by a rival firm, as spotted by TechCrunch.
The rival firm, General Catalyst, went mildly viral in AI circles after posting a parody of Apple’s old “Mac vs. PC” commercials that depict Apple’s operating system as a cool guy that confidently outpaces the total egghead who represents Microsoft’s Windows.
In GC’s version, the egghead — unsubtly introduced as “VC” — is a man who vaguely resembles Andreessen and shills for a ridiculous startup called “Woof AI.” The “GC” character, as the cool guy, raises skeptical critiques over VC’s ridiculous claim that people will like an AI dog more than a real one.
It’s not a particularly funny video. But the point seemed to be that a16z would throw its money at any dumb startup idea. And if the goal by posting it was to get under Andreessen’s skin, it clearly worked.
After it went up, Andreessen unleashed a torrent of angry tweets attacking the minute-long clip, in a paroxysm that, in another era, would be seen as behavior beneath one of the world’s richest men — not to mention one who presents himself as a modern philosopher-king — but today almost seems to be a job requirement.
“Be careful with these,” he warned in one post. “I ran this through an AI checker, and the checker was insulted,” he sneered in another.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. He called GC “General Condescension,” and thought this was good enough jab to write another post right after it saying, “Announcing General Condescension’s newest Managing Director” and posting a picture of the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live, a famous scold.
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