Moonshots EP 145: How the New Administration Will Impact Crypto, AI & Tech Globally w/ Ben Horowitz & Salim Ismail

Summary

Recorded days after the January 2025 inauguration, this WTF episode features Ben Horowitz (co-founder of a16z, $45B AUM) on the policy shift from Biden to Trump and its impact on tech. Horowitz frames the Biden era as “by far the most anti-tech presidency in my lifetime” — citing systematic de-banking of crypto companies (Elizabeth Warren-driven), blocked M&A (FTC blocking Meta’s acquisition of a VR exercise game on absurd antitrust grounds), and the biotech industry’s regulatory collapse. The Trump administration’s reversal is “through the looking glass” in its pro-tech posture.

On AI regulation: Horowitz strongly supports Trump revoking Biden’s 2023 AI executive order, arguing it was designed to push startups and academia out of the field via heavy compliance requirements. He dismisses AI regulation as technically impossible (“you’d have to regulate every line of code written”) and mocks Vinod Khosla’s Manhattan Project analogy, noting that even the Manhattan Project failed to protect nuclear secrets. The more productive frame: use AI to solve existential problems (pandemics, cancer, climate) rather than trying to prevent AI from causing them.

The Stargate Project ($500B AI infrastructure commitment) gets a nuanced read: Horowitz calls it “a Masa thing” — crediting Masayoshi Son’s genius for raising capital at scale while noting the gap between announced commitments and actual deployed capital. He advocates equally aggressive investment in energy infrastructure, particularly small modular nuclear reactors, and highlights a16z portfolio company Daylight Energy building a crypto-enabled marketplace for distributed energy trading (solar panels + Tesla Powerwalls as energy sellers, machines paying machines via crypto).

On bio/health: Horowitz draws the analogy that AI gives biology its “calculus” — the modeling language that physics had for thousands of years but biology lacked. However, he cautions that in vivo testing requirements mean biological innovation will still be slower than pure software innovation. The Demis Hassabis announcement on AI-designed drug trials is framed as the shift from “drug discovery” (build a thousand bridges, see which doesn’t fall) to “drug design” (model it precisely, like SpaceX modeling every Dragon flight mode before launch).

Bias/Sponsor Notes

Horowitz is transparently talking his book: a16z’s crypto fund, bio fund, and portfolio companies are direct beneficiaries of the regulatory loosening he’s celebrating. Diamandis shares the same political alignment. Standard ad reads. No opposing perspective on whether any AI oversight might be warranted, or whether the crypto de-banking had legitimate consumer protection rationale.