The group chats that changed America
Apr 28, 2025, 2:23am GMT+1
Al Lucca/Semafor
Last Thursday morning, a bit before 10 am in Austin and nearly 11 pm in Singapore, Joe Lonsdale had enough of Balaji Srinivasan’s views on China.
“This is insane CCP thinking,” Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, wrote to a 300-member Signal group. “Not sure what leaders hang out w you in Singapore but on this you have been taken over by a crazy China mind virus.”
Srinivasan, a former Coinbase chief technology officer and influential tech figure who now lives in the city-state, responded that China “executed extremely well over 45 years. Any analysis that doesn’t take that into account makes it seem like the US could have held it back.”
It was a normal, robust disagreement among friends in a friendly space (as
both raced to X to declare, after I emailed them about it).
And it was just another day in Chatham House, a giant and raucous Signal group that forms part of the sprawling network of influential private chats that began during the fervid early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and which have fueled a new alliance of tech and the US right. That same week in Chatham House, Lonsdale and the Democratic billionaire Mark Cuban sparred over affirmative action, and Cuban and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro discussed questions of culture and work ethic.
This constellation of rolling elite political conversations revolve primarily around the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and a circle of Silicon Valley figures. None of their participants was surprised to see Trump administration officials
firing off secrets and emojis on the platform last month. I did not have the good fortune to be accidentally added to one of the chats, which can be set to make messages disappear after just 30 seconds.
But their influence flows through X, Substack, and podcasts, and constitutes a kind of dark matter of American politics and media. The group chats aren’t always primarily a political space, but they are the single most important place in which a stunning realignment toward Donald Trump was shaped and negotiated, and an alliance between Silicon Valley and the new right formed. The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion,” wrote one of their key organizers, Sriram Krishnan, a former partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (typically styled a16z) who is now the White House senior policy adviser for AI.
Of course, these are hardly the only power group chats. Anti-Trump liberals are now coordinating their responses on Signal. There are group chats for Black political elites and morning show producers. A vast and influential parallel set of tech conversations take place on WhatsApp. There’s a big China-friendly group over on WeChat. Elite podcasters have one.
“It’s the same thing happening on both sides, and I’ve been amazed at how much this is coordinating our reality,” said the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who was for a time a member of a group chat with Andreessen. “If you weren’t in the business at all, you’d think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently — and [they’re] not. It’s a small group of people who talk to each other and overlap between politics and journalism and a few industries.”
But there is no equivalent to the intellectual counterculture that grew up over the last five years on the tech right, and no figure remotely like Andreessen, the towering, enthusiastic 53-year old who co-founded a16z and, before that, invented the modern web browser.
In February, he
described the group chats to the podcaster Lex Fridman as “the equivalent of samizdat” — the self-published Soviet underground press — in a “soft authoritarian” age of social media shaming and censorship. “The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it,” he said. The chats, he
wrote recently, helped produce our national “vibe shift.”
The chats are occasionally marked by the sort of thing that would have gotten you scolded on Twitter in 2020, and which would pass unremarked-on on X in 2025.
They have rarely been discussed in public, though you can catch the occasional mention in, for instance, a
podcast debate between Cuban and the Republican entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, which started in a chat.
But they are made visible through a group consensus on social media. Their effects have ranged from the mainstreaming of the monarchist pundit Curtis Yarvin to a particularly focused and developed dislike of the former Washington Post writer Taylor Lorenz.
They succeeded at avoiding leaks (until, to a modest extent, this article) in part because of Signal’s and WhatsApp’s disappearing message features, and in part because the groups had formed out of a mix of fear and disdain for journalists they believed were “out to get us,” as one member put it.
Many of the roughly 20 participants I spoke to also felt a genuine sentimental attachment to the spaces, and believed in their value. One participant in the groups described them as a “Republic of Letters,” a reference to the long-distance intellectual correspondence of the 17th century. Others often invoked European salon culture. The closed groups offered an alternative to the Twitter and Slack conversations once dominated by progressive social movements, when polarizing health debates swept through social media and society in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media, and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone,” said Erik Torenberg, an entrepreneur who was the first employee of the tech community hub Product Hunt. As Krishnan was setting up a set of tech group WhatsApp chats at a16z, Torenberg independently founded a group of tech chats on WhatsApp and some more political Signal chats.
“They’re having all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” Andreessen told Torenberg on
a recent podcast, after joking in the name of secrecy that he’d never heard of such groups. “If it wasn’t for the censorship all of these conversations would have happened in public, which would have been much better.”
Their creations took off: “It might not seem like it, because of all the sh*t that people still post on X, but the internet has fragmented,” the
Substack author Noah Smith wrote after my inquiries for this story spilled into public Saturday. “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.”
Time to Build
It can be hard to date the beginning of the Group Chat Era exactly. They began bubbling up in 2018 and 2019, and accelerated in earnest in the spring of 2020. As the scale of the pandemic set in that April and the weaknesses of both the US supply chain and government became clear, Andreessen fired off what would become a profoundly influential essay, “
It’s Time to Build,” calling for a revival of patriotic industry and innovation.
Conversations about the essay and the pandemic bubbled on Clubhouse, a flash-in-the-pan social conversation app where Krishnan was also trying to build communities. Andreessen and Krishnan discussed trying to replicate the free-flowing early Hacker News bulletin board online, and then settled on group chats, as the story they’ve told friends goes. They discussed three platforms, Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram, and discarded the third over lingering questions about its security and Russian ties.
That spring, Krishnan, working as a consultant, launched a group called “Build” on WhatsApp with a dozen of Silicon Valley’s elite figures. Andreessen loved it, and Krishnan began launching more — dozens, within a year, on topics from engineering to design to project management to artificial intelligence.
To the degree these chats strayed into politics, two participants said, they rarely mentioned Donald Trump. They revolved around the specific political challenges of Silicon Valley’s leaders: In the chats, executives commiserated about how to handle employee demands that they, for instance, declare that “Black Lives Matter” or support policies they didn’t actually believe in around transgender rights. And they strategized about how to defeat San Francisco’s progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin.
In an essay on his blog,
Group Chats Rule the World, Krishnan described how “every group chat usually has one or two people that like to talk… a lot. They are critical: you need the provocateurs who inject new ideas consistently. However, almost all of them have a tendency to dominate these groups.”
Andreessen was a nuclear reactor who powered many groups. Srinivasan was another. A good community-builder, Krishnan wrote, would act as a “cooling rod,” preventing meltdown.
Someone who sat next to Andreessen at a conference during this period recalled watching with awe as he flipped on his phone from group chat to group chat, responding and engaging with manic speed.
‘How does he have the time?’
Occasionally over the past few years, I’ve had a friend or source tell me in wonder that Andreessen was blowing up their phone. His hunger for information was “astonishing,” one participant in the group chat said. “My impression is Marc spends half his life on 100 of these at the same time,” another correspondent marveled. “This man should be a lot busier than I am and I can barely keep up with his group chat. How does he have the time?”
Andreessen has told friends he finds the medium efficient — a way to keep in touch with three times the people in a third of the time. The fact that he and other billionaires spend so much time writing to group chats prompted participants to joke that the very pinnacle of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is posting.
Along with the tech-centric WhatsApp groups Krishnan had organized out of a16z, Andreessen joined a slew of others, including ones that Torenberg set up for tech founders and for more political discussions. The tech chats tended to be on WhatsApp and the political ones on Signal, which is more fully encrypted, and they had different settings. (“Every group chat ends up being about memes and humor and the goal of the group chat is to get as close to the line of being actually objectionable without tripping it,” Andreessen told Fridman. “People will set to 5 minutes before they send something particularly inflammatory.“)
After a group of liberal intellectuals published a
letter in Harper’s on July 7, 2020, some of its signers were invited to join a Signal group called “Everything Is Fine.” There, writers including Kmele Foster, who co-hosts the podcast
The Fifth Column, Persuasion founder Yascha Mounk, and the Harper’s letter contributor Williams joined Andreessen and a group that also included the anti-woke conservative activist Chris Rufo.
The new participants were charmed by Andreessen’s engagement: “He was the most available, the most present, the most texting of anybody in the group — which shocked me because it seemed like he was the most important person in the group,” one said.
But the center didn’t hold. The Harper’s types were surprised to find what one described an “illiberal worldview” among tech figures more concerned with power than speech. The conservatives found the liberal intellectuals tiresome, committed to what Rufo described to me as “infinite discourse” over action.
The breaking point came on July 5, 2021, when Foster and Williams, along with the never-Trump conservative David French and the liberal academic Jason Stanley, wrote a
New York Times op-ed criticizing new laws against teaching “critical race theory.”
“Even if this censorship is legal in the narrow context of public primary and secondary education, it is antithetical to educating students in the culture of American free expression,” they wrote.
The conservatives had thought the Harper’s letter writers were their allies in an all-out ideological battle, and considered their position a betrayal. Andreessen “went really ballistic in a quite personal way at Thomas,” a participant recalled. The group ended after Andreessen “wrote something along the lines of ‘thank you everybody, I think it’s time to take a Signal break,’” another said.
The meltdown of this liberal-tech alliance was, to Rufo, a healthy development.
“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” he said. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end — so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”
Rufo had been there all along: “I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right.”
‘What really matters is defeating the left’
The messages in “Everything Is Fine” are all long gone from the chats. So are many of the liberals. By then, Silicon Valley was moving right. In May of 2022, Andreessen asked the conservative academic Richard Hanania to “make me a chat of smart right-wing people,” Hanania recalled. As requested, he assembled eight or ten people — elite law students and federal court clerks, as well as Torenberg and Katherine Boyle, a former Washington Post reporter then at a16z and focused on investing in “American Dynamism.” Later, Hanania added the broadcaster Tucker Carlson.
The substance of the chats no longer exists, but Signal preserved the group’s rotating names, which Andreessen enjoyed changing. The names, Hanania said after checking Signal, included:
Last Men, apparently
Matt Yglesias Fan Club
James Burnham Fan Club
Biden 2024 Reelect Committee
Journalism Deniers and Richard
The tone was jesting, but “Marc radicalized over time,” Hanania recalled. Hanania said he found himself increasingly alienated from the group and the shift toward partisan pro-Trump politics, and he came to see the chat he’d established as a “vehicle for groupthink.” (A friend of Andreessen’s said it was Hanania, not Andreessen, who had shifted his politics.) The group continues without him.
Hanania argued with the other members “about whether it’s a good idea to buy into Trump’s election denial stuff. I’d say, ‘That’s not true and that actually matters.’ I got the sense these guys didn’t want to hear it,” he said. “There’s an idea that you don’t criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left.” He left the group in June of 2023.
Chatham House Rule
Torenberg launched Chatham House the summer of 2024, naming it after a British think tank that
formalized the insight that trusted conversations require a degree of privacy. Two of its conservative participants said they see the group as a way to shift centrist Trump-curious figures to the Republican side, but its founder said he’d begun it to have “a left-right exchange where we could have real conversations because of filter bubble group chats.”
Chatham House includes high-profile figures like the economist Larry Summers and the historian Niall Ferguson, and more partisan figures like Shapiro and the Democratic analyst David Shor. Andreessen lurks. But several participants described it to me as something like a gladiatorial arena with Cuban most often in the center, sparring with conservatives.
(“no idea what you are talking about
” Cuban emailed in response to an inquiry about his arguments on Chatham House.)
The Group Chat Era depended on part of the American elite feeling shut out from public spaces, and on the formation of a new conservative consensus. Both of those are now fading (though Torenberg has invested in a company called ChatBCC that wants to commercialize the heady experience of sitting in on texts among the power elite).
Since Elon Musk turned X to the right and an alternative media ecosystem emerged on Substack, “a tremendous amount of the verboten conversations can now shift back into public view,” Andreessen told Fridman. “It’s much healthier to live in a society in which people are literally not scared of what they’re saying.”
And Trump’s destabilizing “Liberation Day” has taken its toll on the coalition Andreessen helped shape. You can see it on X, where investors joke that they’ll put pronouns back in their bios in exchange for a return to the 2024 stock prices, and where Srinivasan has been a
leading critic of Trump’s tariffs.
“Group chats have changed on the economy in the last few weeks,” said Rufo. “There’s a big split on the tech right.”
The polarity of social media has also reversed, and while participants used to keep their conservative ideas off social media, “now the anti-Trump sentiment is what you’re afraid to say on X,” one said.
By mid-April, Sacks had had enough with Chatham House: “This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,” he wrote, shorthanding “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Then he addressed Torenberg: “You should create a new one with just smart people.”
Signal soon showed that three men had left the group: The Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, the bitcoin billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, and Carlson.
Ben’s view
“Some day, the full story of group chats will be written,” Andreessen wrote after hiring Torenberg last week, “and Erik will have played a valuable role in facilitating the vibe shift.”
But that full story will have to be written by someone who was in the disappearing chats. One Chatham House member shared a few recent texts with me to get the flavor. But most of the members I’ve talked to either don’t have screenshots or respected the groups’ privacy.
And of course it’s true that many of the best great conversations can only flourish in an atmosphere of trust. I have been singed in my time by leaked secret groups, and also probably pulled a bit by their groupthink. I was, mostly, a lurker in JournoList, a hundreds-strong email group founded by Ezra Klein (described in a 2009
Politico article on the subject as “the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind”). I’m not sure if any Chatham House members were also on JournoList, but the cultures sound similar: male-dominated, time-consuming, and veering between silly and brilliant, windy and addictive. (The conservative writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the relatively few women with a big voice in Chatham House, participants said.)
JournoList shut down after a 2010 leak to the Daily Caller had professional consequences for some of its members. Now I keep my own Signal and Slack retention times short.
But I’ve come to think JournoList’s critics were partly right in noticing that these spaces could encourage conformity, and then transform public fora — blogs then, social media now — into pitched battles between well-prepared debate clubs, rather than open conversations.
“You don’t want to create a whole separate, private blog that only the elite bloggers can go into, and then what you present to the public is sort of the propaganda you’ve decided to go public with,” the conservative blogger Mickey Kaus
said on the proto-podcast platform Bloggingheads.
The huffy tweets my polite inquiries about the groups produced reminded me of Kaus’s observation: Honest disagreement is now permitted largely within the chat. As Lonsdale
wrote on X, he and Srinivasan “will always be on the same side against communists and lefty journalists.”
But I do hope someone in those groups took some screenshots and a fuller story can be told. I was able to reconstruct fragments from participants who spoke to me because they considered the group chats an important open secret. And it’s hard to deny their power. The political journalist Mark Halperin, who now runs 2WAY and has a show on Megyn Kelly’s network, said it was remarkable that “the left seems largely unaware that some of the smartest and most sophisticated Trump supporters in the nation from coast to coast are part of an overlapping set of text chains that allow their members to share links, intel, tactics, strategy, and ad hoc assignments. Also: clever and invigorating jokes. And they do this (not kidding) like 20 hours a day, including on weekends.” He called their influence “substantial.”
Many of the group chatters celebrate their success in driving the ascendant politics of the Trump era, which they hope will bring back patriotic industry and traditional cultural norms. Some who have left or lurk consider it a sinister phenomenon in which Andreessen exerted unspoken gravitational pull, as one participant put it: “You’d see that the writers were bending toward the billionaires, and even the ones who prided themselves on being iconoclastic were bending to the tastes and the centers of gravity of power.”
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