Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Last month, after the Trump administration accidentally invited the editor of The Atlantic to a war-planning Signal thread, we made a case for the group chat as the new de facto site for elite coordination, pointing out its frequent appearances in court filings and news stories about politics, sports, celebrity, and tech. NBA players are in group chats across from NBA owners; worried government employees are in group chats while DOGE is in theirs. Over the weekend, Ben Smith at Semafor reported on a network of tech and tech-adjacent group chats that provide some context for, among other things, the industry’s rather abrupt and coordinated shift toward open support for the candidate Donald Trump and then his administration:
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.
In summary, some members of the right-wing tech elite have been chatting with one another for years, bringing some conservatives and centrist media figures into the fold, commiserating about how insane everyone else is and gradually driving themselves insane in the process. There’s classic group-chat material here: careful recruitment, rage-quitting, and fuzzy personal-professional social dynamics. It’s a rare glimpse into spaces where influential people communicate and therefore an important story about politics; it’s also familiar and sort of funny. Confronted about group chats with names like Chatham House, members tell a harrowing personal story about communicating in exile from the major social platforms (in which some of them were investors and remain active advisers and board members!) and being forced to exchange “samizdat” away from big-tech censors and the persecutorial gaze of journalists and the broader public and about how group chats were a necessary “safe space” from an overbearing monoculture that reached full expression in the early days of COVID.
Among other things, the story makes the case for the political influence of Andreessen Horowitz, noting, and arriving shortly after, the VC firm announced the hiring of Erik Torenberg, who helped organize some of the chats and who is quoted in the article, along with former partner and current White House adviser Sriram Krishnan, who blogged last year about how group chats “rule the world.” His post also makes the case that in 2020, people in tech “weren’t comfortable sharing their views” for fear of the “mob” and that group chats have since become the “memetic upstream of mainstream opinion” before describing, in earnest anthropological terms, common group-chat dynamics and advice for establishing them. (Among his insights: “The best group have [sic] shared rituals, jokes, routines,” and “one of the best ways to add value to a group is to suggest a good new member who will fit in.”)
That some of America’s most powerful people are coordinating in private isn’t surprising. That they’re doing so in text threads, rather than in membership clubs, on vacation, or at secret summits, however, is genuinely important. As social contexts go, group chats are strange and specific; most important, they’re free, fast-moving, and efficient. Venture capital has always been about back channeling, introductions, and rapid narrative formation, but it’s also been tied substantially to specific places and cultural contexts. The way these guys talk — no women are mentioned in the story — suggests an aspirational but also real exit from the context of Silicon Valley, the place. They’re not even defining themselves in contrast to the culture of the Bay Area anymore but rather relative to the prevailing conventional wisdom of Twitter and now X, the platform about which this same group of people was telling a similar story more than a decade ago.
It’s less a marker of a new era than its final entrenchment. If you’re a Trump-supporting tech leader in 2025, you’ll find nothing but support on X. Krishnan’s detached assessment of group chats as needing a “mix of personalities” and to create a “forever dinner party” is both accurate and — to anyone outside his social and political milieu, where group chats are of sudden interest among Very Important People after a few industry cycles in which chat cultures have been important for start-ups and tech workers — completely obvious. Similarly, Andreessen’s narration of how his group chats catalyzed an American “vibe shift” is, contra Krishnan, decidedly downstream talk, a tale of tech leaders following, not leading, the masses that use their products. Teens started giving up on social media right before most of the world’s elites started logging on, and in 2019 this magazine argued that group chats were “making the internet fun again,” citing “the arrival of parents and bosses into the same social space[s] as college friends,” “the introduction of the implicitly competitive News Feed, with its opaque multi-metric ranking system,” and “self-conscious conversations” induced by spaces like Twitter.
In 2025, group chats are both the site of war-planning and the main digital format in which regular people talk with their friends, communicate with parents in their kid’s class, trade shifts, or keep up with the cousins on their mom’s side of the family. Even Mark Zuckerberg admits that “social media” as we knew it has been gone for a while. Group chats made the tech elite’s internet “fun again,” too. The only difference is that using “the internet,” for them, is synonymous with trying to rule the world.
