Marc Andreessen is back from his brief, self-imposed break from tweeting.
The Silicon Valley venture capitalist is a billionaire with a penchant for tweeting from the hip, so to speak, and he saw quite a bit of backlash two weeks ago for an offensive tweet he posted in response to Indian regulators’ decision to ban free mobile Internet access in the country. The offending tweet from Andreessen, cofounder of prominent tech investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, opposed the ban and defended Facebook’s Free Basics program, which aims to give free Internet access to certain websites and apps via mobile devices. But, Andreessen’s Twitter (FB) rant also took an unfortunate turn toward a pro-colonialism stance.
The tech bigwig quickly apologized and deleted the tweet—which read “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for the Indian people for decades. Why stop now?”—but he still earned a stern rebuke from Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Andreessen, who is a member of Facebook’s board of directors, went through a rare quiet period on Twitter for several days before telling Re/code last week that he was taking a “soothing social media vacation.”
That tweet-cation appears to have ended, though, as Andreessen reappeared on Twitter late-Wednesday with a message welcoming Martin Casado, a former VMware executive, to Andreessen Horowitz as a new general partner:
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/702619959734595584
In fact, all of Andreessen’s latest tweets have been of the congratulatory nature as the Casado welcome was later followed by shout-outs to Nike (NKE) cofounder Phil Knight and venture capitalist Michael Moritz for separate philanthropic efforts:
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/702670984533282816
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/702671518887612416
In other words, Andreessen is back on Twitter but he seems to be shying away from commenting on anything too controversial—for now, at least.