Does a VC board seat violate antitrust?

"No person shall, at the same time, serve as a director or officer in any two corporations" that compete with each other. The sentence is Section 8 of the Clayton Act, which Congress passed in 1914 to prise apart the interlocking boards of the Morgan-era trusts, when the same financiers sat astride the railroads, banks, and steel firms they were meant to hold at arm's length. For roughly a year, according to Bloomberg, the antitrust division of the Justice Department has been examining whether that century-old prohibition reaches the org chart of Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm the AI industry treats as the boom's political and financial center of gravity.

The specifics are narrow. Ben Horowitz, a16z's co-founder, sits on the board of Databricks, the data-and-analytics platform valued among the largest private technology companies in the world; Martin Casado, an a16z partner, sits on the board of Fivetran, a data-movement company, and held a seat at dbt Labs, the data-transformation startup Fivetran acquired this June, until that deal closed. All three are a16z investments, and the division cleared the Fivetran–dbt merger without conditions, but the separate inquiry into the firm's directorships has continued, and it may yet end with no action at all.

Most coverage has treated this as a housekeeping matter, the kind of conflict that resolves when a director quietly steps down. That treatment misses what stands behind the seat.