Top tech investor Marc Andreessen has quit Twitter (again)

Silicon Valley investor and prolific tweeter Marc Andreessen has abruptly abandoned Twitter, deleting all his tweets after writing: "Taking a Twitter break!"

Andreessen, cofounder of buzzy venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz, is well-known for his constant Twitter presence, sending stream-of-consciousness tweetstorms and retweeting messages about tech, economics, and politics, at all hours of the day.

With nearly 600,000 followers, he is one of the tech industry's most prominent tweeters. "It's like a tube and I have loudspeakers installed in every reporting cubicle around the world," he enthused in a profile of himself for the New Yorker in May 2015.

But the Netscape cofounder has now apparently changed his tune. To hazard a guess, the departure doesn't seem to be permanent: He hasn't outright deleted his account, and his now-solitary tweet frames it as a "break."

Andreessen, who sits on Facebook's board, has taken a break from Twitter before. In February 2016, after he became embroiled in a row over Facebook's Free Basics internet program and colonialism, he stopped tweeting for weeks. 

In June, the Twitter tech community was rocked by another high-profile departure: Sam Altman, president of startup accelerator Y Combinator. Altman was more explicit about his reasons for leaving, arguing that "the platform rewards negativity and snark. There are occasional attacks on me and a lot on my friends. Outrage does too well on Twitter." (He has since resumed tweeting intermittently.)

Andreessen's Twitter hiatus comes amid rumours that multiple interested parties are looking to buy the social network - among them Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. The reports have pushed Twitter's stock to its highest in nearly a year, and it is currently hovering at around $22.60 per share.