On Thursday evening, President-elect Donald Trump once again took to Truth Social to announce a hire for his incoming administration: David O. Sacks, he wrote, would fill the newly created role of “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar,” and work to make the U.S. “the clear global leader in both areas.” Trump also promised that Sacks’ guidance would “safeguard Free Speech online, and steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship,” suggesting that he might have a say on internet policy more broadly.
In a response, Sacks wrote that he was “honored and grateful” to receive the appointment, adding, “I look forward to advancing American competitiveness in these critical technologies,” and that under Trump’s leadership, “the future is bright!”
But just who is Sacks, this Trump backer out of Silicon Valley who will soon be installed in a high post under Trump without the need for Senate confirmation? In the simplest terms, he’s one of the many tech tycoons who saw a second Trump term as a golden opportunity to reshape the government’s relationship with their industry.
Like his close friend Elon Musk, Sacks is currently in his early 50s and immigrated to the U.S. from South Africa. He and Musk are both members of the “PayPal Mafia,” a group of entrepreneurs who worked at the company before its acquisition by eBay in 2002 and went on to build fortunes by founding and investing in other tech startups. (Before serving as product lead and chief operations officer at PayPal, Sacks worked at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.) Over the past two decades, Sacks has led or founded a handful of companies but is perhaps better known as an angel investor in businesses including Uber, Facebook, and Airbnb. He also has stakes in Musk’s SpaceX and Palantir Technologies, which specializes in data analytics software and was co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s earliest major donors in Silicon Valley and another member of the PayPal mafia. Both companies have extensive government contracts, with Palantir supplying AI-enabled surveillance and data-mining platforms to the Pentagon and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures, a venture capital fund, in 2017.
Sacks has undergone something of a political evolution, donating money first to Republican presidential nominee (and current senator) Mitt Romney in 2012, then Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016, when she ran against Trump. He also contributed to the 2018 gubernatorial campaign of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. But by 2022, he was bankrolling hard-right Senate hopefuls such as Blake Masters and now Vice President-elect JD Vance (a Thiel protégé in his own venture capital days who retains close ties to the Silicon Valley scene that Sacks represents). When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis launched his 2024 presidential bid in a glitch-addled audio event on Twitter Spaces — prior to Musk rebranding the platform as “X” — it was Sacks serving as moderator. As with Musk, he donated to DeSantis before ultimately endorsing Trump (though he also donated to third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), and the pair held a secretive Hollywood dinner of rich elites opposed to President Joe Biden in April. He also hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his San Francisco home in June.
There’s yet another similarity with Musk: Sacks is extremely online, hosting the influential business and tech podcast All-In alongside three fellow VCs, and posting prolifically on X. In both formats, Sacks has veered toward the “anti-woke” culture war politics that have animated the MAGA movement and informed Musk’s electoral influence as Trump’s largest megadonor. He rails against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, complains about supposedly “open borders,” attacks legacy media, and claims that leftists hate freedom of speech.
But whatever his feelings on those issues, Sacks clearly believes that Trump will be a boon for him and his allies in the tech world. An early and vocal proponent of cryptocurrency, he was pleased by Trump’s shameless courtship of the executives and investors in the space. This group — Sacks included — had been incensed by Biden and an ongoing crypto “crackdown” by his SEC chair, Gary Gensler, and spent tens of millions to elect Trump and other Republicans. Trump vowed to fire Gensler on day one and replace him with a crypto-friendly appointee, whom he indeed announced on Wednesday: Paul Atkins, an advocate of digital currencies sure to take a lighter hand in regulating the industry. Crypto assets have rocketed upward in value since Trump’s election, with bitcoin surging to $100,000 for the first time ever.
On the AI side, it will also be advantageous for Sacks and his allies to have the president’s ear as the government considers regulatory frameworks for the accelerating technology. Craft Ventures is an investor in Musk’s own AI company, xAI, while both Sacks and Musk have become bitter critics of rival company OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT. Musk co-founded and funded OpenAI in 2015 but stepped away a few years later and is now pursuing a wide-ranging federal lawsuit against it, alleging that it conspired with multibillion-dollar investor Microsoft to break antitrust laws as it sought to transform from a nonprofit into a for-profit business. After rival OpenAI CEO Sam Altman congratulated Sacks on the czar position in an X post Thursday, Musk replied with a laugh-crying emoji.
The conflicts of interest arising from Sacks’ White House job look as if they will be nothing out of the ordinary in Trump’s second administration. Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy‘s nebulous advisory commission-to-be, the Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE), has already targeted federal spending and regulatory agencies in ways likely to benefit their own companies and those of friends across the sectors of transit, tech, pharmaceuticals, banking, and crypto. No doubt Sacks, too, will have some self-interested input on DOGE’s recommendations for hacking away at government institutions.
All in all, then, Sacks is but one more more wealthy player who stands to get richer by trying to steer Trump one way or the other on decisions that affect his bottom line. Conveniently, enough crypto moguls, tech CEOs, and VCs aligned on this vision to create a formidable faction of donors — one that Trump would virtually guarantee free rein once they had propelled him to the Oval Office. Trying to predict what will happen to the nation under another four years of his executive power is a tricky game, though if anything seems like a sure bet, it’s that Sacks, Musk, and their pals are going to get whatever they want.
