A venture capital firm co-founder, David Sacks, has been appointed “Crypto and AI Czar,” a newly created position, by President-elect Donald Trump. An entrepreneur and former chief operating officer of Silicon Valley giant PayPal, Sacks has become a prominent conservative voice in recent years and one who backed Trump’s 2024 presidential bid. Sacks’ appointment to this brand-new and undefined position suggests the crypto and AI industries now have a major ally in the White House.
A charter member of the ‘PayPal Mafia’
Sacks was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and his family, including his endocrinologist father, emigrated to Tennessee when Sacks was five. He received his B.A. in economics from Stanford University in 1994, where he was the editor-in-chief of the conservative Stanford Review, and his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1998. His first job out of law school was a brief stint as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, which he left in 1999 to join Confinity, a start-up founded by his Stanford friend Peter Thiel. There, Sacks worked alongside Elon Musk and several other future Silicon Valley heavyweights.
The group’s marquee product was the online banking and payment site PayPal, a risky bet that “persevered through the crash and became better as a result of the adversity placed by the dot com bust,” said Trevor Grant at Medium. Sacks told his colleagues that they “went to work every day feeling as though the sword of Damocles was hanging over our head,” said Roelof Botha in an interview at Sequoia Capital.
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PayPal survived to become such a huge success that it was acquired by Ebay in a $1.5 billion deal in 2002. Sacks and the company’s early developers became known as ‘the PayPal Mafia’ because so many of them went on to found other successful ventures. For Sacks, that was Yammer, a social networking site for business, which was “a messaging tool for colleagues” said The Guardian. Yammer was acquired for $1.2 billion by Microsoft in 2012. Sacks founded Craft Ventures in 2017, a venture capital firm that has invested in a variety of companies, including Uber and Airbnb.
An alliance with Trumpism
During the Biden administration, a group of wealthy tech titans, including Sacks, became one of the most vocal forces opposing pandemic mitigation policies, as well as experiments in progressive urban governments in San Francisco. Sacks praised Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for being an early critic of lockdowns and attacked mask mandates in blue states as the pandemic wore on. Sacks has become a “leading practitioner of a new right-wing sensibility that has emerged in the political realignments provoked by Trumpism and the pandemic,” said Jacob Silverman at The New Republic.
Trump “became an unapologetic promoter of” Bitcoin in 2024 despite criticizing the crypto leader in the past, said Susan B. Glasser at The New Yorker. Trump successfully courted crypto industry leaders during his campaign and mentioned safeguarding the industry’s health when he named Sacks to the position. Sacks will “work on a legal framework so the crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for,” said Trump. Sacks’ appointment puts an “advocate for looser regulation of digital assets inside the White House,” said David Hollerith and Ben Werschkul at Yahoo Finance. How Sacks will interpret his position is unknown, but “the dual-faceted nature of the role” — covering both crypto and AI — “could set the tone for experimentation around potential synergies between the two disciplines,” said Joel Khalili and Makena Kelly at Wired.
Critics expressed concern about the closeness of these industries to the Trump White House. Sacks’ appointment signals “Trump’s growing intent to leverage D.C. to the better benefit of Silicon Valley,” said Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling at The New Republic. His appointment means that the Trump administration intends to “disregard the very real dangers around crypto AI’s energy use and pollution and environmental plunder and copyright infringement” to further enrich “the guys whose riches are fueling this dystopia,” said Nitish Pahwa at Slate.
