David Sacks led the tech elite’s rightward shift. Now the investor and longtime Musk associate is helping Trump unchain the crypto industry.
Before President Donald Trump promised to make America the “crypto capital of the planet” – launching a meme coin, signing two executive orders promoting cryptocurrency and feting executives at the White House – he attended an intimate fundraising dinner at the San Francisco home of tech investor David Sacks.
At the US$50,000 ($85,000)-a-ticket event, a handful of crypto executives told the presidential candidate that they were being persecuted by the Biden administration, which they said had weaponised the law to thwart the burgeoning industry.
The appeals seemed to resonate with Trump, five guests told the Washington Post, helping lock in his support for crypto, a sector the President had previously called a “scam”.
The dinner was a turning point for both Trump and Sacks, cementing a political alliance that has lifted both men to power in Washington – and stands to transform the fortunes of the crypto industry. A long-time Silicon Valley powerbroker and associate of Elon Musk, Sacks rallied the tech elite to back Trump’s return to the White House. In turn, Trump appointed Sacks to the new role of White House artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto tsar, putting the investor – and the once-spurned crypto executives – in a position to drive policy on two of the most disruptive sectors in tech.
In an interview with the Post, Sacks described his new role as “being a bit of a bridge” between Silicon Valley and Washington. “My job is to advise on innovation policy based on decades of experience in tech,” Sacks said.
Sacks’ influence was notable from Trump’s first week in office, when the President unveiled a pair of executive orders on crypto and AI. “They’re going to make a lot of money for the country,” Trump said after signing the orders, flanked by Sacks. “And so is David. You have to check him out. There’s nobody like this guy.”
In response to the orders, the Justice Department disbanded a unit dedicated to investigating cryptocurrency crimes, directing prosecutors in a memo Monday to pull back on pursuing some cases against the industry.
Tech elites have pinned their hopes on Sacks, banking on him to encourage unfettered growth in AI and to carve out clear rules of the road for crypto. “You’re going in to fix the two things that were [on] all of our agendas in Silicon Valley in terms of getting returns for the next four years,” said investor Jason Calacanis, Sacks’s co-host on the popular All-In podcast, in a March episode.
In recent days, as global markets reacted to Trump’s tariff plan and Musk traded barbs with administration advisers, Sacks initially remained focused on his purview, touting from his White House X account new rules to benefit stablecoins.
But as the stock markets recouped some of the historic losses on Tuesday, Sacks took a victory lap: “Black Monday Hoax is over,” he wrote on his personal account on X. The brief rally sputtered, and the S&P 500 closed down 1.5% that day – nearing a bear market. It ultimately ended the week up 8%, but below its value at the start of the year.
Sacks defended Trump’s tariffs strategy on Friday’s episode of All-In. After Larry Summers, treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, unfavourably compared the US economy to that of Argentina, Sacks countered that Trump had given America “extraordinary leverage over virtually every country in the world”.
Amid economic uncertainty, critics fear that Sacks, who was heavily invested in crypto before divesting for his White House role, will usher in an industry-led free-for-all, leaving consumers vulnerable to scams and volatility. Customers lost more than US$8 billion in deposits when the crypto exchange FTX imploded in 2022.
“There’s no reason to think that he won’t be bringing a view that is ‘corporations first’ as opposed to America or Americans first,” said Rick Claypool, research director of Public Citizen, a money-in-politics watchdog group. “It’s a tragedy for the American people who rely on the federal Government to protect them.”
Crypto companies are surging, buoyed by the new administration. In Congress, Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty steered a bill to legitimise stablecoins – cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar – through a committee that rejected the proposal under President Joe Biden. Agencies such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) have made it easier for banks to work with crypto companies by pledging to not focus on a bank’s “reputational risk”.
Through executive order, Trump established a strategic reserve composed of the bitcoin that the federal Government has seized through forfeitures, as well as a stockpile of other digital currencies taken by the Government. Before Trump took office, cryptocurrency executives and investors pressed Trump to create a reserve to pay down the national debt.
And since Trump took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped or paused more than a dozen cases against crypto firms. “The SEC staff make their own decisions about enforcement actions,” Sacks’ office said in a statement.
“This is it – the moment we’ve been waiting for,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse posted in March on X, announcing that the SEC would drop its court fight against the company.
Hosting crypto executives for a White House summit last month, Trump pledged to end Biden’s “war on crypto” as Sacks marvelled at the swift turnaround.
“Your administration is moving at tech speed. It’s really amazing,” he said, turning to the President. “It’s actually faster than any start-up that I’ve been part of.”
“All-In” on Trump
Sacks has long stood out in Silicon Valley for his conservative bent and his ties to self-proclaimed “PayPal Mafia” iconoclasts such as Peter Thiel and Musk. But the popularity of his podcast All-In transformed him into an influencer with the tech set – with some holding him responsible for shifting venture capitalist elites to the right.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Sacks came to the United States as a child in the late 1970s when his family immigrated to Tennessee.
He met Thiel as a student at Stanford University and with him co-wrote the 1995 book The Diversity Myth, a polemic against political correctness on college campuses that anticipated central concerns of conservative politics today.
“He’s earned a lot of street cred for being a voice for this extremely libertarian ideology when it was not in vogue,” said Niki Christoff, a DC-based consultant who previously worked in public policy for Salesforce, Uber and Google.
Sacks reunited with Thiel at PayPal. After the company was acquired by eBay in 2002, early employees, including Musk, parlayed their fortunes into building powerful companies such as defence contractor Palantir.
Sacks turned to investing fulltime after selling work-messaging company Yammer to Microsoft for US$1.2b in 2012. His firm Craft Ventures focused on business software but took stakes in Musk’s companies, including SpaceX and a handful of AI and crypto start-ups.
A lifelong contrarian, Sacks donated to Mitt Romney in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and stayed on the sidelines in 2020. After the coronavirus shuttered San Francisco, Sacks and his venture capitalist “besties” started All-In, talking for hours each week about business, investing and, increasingly, politics.
Sacks was initially a punchy conservative foil to his centrist co-hosts, who like many in tech had historically backed Democrats. He argued that the US should not support Ukraine’s fight against Russia and called for Government protections for depositors after Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. Over time, the besties – and the tech chattering class as a whole – began to agree more with Sacks.
“They were thinking out loud together, bringing All-In listeners along for the ride,” said a person close to the White House, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to comment. “Sacks was the tip of the spear.”
The All-In crew endorsed Musk’s claims that liberal tech companies quashed free speech and cheered his mass firings at Twitter, where Sacks assisted with Musk’s takeover.
When the 2024 presidential race began, Sacks helped launch Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign, co-hosting him and Musk in a conversation streamed on Twitter. Meanwhile, All-In hosted independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy jnr and Republican contender Vivek Ramaswamy – whom Sacks also held fundraisers for – as well as Democrat Dean Phillips. The candidates got access to millions of listeners, while the hosts of All-In elevated the priorities of the investor class.
When Trump joined the show in June, he sounded like one of the besties when he explained that the US must double or triple the capacity of its electric grid to compete with China in AI, a realisation Trump said he had “at David’s house and talking to a lot of geniuses from Silicon Valley”.
Sacks officially endorsed Trump the day of his June fundraiser – more than a month before the attempted assassination of Trump in July, after which Musk and other tech titans embraced the GOP candidate.
“With respect to economic policy, foreign policy, border policy, and legal fairness, Trump performed better” than Biden, Sacks wrote on X, announcing his endorsement.
Sacks was influential in lobbying Trump to pick JD Vance, a protege of Thiel, for Vice-President, the Post has reported. As Trump’s tech tsar, Sacks seized the opportunity to do more than just advise Trump.
Like Musk, Sacks is a “special government employee”, exempt from certain disclosure rules and only permitted to work for the federal Government for 130 days a year. “Sacks is staying within that limit by alternating weeks working for the White House and working in the Bay Area,” a spokesperson said.
“He’s Team America,” said entrepreneur Trevor Traina, who attended Sacks’ fundraiser and was ambassador to Austria in Trump’s first term. “An incredibly wealthy guy with a beautiful lifestyle and all that, who doesn’t have to be running at full tilt but who chooses to do so.”
Politics and policy
Three days before Trump’s inauguration, the President-elect underscored that his interest in crypto was also personal.
While Sacks co-hosted the Crypto Ball, a jubilant black-tie affair in DC, Trump promoted a crypto coin called $TRUMP, launched by companies with ties to his family.
Crypto insiders recognised it as a meme coin, designed to ride online hype. Some became concerned that the “crypto president” might be prioritising his own portfolio. Trump seemed to be “acting almost as a crypto entrepreneur, which we don’t need,” said Nic Carter, founding partner of the investment firm Castle Island Ventures.
Political watchdogs have also raised questions about Sacks’ crypto holdings. Sacks pushed back, revealing in sharp X posts that he had voluntarily divested many of his crypto holdings and related investments months earlier.
“The supposed ‘watchdogs’ were revealed to be making baseless accusations when the truth came out about David’s divestments,” Sacks’ office said.
A White House memo said Sacks and Craft Ventures sold over US$200m in digital assets or related ventures.
Trump’s tsar appeared to have smoothed over the controversy. “A lot of people think if they’re coming to DC to do policy, but you’re not, you’re doing politics,” said one crypto lobbyist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. Yet Sacks may still be asked to lend credibility “to whatever wacky plan a bunch of barbarians have come up with,” the person added.
Silicon Valley executives whom Sacks has called for advice on White House business say he is energised by the challenges of Washington bureaucracy.
Sacks came across more like a sober student of government than a Doge disciple when he summed up his first few weeks in DC on an episode of All-In.
Sacks described a news conference where the chairs of four House and Senate committees pledged to pass crypto legislation by year’s end.
“There were a lot of people on X who felt like this wasn’t a mind-blowing announcement. They wanted something that they could trade on right away,” Sacks said. But such pro-crypto unity in Congress was new. “So that is pretty monumental,” he added.
