(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- (This story was originally published on June 5, 2024. US President-Elect Donald Trump announced late Thursday that he has chosen David Sacks to serve as his artificial intelligence and crypto czar.)
Venture capitalist David Sacks has taken a meandering path to Donald Trump. In 2012 he gave $50,000 to Mitt Romney; in 2016 he gave $33,400 to Hillary Clinton. He sat out 2020 altogether, and he said after the violence at the US Capitol that Trump had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at the national level again.” In the 2024 cycle, Sacks has backed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Ron DeSantis. He played a public role in the official launch of the DeSantis campaign, which was marred by technical issues, and has also co-hosted fundraisers for Kennedy and presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy.
On Thursday, Sacks will end up where most Republicans find themselves in 2024. He’ll host a $300,000-a-head fundraiser for Trump, the only candidate left with a serious chance of defeating President Joe Biden. The event will take place at Sacks’ Italianate home in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood that he has dubbed “Broadcliff,” and which boasts sweeping views of the bay. “I’ve been very critical of Biden’s performance over the last four years, and I would like for him not to win another term,” Sacks says in an interview at his office. “I’ve been looking at all the alternatives and getting to know the alternatives.”
The timing is potentially awkward, coming exactly a week after Trump was convicted in New York of 34 felonies related to the suppression of a potential sex scandal in the run-up to the 2016 election. Sacks dismisses the charges as politically motivated and says the conviction is likely to drive support to Trump. Within hours of the jury verdict, Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire posted on X that he’d donate $300,000 to the former president. Sacks replied with his own post. “Trump has a lot of supporters in Silicon Valley; many are just afraid to admit it,” he wrote. “But with each act of courage, like this one, the dam begins to break.”
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A new wave of enthusiasm for Trump is building among conservatives in Silicon Valley. Biden seems vulnerable, and many people in tech don’t hesitate to blame him for inflation, while also criticizing his administration’s approach to antitrust, AI regulations and crypto. Sacks has positioned himself at the forefront of this movement. In addition to having a large following on X, he’s close with Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, who’s emerged as one of the industry’s most prominent advocates for right-wing views. Sacks has also developed his own platform through All-In, the podcast he’s co-hosted since 2020. On the show’s weekly episodes, which often run for 90 minutes or more, he and his co-hosts—investors Chamath Palihapitiya and Jason Calacanis and entrepreneur David Friedberg—dish on the tech industry and debate politics. All-In has become an influential part of the Silicon Valley media diet, with about 420,000 followers on Spotify. Its popularity means never-Trump Republicans and other potential political foes tend not to want to talk publicly about Sacks, in part to avoid a public dressing-down on the show.
Many of Sacks’ views are standard-issue conservatism. He bemoans profligate government spending and aggressive regulation. He takes a notably libertarian tack on free speech, describing, for instance, the right’s response to college protests over the war in Gaza as “snowflakery.” His most prominent position may be his stance on Ukraine, which consists of steady, almost exhausting calls for the US to stop spending so much on military aid for the country and for Kyiv to make large concessions to end the war with Russia. This aligns with many MAGA Republicans, though it falls well outside the thinking of the old-guard conservative establishment.
Sacks says All-In’s hosts floated the idea of recording an episode with Trump at the fundraiser, but it now seems more likely that any such conversation would happen later in the year. Palihapitiya, who castigated Trump after Jan. 6, and who’s co-hosting this week’s fundraiser, says All-In has asked Biden to join the show at some point. He says the group hasn’t heard back.
Friedberg argues it shouldn’t be surprising that people in tech have become more politically active, given the increasing interest that federal officials have in the industry. “I think it’s only natural that folks in Silicon Valley want to engage more on national politics,” he wrote in an email, saying he was making a general statement rather than commenting on anyone in particular.
Sacks has been involved in political and social issues at least since he was an undergraduate at Stanford University in the early 1990s, when he worked on the Stanford Review, a libertarian newspaper founded by the PayPal co-founder and investor Peter Thiel. Sacks and Thiel also co-authored a 1995 book, The Diversity Myth, which claimed that promoting diversity had become a tool for curbing free speech and anticipated some of the anti-woke arguments now popular among the US right. The two men also questioned campus policies on sexual assault, writing that they could punish consensual encounters and noting that “a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret.” Both men later apologized for portions of the book, with Sacks telling journalist Kara Swisher in 2016 that the work “does not represent who I am or what I believe today.”
Within the tech industry, Sacks first made his name during a stint as chief operating officer of PayPal, the payments company that Thiel and Musk co-founded in the late ’90s. After PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002, Sacks dabbled in Hollywood, producing the 2005 satire Thank You for Smoking, which focused on how political lobbyists worked to make the unpalatable acceptable.
He then returned to Silicon Valley, founding a workplace communications company called Yammer, which Microsoft Corp. bought in 2012 for $1.2 billion. In 2017, Sacks founded a venture capital firm, Craft. It has invested in Musk-owned businesses Boring, Neuralink and SpaceX. The firm also profited from its investment in Bird, the scooter-sharing company, when it went public through a special purpose acquisition company in 2021. Bird filed for bankruptcy in December. Craft has invested in companies that align with his free-speech ideals, including the social podcasting company Callin and Reddit, the social media platform, plus others that complement his knowledge of enterprise technology, such as productivity startup ClickUp and compliance startup Vanta.
As his fortune grew, Sacks became a large political donor, not on the scale of tech titans such as Steve Ballmer and Ron Conway, but in recent years giving enough to get his calls returned. He’s also created a political action committee called the Purple Good Government PAC, to which he and his wife, Jacqueline, are the main contributors and through which they made their Kennedy donations.
In California, Sacks has helped fund attempts to push back against what many conservatives in the state see as overly liberal politicians. He gave money to a successful campaign to recall three San Francisco school board members, as well as an unsuccessful one to oust the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. Nationally, Sacks has been closely associated with investor-turned-Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, the recipient of most of the almost $2 million that Sacks made in political contributions to national candidates in 2022 and ’23. “As Vance’s star rises, I think Sacks is one of those people who could rise in influence,” says Rob Stutzman, a Sacramento-based Republican political consultant.
While he’s mostly been focused on Republicans, Sacks hasn’t avoided Democrats. There was that 2016 donation to Clinton, which he now dismisses as a favor to a friend who was holding a fundraiser. (Jacqueline gave $50,000 to Trump the same year.) The couple also gave $11,600 to Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democrat, days after she resisted abolishing the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for ending a filibuster in 2022, and to Representative Ro Khanna, a centrist Democrat from Silicon Valley who’d objected to Twitter’s suppression of links to the New York Post’s October 2020 article about files found on Hunter Biden’s stolen laptop. “I’m really more into the issues than candidates,” says Sacks. “If I find common ground with a candidate on issues, then great. I can try to support them.”
Sacks says that he’s not interested in running for office and that the day-to-day life of a political appointee such as, say, an ambassador seems like “a lot of glad-handing” and less compelling than building products or investing in tech companies. His political allies say he’s helping conservatives in tech find their political voice. “There’s a universe of interesting movements in Silicon Valley that are on the radar in DC,” says Saurabh Sharma, who runs American Moment, a right-leaning Washington-based policy organization that Sacks helps finance. “David’s foremost among them.”
Although he’s prominent in tech circles, Sacks doesn’t have a high profile in national politics. With the Trump fundraiser, he may be inviting a new level of scrutiny. He seems to revel in it. On the day the former president was convicted, Sacks posted on X about a reporter buzzing his gate, asking how he felt about the coming fundraiser in the neighborhood. “I feel great about it,” he recounted saying. —With Ashley Carman
(This story was originally published on June 5, 2024.)
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