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On Thursday evening, President-elect Donald Trump announced on his Truth Social platform that he would be appointing David O. Sacks—the “PayPal Mafia” alum, longtime venture capitalist, All-In Podcast co-host, Elon Musk pal, and rock-ribbed Silicon Valley conservative—as the “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.”
In his statement, Trump wrote that “Sacks will focus on making America the clear global leader” in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, which he deemed to be “two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness.” In addition, Sacks will “safeguard Free Speech online,” “steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship,” and “lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.” For his first-ever Truth Social post, the incoming czar responded to Trump with gratitude and claimed that he “looks forward to advancing American competitiveness in these critical technologies.”
It’s the first position of its kind in United States history and, more importantly, a fulsome reward for Sacks, who’s spent much of this year fundraising for Trump and advising him on power-circle picks, from Vice President–elect J.D. Vance to the administration staffers who’ll guide executive tech policy. (Look to the space agencies especially.) He’ll now continue to have the president’s ear, without having to go through a Senate confirmation, and he’ll be able to directly connect crypto and A.I. executives with the president for whatever they need, whenever.
What’s more, David Sacks’ appointment unambiguously indicates the tech vision that will win out under a Trump presidency: that we should disregard the very real dangers around crypto A.I.’s energy use and pollution and environmental plunder and copyright infringement and horrific output, for the direct benefit of the guys whose riches are fueling this dystopia—uh, sorry, for the good of the world or something.
To be clear, as with incoming “border czar” Tom Homan, it’s unclear how much power Sacks will actually have. The Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology merely tends to act as an advisory board of experienced experts who work together to write reports on key topics that the president is free to ignore. (In his last term, Trump didn’t form his own PCAST until 2019, and he infamously ignored the Obama PCAST’s pandemic research, to devastating effect.) But Sacks will likely carry a lot of influence, especially in deciding which private-sector technologists will have the easiest flow of communication with Trump.
Those folks will likely include a lot of Sacks’ fellow Silicon Valley Republicans—think Peter Thiel, All-In co-host Chamath Palihapitiya, Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey, the Winklevoss twins—while excluding anyone deemed “woke,” or any business rivals who pose threats to the companies and sectors that Trump-advising techies like Sacks, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen specialize in. (Musk believes that nemeses like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recognize his sense of “ethics,” but his sparring partners’ ongoing, preemptive bids to flatter Trump as much as possible are telling a different story—that of nervousness.)
If you thought the conflict-of-interest optics were bad enough with the “Department of Government Efficiency” project from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy (whom Sacks had wanted for a “major major role”), you won’t feel any better about czar David Sacks. The VC firm he co-founded in 2017, Craft Ventures, has funded quite a few crypto and A.I. companies, several of them under Sacks’ aegis: crypto index fund Bitwise, workplace chatbot Glue, task automator Replit, and Elon Musk’s own xAI, among others. Not only does Sacks have plenty of other friends with direct stakes in this tech, but he has some very personal investments and beefs that will be on the forefront of his mind, and thus, Trump’s.
It didn’t take much persuasion for Trump to go from shitting on Bitcoin to running his own crypto operation. And last time, the president was happy to weaponize his Justice Department against the CEOs and companies he thought had wronged him, from Amazon to Time Warner. Sacks knows this well, as should any of the companies and executives with which this venture capitalist holds a grudge: Disney, for its legal battles against Ron DeSantis and its refusal to advertise on Elon Musk’s X; Google, for supposedly censoring right-wingers and crafting “woke” generative-A.I. bots; Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, who had a rather public spat with Sacks this summer over a bitter chapter in the latter’s corporate-leadership history.
Yet the most important part of Trump’s Sacks promotion may lie in just how the president-elect announced it. To refer to the text of the Truth Social post: “Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness,” and later referred to, again, as “two critical technologies.” It’s likely not a coincidence that crypto and A.I. were the primary topics of Andreessen’s infamous “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a late-2023 screed arguing that any sort of regulation, caution, guardrail, or impediment to the ways the private sector wishes to develop and release A.I. would be bad and dangerous, for humanity and for America. (Yes, it’s a touch convenient that Andreessen’s VC firm has plenty of investments in A.I. and crypto, and that he’s spent gobsmacking amounts of money in support of deregulation-friendly politicians.)
Not long after Trump’s announcement, Sacks shared a clip from Andreessen’s recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience concerning, as Sacks characterized it, “the dystopian path we were on with AI” before “the timeline split,” leading us to “a different path now.” (One must assume the timeline split occurred thanks to Sacks’ appointment.) Andreessen stated to Rogan that “if you thought social media censorship was bad … A.I. is going to be the control layer on everything,” and that the Biden administration was apparently on the road to A.I. censorship.
This is all in line with another manifesto Andreessen had published with his VC partner, Ben Horowitz, back in July: “The Little Tech Agenda.” (Another sign of the duo’s presidential influence: When Trump announced his pick for antitrust chief last week, he mentioned and capitalized “Little Tech” in his statement.) The enemy, once again, was “regulatory agencies” that, under Biden, were going after crypto scams and publishing limp memos about A.I. So it’s was existential for the U.S. to “reconstruct the American manufacturing sector around automation and AI” and incorporate even more A.I. into defense tech. (Oh yeah, and to make sure that supposedly liberal Big Tech can’t “censor” right-wingers by practicing basic content moderation or by applying cautious guardrails to their A.I. apps.)
It doesn’t matter that the Biden era produced no regulations or laws significantly affecting A.I., that he already passed a law boosting A.I. research as well as domestic production of semiconductors (a key A.I. tech component), or that various companies both Andreessen and Sacks have invested in, like Palantir and SpaceX and Anduril and Shield AI, all benefited from military contracts inked by the Biden administration.
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The issue with all this is simple: All major forms of A.I., including your simple chatbots, are expensive and resource-intensive as hell, thanks to ample electricity and infrastructure costs. And so far, the profit (and godlike capability) that has been promised just isn’t being generated. As VCs, Sacks and Andreessen can make do with some flops, but they need their larger investments to make at least some monetary returns—especially in a hyped and hypercompetitive sector like A.I.. To do so involves “improving” A.I. power through sheerly destructive means: huge data centers that swallow up farmland, electricity requirements that revitalize old fossil-fuel plants (and their greenhouse gas emissions), and constantly running computation that overheats this infrastructure, which is often cooled by gallons of potable water (sorry if you live in a drought-stricken area). All of this applies to Bitcoin mining as well, which is why Texans who live near Bitcoin complexes don’t exactly share their governor’s (or these VCs’) enthusiasm for the stuff.
A massive buildout of this sort involves not just brushing up against resistant local communities, but inevitably running afoul of regulations governing the natural environment, climate change mitigation, and market competition. That’s exactly why Andreessen wants to do away with such regulations, and why Sacks and Trump will be amenable to this agenda. (Another set of rules they’ll probably want to target: tax requirements of the type that Jensen Huang, the megawealthy Nvidia CEO and darling of the A.I.-verse, has already been dodging.) It’ll also behoove the trio’s mutual friend Elon Musk: His auto empire Tesla is stacking up on chips to power self-driving tech that’s raised dire safety concerns from customers and government officials; his xAI venture is dependent on Memphis-based data centers that run on high-polluting gas turbines; his Neuralink brain-chip experiments will need a pliant Food and Drug Administration if it wants to keep employing sketchy animal-testing methods.
Sacks and Andreessen are mutually invested in xAI, which is why they’d prefer for it not to raise any environmental complaints, but there’s another factor here: xAI’s core product is an “anti-woke” chatbot named Grok, built in explicit opposition to products like ChatGPT that have output guardrails intended to help avoid the output of disinformation and racial slurs. The incoming White House brain trust sees all of that as a waste of time—that we should keep letting A.I. systems do whatever they want, no matter how dangerous or misguided or even fatal, and let techno-autonomy win the day.
All of this, if successful, entails less land and water for the common people—along with more climate horrors and exploitative, bigoted spam—as government policy. Trump is following through right away, promising to repeal Biden’s toothless A.I. executive order right when he gets to the Oval Office. The ensuing A.I. death spiral is upon us. But at least the venture capitalists will ensure those returns with a little help from their friend: the president.