David Sacks

AI & Crypto Czar — White HouseFounder — Craft Ventures

Profile

David Sacks is the venture capitalist, podcaster, and political operator who became the most direct conduit between Silicon Valley AI capital and the Trump White House. A founding member of the PayPal Mafia alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, Sacks served as PayPal’s first product lead and then COO through its $1.5B sale to eBay in 2002. He went on to found Yammer, the enterprise social network that Microsoft bought for $1.2B in 2012, and briefly served as interim CEO of Zenefits during its 2016 turnaround. In 2017 he co-founded Craft Ventures, where he’s been a prolific early-stage SaaS investor ever since.

For most developers, Sacks is probably best known as one of the four hosts of the All-In Podcast — the weekly show with Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, and David Friedberg that became required listening across tech and finance. The show, and Sacks’ increasingly combative political commentary on it, is the platform that turned him from a respected operator into a movement figure on the so-called “tech right.” He hosted a Trump fundraiser in 2024 and was rewarded with a White House post in December that year.

In the role of “White House AI & Crypto Czar,” Sacks served as a special government employee — capped at 130 days a year so he could keep his Craft seat — and used the time to architect the administration’s America’s AI Action Plan, released July 2025. The plan aggressively favors innovation over regulation: rolling back Biden-era export controls, preempting state AI laws via executive order, and directing federal agencies to procure only models stripped of “ideological bias.” He framed DeepSeek’s rise as proof that Biden’s chip restrictions hurt US labs without slowing China, and lobbied the Senate to kill the GAIN AI Act’s domestic-customer-priority clause.

In March 2026 Sacks burned through his 130 days and stepped down, moving to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science & Technology. For developers, he matters less for technical taste than for the policy weather: the regulatory environment you’ll ship AI products into for the rest of this decade was largely drafted on his watch.

Books

The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on the Campus Co-written with Peter Thiel in 1995 as a polemic against political correctness at Stanford — a foundational text for understanding the Thiel/Sacks worldview that now shapes White House tech policy.

Controversies

Conflict of interest as AI czar. Sacks and Craft Ventures hold stakes in more than 400 tech firms, many with direct AI exposure. Reporting from NPR and the New York Times raised pointed questions about whether his “special government employee” status — which limits disclosure obligations — let him shape policy that directly benefited his own portfolio. Critics argued the 130-day cap was a workaround designed to avoid divestment; defenders noted that the alternative was no Silicon Valley insider in the role at all.

The Diversity Myth. Sacks publicly distanced himself from passages in his 1995 book that critics said minimized a campus sexual assault case. Peter Thiel issued a similar walk-back. The book remains a touchstone for both his admirers and opponents.

Ukraine commentary. His 2022 essay “Neocons and the Woke Left Are Joining Hands and Leading Us to Woke War III” — arguing for accommodation of Russian demands — drew sharp criticism and marked his public shift from libertarian-leaning operator to a lead voice of the new right.