The crypto industry is about to have another friend inside the White House.
In a post on Truth Social, Donald Trump announced the appointment of Paypal COO David Sacks to a new position with an influential-sounding title: “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar.”
“In this important role, David will guide policy for the Administration in Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness,” Trump wrote late Thursday. “David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas. He will safeguard Free Speech online, and steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship. He will work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the U.S. David will also lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.”
Trump continued to pile on the praise for his prominent Silicon Valley backer in a follow-up post, promising that the tech executive has the “knowledge, business experience, intelligence, and pragmatism to MAKE AMERICA GREAT in these two critical technologies.”
The new role—and his appointment of a longtime tech billionaire to initiate it—underscores Trump’s growing intent to leverage D.C. to the better benefit of Silicon Valley. A member of the “Paypal Mafia,” Sacks will be the latest associate of Peter Thiel to enter the echelons of the executive branch, following fellow Paypal co-founder Elon Musk and Vice President–elect JD Vance, who has had a long work history with the anti-tax billionaire. Trump has also tapped Thiel’s colleagues to run critical agencies: Jared Isaacman, who financed Musk’s SpaceX initiative, was nominated to run NASA earlier this week.
Sacks is a part of a contingent of tech bros, including Musk and Thiel, who have leveraged their immense wealth, power, and influence to unite conservatives and former leftists behind a cynical and conspiratorial reactionary vision against liberalism. As The New Republic’s Jacob Silverman noted in 2022, Sacks has spent years “quietly becoming the leading practitioner of a new right-wing sensibility that has emerged in the political realignments provoked by Trumpism and the pandemic.
“On foreign policy, it offers a blend of isolationism, Trumpist nationalism, suspicion of the deep state, and the anti-empire realism of John Mearsheimer,” Silverman wrote. “Domestically, the vision is more muddled, a series of angry poses, a politics of pique, much of it playing out on Twitter, Callin, YouTube, Rumble, Substack, and other online media, especially among people who may have once counted themselves on the left but now can’t countenance the sight of homeless encampments.”
But despite his political affinity for Trump’s politics, Sacks hasn’t always been on the president-elect’s side. In the immediate wake of January 6, the longtime Republican said on his podcast, All-In, that Trump was “clearly” responsible for the insurrection because “he is the one who put forth this theory that the election was stolen and was constantly repeating it for the last two months” and had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level.”
“If you want to see this mob as a gun, I think he loaded the gun,” Sacks said at the time. “He pointed it in a certain direction, but did he tell them to storm the Capitol? No, not specifically. I think therefore it’d be a very hard case to prosecute, but I think, you know, prosecuting him in a court of law is sort of unnecessary and redundant. I mean, I think that in the eyes of the public, politically, he is—I think most see that he’s culpable.”
