Donald Trump has named venture capitalist David Sacks as his choice for the newly created role of White House artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency czar — “two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness,” he wrote in a Truth Social post.
Sacks is the co-founder of venture capital firm Craft Ventures and was the early COO of Paypal. Along with Peter Thiel and his good friend Elon Musk, he is a member of the so-called “Paypal Mafia,” a group of former workers and leaders of the company.
He is also the founder of social networking site Yammer and a former chief executive of software company Zenefits.
Sacks spoke on the opening night of the Republican National Convention in July. He used part of his speech to blast his hometown of San Francisco, where he said “Democrat rule has turned the streets of our beautiful city into a cesspool of open encampments and open drug use.”
Sacks donated $300,000 to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ re-election campaign and became a close adviser. In May, 2023 he hosted the glitch-filled conversation between Musk and DeSantis on “Twitter Spaces” that DeSantis used to launch his GOP presidential primary campaign.
The event got off to a 25-minute late start and was plagued by repeated crashes throughout. It was a debacle that turned DeSantis’ campaign into a national joke just as it started and was likely a factor in the very poor showing he eventually made in the Republican primary.
Cryptocurrency is increasingly the domain of scammers and criminal money laundering operations, in addition to its massive energy consumption, wasteful water use and the pollution it generates. So-called “artificial intelligence” software is associated with an even larger waste of water, and rampant copyright theft.