Venture investor and podcaster David Sacks will join the Trump administration as President-elect Donald Trump's “White House AI and Crypto Czar.” announced on Truth Social on Thursday.
Sacks will lead the federal government's policies on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, Trump wrote. This work includes making a legal framework for crypto in addition to leading a Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
“David will focus on making America the clear world leader in both areas,” Trump wrote. “It will protect free speech online and keep us away from Big Tech’s bias and censorship.”
The appointment signals that the second Trump administration is rewarding Silicon Valley figures who supported his campaign. It also suggests that the federal government will push for policies which can be supportive of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs usually.
Sacks became a serious Trump supporter earlier this 12 months, hosting a fundraiser for the then-Republican candidate at his San Francisco mansion. Tickets sold for $50,000 per person, with a price tier of $300,000 that included perks like a photograph with Trump.
It was a big change in tone for Sacks, who was sharply critical of Trump after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Sacks said shortly afterward on an episode of his All In podcast that Trump was “clearly responsible” for the events of January 6 and that he had “disqualified himself from running at the national level.”
In July, Sacks spoke on the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Sacks is a enterprise capitalist and entrepreneur who sold Yammer to Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion. He can also be related to the “PayPal Mafia,” an unofficial club of distinguished technology figures and investors, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who worked at PayPal within the Nineties.
In recent years, Sacks has been best known for co-hosting the All-In podcast alongside fellow investors Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg. In his post, Trump called it the “top podcast in tech where he and his friends discuss economic, political and social issues.”
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