Who is David Sacks, the Bay Area venture capitalist tagged by Donald Trump to lead on AI, cryptocurrency?

Incoming President Donald Trump’s appointment of Bay Area venture capitalist David Sacks as his artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency “czar” and head science and technology adviser brings the region — and the tech industry — into the White House in an unprecedented way, experts say.

“It’s going to be Silicon Valley’s turn,” said Steve Blank, an adjunct professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, and a long-time Valley insider.

Menlo Park venture capitalist and former software entrepreneur Shomit Ghose said Sacks brings to his roles a “pretty well-steeped Silicon Valley mindset,” as a Stanford economics grad, entrepreneur and VC.

“That’s a pretty classic background, and he knows what the dynamics are for disruptive innovation,” Ghose said. “The policies and thinking in Washington will be conditioned by that Silicon Valley perspective.”

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, whose firm invests in AI and crypto, said Sacks would “provide the innovators the flexibility and freedom they need to create and build.”

But as a billionaire presidential adviser, Sacks carries baggage: His San Francisco VC firm Craft Ventures boasts investments in AI and cryptocurrency, the two technologies he is directly charged with overseeing, noted John Pelissero, director of government ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

“There’s a potential for lots of conflicts of interest to arise here,” Pelissero said.

Sacks did not respond to a request for comment.

Sacks’ roles bring him into the close orbit of the incoming president, along with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as head of “government efficiency,” and Silicon Valley VC Marc Andreessen as an informal adviser. These well-known tech figures, and others receiving roles from Trump, have indicated they will promote a pro-business agenda of deregulation.

“With the number of billionaires and millionaires he’s offered positions to, it would be difficult to look at this and not believe that there would be a number of instances where the foxes are right at the henhouse,” Pelissero said.

Trump in a Dec. 5 social media post named Sacks “czar” for AI, which since ChatGPT’s 2022 public release has birthed a funding frenzy in Silicon Valley, and for cryptocurrency, the digital money hailed by supporters as a stable, potentially anti-inflationary tool, and decried by critics as a Ponzi scheme and environmental catastrophe. The president-elect also appointed Sacks head of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

“David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas,” Trump wrote in the post on Truth Social. “He will safeguard Free Speech online, and steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship.”

Trump, who has pledged to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet,” and to create a “strategic reserve” of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, said he would charge Sacks to “work on a legal framework so the crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for.”

Sacks has strongly supported Trump, hosting him at his mansion in San Francisco in June for a fundraising dinner costing $300,000 per person and $500,000 per couple.

The prominent VC began leaning rightward as early as college. At Stanford in the early ’90s, he wrote and edited for the Stanford Review, a conservative-libertarian newspaper co-founded by Peter Thiel, now a prominent entrepreneur and investor. In 1995, Sacks and Thiel published the book “The Diversity Myth,” a Stanford-focused attack on multiculturalism and political correctness in higher education.

After college, Sacks earned a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1998, and joined the nascent PayPal payments company in 1999 as chief operating officer, becoming a member of the so-called “PayPal Mafia,” a group including Musk, Thiel and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

At age 30, Sacks helped broker the $1.5 billion 2002 sale of PayPal to eBay, he told the Mercury News in 2011. He produced a critically acclaimed satirical movie called “Thank You For Smoking,” released in 2006.

But the slow pace of filmmaking made Sacks miss technology, he said, and with funding from Thiel, he founded genealogy website Geni just months after the movie launched, and then in 2008 launched Yammer, a business-networking platform sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012.

In 2016, Sacks moved from chief operating officer to interim CEO at San Francisco business software startup Zenefits following a regulatory scandal. After reports of in-office boozing and worker sex in a stairwell at Zenefits’ San Francisco office, Sacks promptly cracked down on alcohol in the company workplace.

In May, Sacks unveiled his new startup Glue, an AI-based internal-messaging product for businesses.

In social media posts and on the All-In podcast he co-hosts, Sacks has telegraphed his thinking on the tech issues he will advise Trump about. Like many on the right, he has often propounded a disputed talking point that the federal government and social media companies censor conservative views.

In a podcast episode last month, Sacks, wearing a brown camouflage Trump/Vance cap, lambasted U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler for issuing Wells notices — letters from the agency indicating it plans to initiate enforcement action — to crypto firms for allegedly breaking securities laws.

“The days of Gensler terrorizing crypto companies by issuing Wells notices without clarifying what the rules are that he’s prosecuting … are about to be over,” Sacks said.

Sacks in an April podcast dismissed fears that AI will create widespread job losses, saying some employment could disappear, but an AI-generated “productivity boom” should create new jobs, help cut the national debt, and expand the economy.

In the same podcast, Sacks asserted that the U.S. defense industry needs fast-moving “startup disruptors.”

Sacks also promised an end to “deceleration” in company mergers and acquisitions. He credited Federal Trade Commission chief Lina Khan for targeting Google, Apple and Amazon.

“She was actually willing to apply pressure on them to not engage in anticompetitive tactics,” Sacks said.

Google, Sacks said, “should be broken up,” but not Meta — a company in Sacks’ investment portfolio that is currently accused in an FTC lawsuit of being a monopoly.

Within Craft Ventures, which Sacks said last year in a blog post managed $3.3 billion in assets, he has invested in companies including Meta, Musk’s XAI AI startup and The Boring Company tunnel startup, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Reddit, and firms receiving valuable U.S. government contracts, like military- and intelligence-technology company Palantir and Musk’s SpaceX rocket business.

Sacks’ position as a Trump adviser does not require him to put aside his own business interests, Pelissero said. Conflicts of interest could arise with regard to Sacks’ own companies and investments, potentially affecting the public interest and also competitors of firms in Sacks’ portfolio, Pelissero said.

Ghose expects the proximity to Trump of Sacks, Musk and other tech leaders will lead to a lighter regulatory touch on crypto, and an especially light touch on AI, despite the technology’s climate-unfriendly massive energy use for data centers, and its potential to cost jobs.

“The brakes,” Ghose said, “are going to be off when it comes to AI innovation.”