Sacks Rules: The New AI and Crypto Czar

It is possible you don’t know David Sacks. This week, Donald Trump appointed him to head up the White House AI and Crypto policy development.

Sacks responded, saying he is honored to be in charge of American competitiveness in these two critical technologies.

This was also the week Bitcoin reached $103,000 per coin.

It is hard to underestimate how significant this appointment is regarding Silicon Valley gaining access to power in Washington, DC. Placed alongside Elon Musk’s role and rumors that Marc Andreessen is helping recruit for various roles, there has never been a time that technology and politics have become so closely intertwined.

In Silicon Valley terms, Sacks is pretty standard, aside from his early and consistent support for Trump. He was COO at PayPal and founded Yammer, a Twitter clone for enterprise communication, like an early Slack.

He made money from both and is today a regular performer on the All-In Podcast with Jason Calacanis, David Friedberg, and Chamath Palihapitiya. He also runs Craft Ventures: SaaS, and sometimes Crypto investors.

Sacks was an early Solana investor and is also an investor in Elon Musk’s xAI.

After the succession, the SEC, the DoJ, and the FTC will all have new leadership.

That Was The Week has consistently criticized Lina Khan, Gensler, and others. From premature attempts to regulate AI to failure to provide a policy framework for crypto to blunderingly seeking to break up Google and block mergers, they have been universally poor.

Musk and Sacks represent a chance to apply sanity to both AI and Crypto and for the SEC to define regulation that permits experimentation rather than seeking to block it.

Overall, I am optimistic. Musk and Sacks will need to manage conflicts of interest, especially in the crypto field and where OpenAI is concerned. But as they say, where there is no conflict, there is no interest, so it is mostly good that people who understand things get to influence policy around them.

Henry Farrell writes this week about how Silicon Valley turned right. From my point of view, Musk and Sacks are not on the right wing. They believe in progress and see capitalism as capable of delivering it if freed from regulatory straightjacket. Progress is about wealth creation and freedom for the individual. AI and crypto are components of an innovation worldview, and neither needs over-regulation.

What could go wrong? A lot. 1. Congress being unaligned with the goals. Putting the right people in the right places only matters if they can execute plans, and Congress has a poor record of understanding technology and how it can help bring a brighter future. 2. Focusing on cost saving more than modernizing and innovating. 3. Musk and Sacks becoming self-serving in a narrow way and not seeing the bigger picture from a human point of view. There are a lot of great essays this week. What if Intelligence Were Free asks a great question at a time when it is quite likely to become free. The launch of OpenAi’s o1 model this week gets close. Meta released a 70 billion Llama model that performs as well as its 405 Billion model into open source. The essay focused on what happens in higher education. It is a question Sacks and Musk should have great modernizing answers to. More next week. Enjoy.

Hat Tip to this week’s creators: @henryfarrell, @cshirky, @nickwingfield, @sharongoldman, @DaleyMaths, @sama, @CaseyNewton, @azeem, @johnthornhillft, @ZeffMax, @deanwball, @sgblank, @mgsiegler, @UKZak, @a16z, @DanBartus, @ajkeen, @MitchellBaker, @Kyle_L_Wiggers, @SullyOmarr

Contents

• Editorial: 
• Essays of the Week
• Interview of the Week
• Startup Of the Week
• Post of the Week
• News of the Week (Supplement)