SF’s own right-wing VC billionaire David Sacks was named the Trump administration’s ‘AI and Crypto Czar’ last year, and a New York Times analysis says that since then, his investments have hit the jackpot over policies he helped craft.

Big-bucks Silicon Valley investor David Sacks first registered on our radar when he was largely bankrolling the Chesa Bouin recall himself back in 2021, and spent much of 2022 hyping Kremlin propaganda that Ukraine should surrender to Russia.

Sacks made his fortune as one of the “Payal Mafia” guys with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk in the early 2000s, though became more prominent as the co-host of a tech bro podcast called “All In.” But funny, these “All In” podcast guys certainly weren't “All In” when they were begging the Biden administration for a Silicon Valley Bank bailout, instead just bitching and moaning for the government to handle the bailout despite how these assholes had several spare billions of dollars laying around.

Though Sacks gained outsize influence in MAGA circles after he threw a $12 million Trump fundraiser in his SF mansion in the lead-up to the 2024 election, and then was named Trump’s “AI and Crypto Czar” after Trump won the election.  

Now a Sunday report in the New York Times shows the degree to which Sacks’s investments are benefiting from his decisions as AI and crypto czar. Obviously, AI and crypto are two of the least well understood industries in the US, especially by the powers that be, and crypto scams are already a hallmark of the Trump administration. But the self-dealing described by the Times exposes new angles of this grift.  

Per the Times, Sacks was offered this role in administration, but insisted he would only take it if he could still work with his SF-based VC firm Craft Ventures. The White House honored his request. That put Sacks into simultaneous roles as a White House advisor, and Silicon Valley investor posed to profit massively from the very industry for which he was a major policy advisor. As Senator Elizabeth Warren pointed out earlier this year, “Mr. Sacks is financially invested in the crypto industry, positioning him to potentially profit from the crypto policy changes he makes at the White House.”

Needless to say, Sacks was furious with the Times’s Sunday report. His tweetstorm above describes the report as a “nothing burger,” though also adds that he has retained the high-priced law firm Clare Locke to write a nasty letter for him (though he’s not suing the Times). Because, you know, hiring an expensive law firm to write a nasty letter over a “nothing burger” story is totally a normal-person thing to do.

The most concerning part of the Times’ story, from a national security standpoint, is how a United Arab Emirates prince forked over $2 billion to Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto scam, and then immediately the White House gave the United Arab Emirates hundreds of thousands of our most advanced computer chips. That deal was reportedly brokered by Sacks.

It also ran afoul of Biden-era restrictions on direct chip sales to countries that could share the technology with China or other potentially hostile nations. White House officials were reportedly against the deal over national security concerns, but apparently InfoWars personality Laura Loomer intervened on behalf of doing the deal and it went through, because that is how stupid of a nation we have become these days.

Sacks said he had sold his crypto and AI investments before taking the White House role, to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest. But the Times report suggests that Sacks has "retained 20 crypto and 449 AI-related investments.” A look through Sacks’s portfolio shows that many of these are listed in disclosures as hardware or software companies, though their marketing materials describe themselves as AI.

In one particularly obvious cash grab from Sacks, he wanted his “All In” podcast listed as the host of a big Trump AI announcement this past July. And as host, “All In” planned to charge $1 million to every sponsor to attend a private reception. Even the Trump White House apparently thought that seemed a bit on the shady side, and Visa and the New York Stock Exchange ended up being the hosts.

Sacks also has investment stakes in drone companies like Anduril, Firestorm Labs, and Swarm Aero, who are winning contracts sometimes in the hundreds of millions of dollars under the Trump administration. And the crypto industry GENIUS Act under this administration has been a boon for a Sacks investment called BitGo, who are now planning a multi-billion IPO.

White House spokesperson Liz Huston shot back on claims that Sacks has conflicts of interest, saying that he was instead “an invaluable asset for President Trump’s agenda of cementing American technology dominance.”

Under the Trump administration, we should not be surprised to see the White House selling access to China and the Saudis for a quick buck. But now the US technology-industrial complex is getting in that bed too, and even if someone has a “White House Czar” title, you have to wonder where their allegiances really lie.

Related: Invites Go Out For Trump Fundraiser In San Francisco, Hosted By David Sacks [SFist]

Image: WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 03: David Sacks, U.S. President Donald Trump's AI and Crypto Czar (R), accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump, speaks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on March 3, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump announced that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, one of the largest manufacturers of semiconductor chips, plans to invest $100 billion in new manufacturing facilities in the United States. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)