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President-elect Donald Trump tapped David Sacks to be his new man on artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto. Here’s what we know.
US President-elect Donald Trump has picked his new head of artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto: David Sacks.
Sacks will guide policy for Trump’s second term on both issues, which Trump described as “two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness,” on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Among other things, Sacks will “safeguard free speech online” and steer the US away from “Big Tech bias and censorship,” Trump wrote.
Sacks’ mandate will also include a legal framework for the US crypto industry so that it has the “clarity it has been asking for,” the president-elect added.
The AI and crypto czar will also lead what Trump is calling the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, a council that works with each administration to advise the President on science and technology.
“[Sacks] has the knowledge, business experience, intelligence, and pragmatism to MAKE AMERICA GREAT in these two critical technologies,” Trump wrote.
Who is David Sacks?
Straight after finishing his law degree at the University of Chicago in 1998, Sacks worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company but left after a year to join e-commerce startup Confinity, along with Peter Thiel, an ally of Vice President-elect JD Vance.
Sacks was the head of product at Confinity’s PayPal, where he built the company’s key teams before the company went public in the early 2000s.
The company was eventually bought by eBay for $1.5 billion, according to media reports at the time.
Trump noted in his description of Sacks that he’s part of the “PayPal Mafia,” a group of early founders of the company that have gone on to grow some of the biggest tech ventures in Silicon Valley.
Sacks moved on to a career in Hollywood after PayPal was acquired, by financing and producing the political satire Thank You For Smoking, which was nominated for two Golden Globes in 2007 including ‘Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical.’
But Sacks didn’t leave Silicon Valley behind completely. In 2008, Sacks founded Yammer, a social networking platform between companies.
Yammer was eventually acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion as part of its package of offers, according to a TechCrunch report at the time.
By 2017, Sacks had co-founded Craft Ventures in San Francisco, where he has invested in over 20 unicorn companies like Airbnb, Eventbrite, Meta (Facebook), Lyft, Postmates, Reddit, Slack and SpaceX, according to his biography on his venture’s website.
Sacks also hosts the “All-In Podcast,” alongside Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, and David Friedberg where they talk about technology, economy, politics and social issues.
The South African-American tech entrepreneur and film producer was born to a Jewish family in Cape Town and moved to the United States at five years old, according to a 2012 Los Angeles Times profile of him.
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