Meet David Sacks: Trump’s AI power broker

From a total Washington novice, Silicon Valley investor David Sacks has, against expectations, emerged as one of the most successful members of the second Trump administration.

He is officially chair of President Donald Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

However, in the White House, he is referred to as the AI and crypto tsar, there to guide the president through the technology revolutions in which the United States plays a central role.

“I am grateful we have him,” OpenAI boss Sam Altman said in a post on X.

“While Americans bicker, our rivals are studying David’s every move,” billionaire Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff chimed in.

Those supportive posts responded to The New York Times investigation highlighting Sacks’s investments in technology companies benefiting from White House AI support.

Sacks dismissed the report as an “anti-truth” hit job by liberal media.

But the episode confirmed that this South African-born outsider has become a force in Trump’s Washington, outlasting his friend Elon Musk, whose White House career ended in acrimony after less than six months.

“Even among Silicon Valley allies, he has outperformed expectations,” said a former close associate, speaking anonymously to discuss the matter candidly.

‘Mafia’ member

Unlike many Silicon Valley figures, the South African-born Sacks has been staunchly conservative since his Stanford University days in the 1990s.

There he met Peter Thiel, the self-styled philosopher king of the right-wing tech community.

In the early 1990s, the two men wrote for a campus publication, attacking what they saw as political correctness destroying American higher education.

After earning degrees from Stanford and the University of Chicago, Sacks initially took a conventional path as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.

But Thiel lured his friend to his startup Confinity, which would eventually become PayPal, the legendary breeding ground for the “PayPal mafia” — a group of entrepreneurs including Musk and LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman — whose influence now extends throughout the tech world.