For months, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks bit his tongue as Donald Trump used crypto to enrich himself and his family. The rabble-rousing podcast host and Silicon Valley investor turned Washington operative divested $200 million of his and his firm’s digital holdings to avoid conflicts of interest before joining the administration. Meanwhile, crypto ventures have added at least $620 million to Trump’s fortune since he retook the White House, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. 

But after one Truth Social post in March, Sacks couldn’t stay silent. Trump wrote that the U.S. strategic crypto reserve would include not only ethereum and bitcoin as expected, but also more niche cryptocurrencies like XRP, solana, and cardano. The announcement provoked accusations of open favoritism from the industry, and it was later reported that the Truth Social post was written by a lobbyist representing XRP creator Ripple Labs. 

Troubled by the post, Sacks raised his concerns with Trump, according to a crypto VC adviser who is in regular contact with Sacks and requested anonymity to preserve working relationships. “He is trying to prevent crazy stuff from happening,” the adviser said, “and focus on what’s actually good for the industry long term.” 

Sacks denied bringing the issue to the president and staying silent about anything through a spokesperson at Craft Ventures, the San Francisco-based venture capital firm he cofounded. He declined requests to be interviewed for this story. 

Since Sacks began his White House tenure, he has walked a tightrope as he tries to fulfill both Silicon Valley’s wish list and maintain his status under a president who demands unwavering loyalty. In his six months as a “special government employee,” he has led monumental wins for the crypto industry, all while his boss’ family cashes in on crypto ventures. Trump’s crypto holdings, which are held in a trust managed by his children, are worth more than any single real estate asset in his portfolio.  

“[Sacks] took the high road with his divestitures,” said Mike Chan, a partner at crypto firm Deep Ventures. “And now the guy that he’s working for is doing quite the opposite.”

Despite his often challenging position, Sacks is now Silicon Valley’s undisputed power broker in the White House after Elon Musk’s hasty retreat from the capital. But even as Trump’s crypto controversies stack up and Sacks reportedly expresses his disapproval in private, he’s fashioning himself into a creature of Washington. Sacks has limited his venture capital and podcasting obligations while increasingly representing the Trump administration at U.S. conferences and on international missions, all while deepening his D.C. political footing through a new social club for Trump-aligned Republicans. 

Sacks’ spokesperson told The Standard that he is not in a challenging position. The spokesperson added that Sacks has no concerns regarding the Trump family’s crypto endeavors. “David is a policy adviser for innovation. He doesn’t get involved in any particular crypto offering.”

To track Sacks’ evolution from a poker-playing, party-throwing Silicon Valley instigator to a MAGA-pilled ideologue with a direct line to the president, The Standard spoke to more than a dozen people who know him, from friends of the investor to D.C. lobbyists. The picture that has emerged is of a happy warrior who has the ear of the president and his crypto-crazed sons — and has been forced to square concerns about alleged corruption with the absolute fealty Trump expects from his inner circle. 

Soon after he was appointed Trump’s crypto and AI czar in early December, Sacks embarked on a “listening tour” of Silicon Valley. He put out dozens of text messages and calls, taking stock of the industry’s wishlist. 

“It was a very deliberate strategy,” said Avichal Garg, a managing partner at Electric Capital. “His attitude was, ‘Please give me input and feedback. I want to make sure we make good decisions.’” 

Between a flurry of calls, Sacks took a few hours to celebrate his appointment, showing up to the All-In Holiday Spectacular party in San Francisco donning a traditional Russian fur hat. 

“Cheers for the new czar,” his cohost Chamath Palihapitiya said at the boozy, caviar-fueled bash that reportedly cost $1 million. 

For many in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley, who often felt neglected and even attacked by the Biden administration, Sacks’ new job meant a sympathetic line directly to the White House. Tech insiders lauded Sacks’ outreach as being wide and thorough, drawing on an extensive Rolodex of connections developed through his decades-long career in Silicon Valley.

Sacks is a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia, an influential alumni network that includes billionaires Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, and Musk. He’s a general partner at Craft Ventures, one of the four “besties” on the “All-In” podcast, and a prolific poker player who has sparred against pros like Phil Hellmuth and Alan Keating in televised games. 

But his career has not been without controversy. In fact, Sacks has seemingly courted it since his Stanford days, when he wrote essays lamenting alleged feminist overreach, maligning political correctness, and discrediting date rape as “seductions that were later regretted.” (Sacks later apologized for some of his more extreme views.)  

As he rose to prominence in the Valley, he started pot-stirring on a grander scale. In 2012, around the time his startup Yammer sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion, Sacks put on a gilded 18th century suit and hosted a “let them eat cake”-themed birthday bash. But he made his most powerful enemies in 2016, when he replaced Parker Conrad as interim chief executive of Zenefits after the company was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for compliance issues. 

Conrad said the duo had written a friendly statement to announce Conrad’s departure, but Sacks opted to go on the attack. In a note to employees, Sacks said some of the company’s decisions around compliance have been just “plain wrong.” “Our culture and tone have been inappropriate for a highly regulated company,” he wrote. 

The bad blood runs strong nearly a decade later: Last year, Conrad tweeted that coups are Sacks’ “specialty,” as Y Combinator founder Paul Graham backed him up. “I was talking recently to another investor about whether you’re the most evil person in Silicon Valley,” Graham tweeted at Sacks. 

Sacks’ CEO stint lasted 10 months, after which the centimillionaire embarked on a new ambition: serving as a premier political fundraiser. From 2021 to 2023, he reportedly threw at least six fundraisers for various candidates, including Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, while lambasting Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection. 

“What Trump did was absolutely outrageous,” he said on “All-In” following the attack on the Capitol. “And I think it brought him to an ignominious end in American politics. He will pay for it in the history books, if not in a court of law.”

After enthusiastically supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president in 2023, Sacks last summer settled on Trump — or at least decided the upside was worth the public reversal. Like many of Silicon Valley’s Trump boosters, he framed the decision as opposition to the incumbent, saying he had “bigger disagreements with Biden” than with Trump.

“With respect to economic policy, foreign policy, border policy, and legal fairness, Trump performed better,” he wrote in a tweet announcing his vote. “[Trump] is the President who deserves a second term.”

If his endorsement wasn’t enough to get Trump’s attention, the $13 million that Sacks raised from his ultrarich Silicon Valley compatriots apparently did. Shortly after Trump won the election, he named Sacks the White House AI and crypto czar, giving him access to the staff of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. Sacks joined the technocrats whose political donations may have scored them spots in Trump’s orbit, including Musk, investor Marc Andreessen, and technology adviser Jacob Helberg. A group of men who had made their fortunes as outspoken contrarians were now firmly embedded in the world’s most powerful institution. 

By the time inauguration weekend rolled around, Sacks jetted off to Washington, to his newly purchased $10.25 million Georgetown penthouse overlooking the Potomac. The clock was ticking — he was given 130 days as a special government employee to deliver. 

Sack’s open-door policy in the Bay Area and D.C. has won him big fans on both coasts. In contrast to the Biden administration’s stubborn antagonism to tech and Musk’s indiscriminate slashing of federal programs and workers, Sacks proved adept at navigating the existing Capitol machine and building bridges between the West Coast and Washington.

To consult on all things crypto, Trump picked 29-year-old former Yale football player and failed North Carolina congressional candidate Bo Hines to be Sacks’ deputy. Garg of Electric Capital described Hines as a high-energy “true believer” who is constantly traveling between D.C. and crypto conferences across the country. 

“They’ve shown a true understanding of how the crypto community — which is decentralized and distributed — really works,” Garg said of Sacks and Hines. “They’re not just sitting in D.C. and saying, ‘Oh, come talk to us here.’ They’re everywhere, it’s really impressive.” 

In contrast to the Biden administration, where officials opted for hotels over the White House on the rare occasion they took meetings with crypto industry affiliates, one crypto lobbyist said Sacks “literally did the exact opposite approach.” He has adopted an open-door policy for industry players and lawmakers, inviting them to the White House for meetings and events like the Crypto Summit. “It’s something I’ve never seen ever from a White House,” the lobbyist said. 

With a circle of crypto advisors drawn from both coasts, including Multicoin Capital’s Kyle Samani, former Blockchain Association leader Kristin Smith, and Bitcoin Media’s David Bailey, Sacks and Hines have evened out speed bumps put in place by the Biden administration and steamed toward making the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.”

During Trump’s first week in office, he signed an order revoking a Biden-era policy demanding a cautious approach to blockchain technology development. Sacks was in attendance in a suit and gray tie as Trump announced his intent to “support the responsible growth and use” of crypto technology. Trump has nominated crypto-friendly heads to the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Senate passed a bill to establish the first comprehensive regulatory framework for stablecoins, cryptocurrencies that are pegged to a stable asset, like the U.S. dollar. 

“We’ve been rooting out all the Biden-era war-on-crypto rules and regulations at the agency level, and now we have this first major legislative win,” Sacks said of the Senate bill on “All-In” last month. He added that he expected the House to act in the next few weeks and Trump to sign the bill thereafter.

The speed at which Sacks has operated on crypto has even surprised people close to him who had high expectations. “He already knew what all the problems were and fixed them in the first three months,” Garg said. “It’s pretty remarkable.” 

At the same time, Sacks is a bystander in what Trump critics view as unprecedented crypto corruption by the president’s family. After launching the $Trump memecoin during Sacks’ inauguration weekend crypto ball, Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his golf course in Northern Virginia to reward the top 220 investors in the coin. (The top 25 received VIP access and a private reception with Trump.) The president’s family continues to profit from crypto-linked projects, including cryptocurrency platform World Liberty Financial, which has reportedly netted the Trumps about $390 million so far, and American Bitcoin, a Trump-affiliated bitcoin mining company. 

At the Bitcoin Conference in May in Las Vegas, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. called for the demise of traditional banks and for America to “win the crypto revolution,” following a morning keynote speech from Vice President JD Vance. 

“We have a president who loves this industry and is behind this industry 100%,” Eric said to a cheering crowd. “We as a family could not be more excited about this.”

The conference offered $21,000 tickets to “whales” — big investors who can influence the price of digital assets — for access to an area called “The Deep,” where Sacks gave a talk and Hines answered questions. One crypto investor told The Standard they purposefully avoided The Deep despite the tantalizing access. They were afraid of the legal repercussions that could come from paying for the administration’s ear. 

Trump’s crypto schemes have become a liability in Washington for legitimate players in the industry, according to some D.C. crypto insiders. Two lobbyists told The Standard they’re warning clients that anyone who buys $Trump coin or engages with this administration through paid events could potentially be breaking the law. One lobbyist is explicitly advising crypto clients not to lobby the White House at all. 

“These people are going to be subpoenaed in two years — seriously — if the House flips,” one crypto lobbyist said. 

While D.C.-based operatives were aghast at the pay-to-play state of Trump’s crypto regime, several sources just shrugged. “They’re just dealing with bull-nosed, weaponized autism, crypto heads for the first time in their career,” said Jacob Martin, partner of crypto firm 2 Punks Capital. “This is just a bunch of people going, ‘Oh, that’s how that game works. … Others don’t have unlimited money, darn, but we do, so let’s host a dinner.’”

On a warm Friday night in late April, Sacks put on his black suit and tie to mingle with D.C.’s elite at Georgetown’s Four Seasons hotel. It was a bash thrown by the Qatari Embassy and Washingtonian magazine, and Sacks was surrounded by a who’s who of politics: former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro, Trump megadonor Omeed Malik, former Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, and Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, who once attended a Sacks fundraiser. 

Everyone glowed gold beneath a massive illuminated “Qatar” sign — lest they forget who funded the pink cocktails and the roaming, camera-toting robot. For most attendees, the party was a chance to score free cocktails and rubberneck at Persian Gulf opulence; for Sacks, the event helped plant his flag as a foreign policy player. Two weeks later, he would touch down in Doha with Trump himself and help close billions’ worth of AI deals.

In mid-May, the White House announced that “dealmaker in chief” Trump had swayed Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates to help strengthen “America’s economic dominance and global influence.” The agreements included a $600 billion deal with Saudi Arabia that allows the country to import semiconductors in exchange for buying hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips and building data centers in the U.S. The UAE made a similar deal, allowing it to import cutting-edge Nvidia semiconductors. Qatar announced it would buy billions of dollars’ worth of Boeing products, as well as invest $1 billion in quantum research and $8.5 billion in developing energy infrastructure with an American company.  

The arrangement immediately divided people inside and outside the White House, with some convinced that the move would outsource the future of AI to the Middle East instead of keeping it homegrown. Sacks, meanwhile, argued that the deals will benefit domestic AI companies and help the U.S. win the AI war against China through international partnerships. “The only question you need to ask is: does China wish it had made these deals?” Sacks wrote on X. “Yes of course it does. But President Trump got there first and beat them to the punch.” 

Even critics couldn’t deny that the trip was potentially a history-defining chapter in the AI race and that Sacks, posing with a smile beside leaders from the UAE and Qatar, had helped in writing it. The Council of Foreign Relations, a prominent think tank, wrote that the deals may influence the “balance of global power for years to come,” calling them a manifestation of Sacks’ “accelerationist” attitude. 

It’s a remarkable arc for Sacks, whose foreign policy views once made him a political misfit. When he first tried his hand at swaying U.S. actions abroad in 2022, his views on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine angered many in Congress and even his “All-In” cohosts. The war galvanized the contrarian in him, and he spoke passionately against U.S. involvement in the conflict and donated to a restraint-oriented think tank, the Quincy Institute. Investor Jason Calacanis even accused him of being a Putin sympathizer: “I know that you are a fan of these folks, Sacks, apparently, and you think they should be able to run amok,” Calacanis said on “All-In.” 

But as the race to dominate AI has gone global, with countries scrambling to secure chips, build out data centers, and fund new energy infrastructure, Sacks’ role as czar has thrust him into a long-coveted position: legitimate foreign policy power broker.

Domestically, Sacks has had less success completing his AI wish list. For over a month, he argued in favor of a federal framework for AI regulation and a moratorium on state-level regulation. “The alternative is a patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes driven by the AI Doomerism that is becoming a dominant strain on the American and European Left,” he wrote on X in early June.

Trump’s allies in the House accordingly slipped a clause into his Big Beautiful Bill that would block states from passing their own AI laws for 10 years. But then the Senate voted 99-1 to scrap the moratorium, with some senators arguing that current state-level regulation helps prevent deepfake pornography and protects children. On last week’s “All-In” podcast (Sacks wasn’t in attendance), Palihapitiya expressed his displeasure. “I was disappointed that we weren’t able to see the forest for the trees here,” he said. 

Still, Sacks’ tentpole project has yet to come: The team is working on the administration’s AI Action Plan, which promises to lay out a road map to “sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance.” The deadline for the plan is later this month. 

A spokesperson for Craft Ventures said Sacks is splitting his weeks between D.C. and Silicon Valley to stay under the 130-day term limit as a special government employee. Sacks intends to return to Craft Ventures once he concludes his government role. Since the beginning of 2024, at least 10 people have departed the venture capital firm.

Sacks can renew his special government employee status at the beginning of 2026, leading many to ponder his political ambitions. “Fundamentally, he is an outsider in Washington, D.C.,” said Will Rinehart, a technology regulation expert at the American Enterprise Institute. “People don’t really know how to read him. There’s uncertainty about what his involvement looks like long term.”

There are signs that Sacks will spend more time in D.C., even after his position lapses. After all, if he was content being a stop on the West Coast donor circuit, he achieved that status years ago. 

In April, at D.C.’s Willard Hotel, Sacks made a powerful argument that he’s aspiring to something greater: a lasting member of the new, Trump-led political establishment. He threw an anti-White House Correspondents’ dinner bash, where guests such as Oz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio noshed on caviar and lobster, displayed atop an ice sculpture. At the party, Sacks announced the founding of the Executive Branch, a members-only private club in Georgetown near his new penthouse. Membership for founding members, who include Sacks and Palihapitiya, costs $500,000.

“The clubs that exist in Washington today have been around for decades. They’re kind of old and stuffy,” Sacks said on “All-In.” “We wanted to create something new, hipper, and Trump-aligned.”

The club has yet to open, but a peek through its lacquered black doors reveals a marble checkerboard floor and a black granite table perfect for the investor’s famous poker games — provided Sacks sticks around the city he has long been trying to claim a stake in.