George Packer
speaker
697 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 6 May
George Packer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And he was a big part of what came to be called the PayPal mafia, which was a lot of Stanford grads.
Plus Musk, who had been on the right at Stanford.
Many of them were conservatives, not all of them.
Reid Hoffman, a liberal, was also part of PayPal.
And it was a hugely important company in sort of bringing Silicon Valley from its earlier era to the era that we're still living in, what's called Web 2.0 technology.
the era of Facebook, of these online platforms.
And PayPal survived the dot-com crash of 2000 and made all of the people I've just mentioned rich and set them off on their course as entrepreneurs and investors, including Saks.
I mean, within the first six months, it was a very quick payback to the crypto industry for their support.
He became their biggest champion.
He said he was going to make the U.S.
the crypto capital of the planet.
In other words, whatever you want.
And in turn, the crypto industry...
has increased Trump's wealth by orders of magnitude.
As you said at the start, his paper wealth in crypto has increased by $7.5 billion, according to some sources, since he began to invest in it in 2024.
Right.
I think they wanted – and they said this over and over.
They wanted certainty.
They wanted to know where the lines were drawn on what was allowed.
And they blamed Biden for failing to do that, for keeping everything uncertain so that in their view, it was very easy for crypto firms to cross a line and find themselves on the wrong end of a federal investigation.
Showing 81–100 of 697 · page 5 of 35
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