Chapter 1: How have Silicon Valley leaders aligned with MAGA?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. In the early days of Internet startups, tech innovators in the Silicon Valley were seen as young idealists who developed their creations in their garages, bedrooms, or at the universities where there were students. But recently, many Silicon Valley leaders have become identified with the right, with President Donald Trump and MAGA. Thank you very much.
He shows how lucrative this alliance has been for the venture capitalists and for Trump. Packer writes that Trump's crypto wealth has grown by at least $7.5 billion since 2024. His article is titled, The Venture Capital Populist, How David Sachs and the New Tech Right Went Full MAGA and Captured Washington. Sachs co-founded the venture capital fund Kraft Ventures.
He served as President Trump's special advisor for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. He's now co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sachs was an early investor in Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, Palantir Technologies, and Airbnb, was PayPal's first head of products, and served as COO. He's also one of the hosts of the tech podcast All In.
George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, focusing on American politics, culture, and U.S.
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Chapter 2: What role does David Sachs play in the tech and political landscape?
foreign policy. He previously was a staff writer at The New Yorker. He won a National Book Award for The Unwinding and Inner History of the New America. His latest book is the novel The Emergency. George Packer, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Good to be back with you, Terry.
I want to start with a clip, and this is a clip of Sachs speaking at the White House in March of 2025. The occasion was a cryptocurrency summit at the White House.
Thank you, Mr. President. We're all here today because of your leadership, your vision, and your generosity, and I really want to thank you for that. We're also here because of your desire to make America great and to introduce a golden age in America, including for digital assets. And we're here because of your love of innovators, or as you might say, high IQ people.
We know you love high IQ people. We have about 30 of them here in the room today. These are the top people in the digital asset industry.
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Chapter 3: How has Trump's wealth increased due to crypto investments?
Thank you.
And one other thing that I think that you love is legal fairness. This is an industry that was subjected to prosecution and persecution for the last four years, horrible lawfare, and nobody knows what that feels like better than you do. So we really appreciate the fact that you understand legal fairness and that you're always willing to fight for the right thing, for legal fairness.
You never back down. You stand to fight, even in the face of an assassin's bullet. It's an inspiration to everyone in this room, I think. So it's an honor.
So that was recorded in March of 2025. You describe Sachs as a venture capital populist. Why did you put those two usually oppositional words together to describe him?
It's a bit of an irony because I don't think the two are compatible. And I think we're finding out almost by the day that they are not compatible. But I put them together because Saks puts them together. Following the January 6, 2021 insurrection, which he called an insurrection and which he declared would finish Trump in national office and put him in an ignominious place in history.
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Chapter 4: What pivotal event solidified the alliance between Silicon Valley and Trump?
He was quite categorical about that. Very quickly, Sachs began to creep back from that position and to make amends with Trump. And with MAGA. He didn't support Trump right away for 2024 for the Republican nomination. He was for Ron DeSantis. But in his public speech. In what he said on his podcast, it was clear that he was trying to align himself with MAGA.
So he began talking about things that you never heard him talking about before such as our terrible trade deals, mass immigration, free speech by which he meant – The big platforms, Facebook, Twitter, banning Trump and other right-wing purveyors of falsehoods.
For Sachs, that was kind of like the big red line that he claimed made the left unacceptable and brought him back into sort of a tolerant position, eventually a really sycophantic position toward Trump. But those are the – And then he began to say, I'm a populist. And he actually quite openly said, I'm on the side of the working man. I'm on the side of the working class against the elites.
Now, who are the elites, if not David Sachs?
Chapter 5: Why did Silicon Valley venture capitalists shift their political support?
Well, the elites are the heads of corporations. Tech companies who are – to Sachs are kind of giving in to the woke younger staff who are putting pressure on them to say these things. He is for the working man against the tech oligarchs as he calls them. So there is this underlying irony that you can't get away from. But Sachs uses the word populist.
So I used it because it basically was his effort to form an alliance between – the tech industry, Silicon Valley, and MAGA.
Well, you use Sachs as a kind of stand-in for the tech billionaires who have become aligned with MAGA. So what changed? Why the sudden shift from people who used to support Democrats, even if they identified as libertarian, when it came to Democrats versus Republicans, the political support often went to the Democrats. So how do you account for the switch to Trump?
I think for Silicon Valley, libertarianism has always been the default political view, but it's not a hard edged. Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek kind of libertarianism. It's softer. It's a liberal libertarianism.
Chapter 6: What implications does the Genius Act have for the crypto industry?
The issues that got support in Silicon Valley, where, by the way, I grew up before it was ever called that, pro-choice, pro-immigrant, pro-gay marriage, for socially liberal causes. I think what happened – was the Biden administration came in and began to push harder on issues like monopoly.
They had a much more robust antitrust posture on enforcement of laws against money laundering in the crypto industry. They were more wary of AI, although supportive of it. Also wanted the federal government to have a role in making sure companies were testing it for safety and sharing the results of those tests with the federal government. So all those things, I think, began to drive security.
tech leaders and investors who were used to a free hand in their own business. Crazy. That's like they couldn't believe that someone was actually telling them how to do their business because that had never happened before. Tech has been totally unregulated, which is why there's a crisis of social media among American teenagers.
And I think that change coincided with a cultural change that I call the new progressivism of Others call it wokeness that caught on in Silicon Valley, especially among younger engineers and staffers at these companies, and that kind of began to push hard against their leadership. And some of the leaders... You know, kind of compromised with it, gave into it, said, we'll do what you want.
Chapter 7: How does the alliance affect the public perception of AI and tech regulation?
We're going to start monitoring speech in our internal deliberations, etc. And all these things, I think, for a certain number of very powerful tech people were just unacceptable intrusions. on their right to rule, to rule their industry. It was just an unacceptable affront to have young people, the left, the federal government, pushing hard against their business.
And that led them all the way over to Trump.
You write that the courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighborhood on a street known as Billionaires Row at the $45 million French limestone mansion of venture capitalist David Sachs. So what was this dinner? It was a fundraising dinner.
Why was this so pivotal in creating the alliance between Silicon Valley, billionaires, venture capitalists, and Trump and MAGA?
Well, as Sachs said on his podcast just a week before the fundraiser, he knew that a lot of people in the tech world, people up at his level, and by then he was one of the leading venture capitalists, were for Trump, but they were afraid to say so because it was still socially a bit unacceptable in their world.
It's not something you announced at a dinner party, you didn't tell your employees, but it was something he knew from internal conversations. And he wanted them to come out of the closet. He wanted to make it socially okay to be for Trump. And he believed that this fundraiser where Trump
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Chapter 8: What are the potential consequences of the tech-MAGA alliance for democracy?
especially a lot of crypto executives, but also investors and people in other parts of the tech industry would have a chance to. meet Trump, to hear him out on tech, and to try to influence him, that they'd be there. And they were there. And it raised something like $12 million. And J.D. Vance was there, too, by the way.
And Sachs had played an important role in bringing Vance into the sort of inner circle of Trump, along with Don Trump Jr. So there was a kind of a coalescing of these two worlds, Trump world, tech world, that Vance represented part of and that Sachs was instrumental in sort of catalyzing.
I just want to interject here that for people who don't know or who have forgotten that Vance used to work for Peter Thiel and Peter Thiel was a founder of PayPal and is one of the billionaire venture capitalists.
And we should talk about Peter Thiel because he has played a very important role both in J.D. Vance's career but also in the life of David Sachs. They were at Stanford together. Thiel is a law student. Sachs is an undergrad. They were on the Stanford Review together, which was a conservative publication that Thiel founded. And they co-wrote –
a book called The Myth of Diversity that was sort of an anti-PC, as the term was back then. This was in the mid-'90s. Anti-PC, anti-multiculturalism diatribe against sort of the takeover of elite higher education by the left. And it was kind of consciously in the tradition of William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale, except it was the left at Stanford.
And it got them both a lot of attention, and I think it formed a bond between them. And so when Teal co-founded an online payments company that became PayPal – co-founded it, by the way, with Elon Musk – He brought his friend David Sachs in as the chief of products and Sachs played a very important role in developing email as the system of payments.
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.
At this fundraising dinner, they raised $12 million for Trump. And then when Trump was in office, I'm quoting you here. Back in office, he pardoned convicted crypto executives, neutered consumer protections, and did investigations by the Security and Exchange Commission into crypto firms with ties to Trump's businesses. and disbanded the Justice Department's crypto enforcement team.
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