Trump appoints venture capitalist David Sacks as cryptocurrency and AI czar

Donald Trump has named venture capitalist David Sacks as his nominee for the newly created role of artificial intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrency czar in the White House – “two areas that are critical to the future of American competitiveness,” he wrote in a post from Truth Social.

Sacks is a co-founder of venture capital firm Craft Ventures and was the early COO of Paypal. Together with Peter Thiel and his good friend Elon Musk, he is a member of the so-called “Paypal Mafia”, a group of former workers and executives of the company.

He is also the founder of the social networking site Yammer and the former CEO of the software company Zenefits.

Sacks spoke on the opening night of the Republican National Convention in July. He used part of his speech to disparage his hometown of San Francisco, where he said, “Democratic rule has turned the streets of our fair city into a cesspool of open camps and open drug use.”

Sacks donated $300,000 to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ re-election campaign and became a close adviser. In May 2023, he moderated the glitches-filled conversation between Musk and DeSantis on “Twitter Spaces,” which DeSantis used to launch his Republican presidential campaign.

The event started 25 minutes late and was plagued by repeated crashes throughout. It was a debacle that turned DeSantis’ campaign into a national joke right from the start and was likely a factor in the very poor showing he ultimately had in the Republican primary.

In addition to its massive energy consumption, wasteful water use and resulting environmental pollution, cryptocurrency is increasingly the domain of fraudsters and criminal money laundering companies. So-called “artificial intelligence” software is linked to even greater waste of water and rampant copyright theft.

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