Donald Trump · White House · Microsoft · Hong Kong · Palantir · SpaceX · The Atlantic Technology
When he caught the work too onerous, he turned the research over to Sacks
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Sacks attended the University of Chicago Law School, but law was too much like the detested public sector, and in 1999, when Thiel co-founded an online-payments company in Palo Alto that was soon to be called PayPal, Sacks left a consulting job to lead the company’s product team.
Key facts
- The courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as “Billionaires’ Row,” at the 22,000-square-foot
- Sacks was born in 1972 in South Africa, and moved to the United States at age 5
- He conducted himself in the usual way of an aristocrat of the second Gilded Age: buying lavish properties, contributing to mainstream politicians (Mitt Romney in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016)
- But these 20- and 30-somethings were not inspired in the same way that the founders of earlier Silicon Valley companies were: “They didn’t follow the vision of Steve Jobs, that tech can democratize
Summary
The courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as “Billionaires’ Row,” at the 22,000-square-foot, $45 million French-limestone mansion of a venture capitalist named David Sacks. Along with Chamath Palihapitiya, a fellow venture capitalist and a colleague on the All-In podcast, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. A few years earlier, Sacks had described the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as an “insurrection” and pronounced Trump “disqualified” from ever again holding national office. Any lingering awkwardness between the hosts and their guest of honor was dispelled by the fundraiser’s $12 million haul, much of it from cryptocurrency moguls. Opportunist doesn’t describe Sacks. In 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Sacks demanded that the federal government bail out the uninsured deposits of start-up companies, much of the money from crypto firms.
From the May 2026 issue: What Noah Hawley learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat. In this sense, though Trump is impulsive and narcissistic while Sacks is cold-eyed and logical, they are well matched.