At his Christmas party this month All in David Sachs took to the stage wearing a Russian-style fur hat and was ceremoniously presented with a Vladimir Putin calendar and a box of caviar.
The Silicon Valley investor was relishing his appointment last week Donald Trump's artificial intelligence and the “czar” of cryptocurrenciesWhile mocking critics who say his foreign policy positions are in line with those of the Russian leader.
The performance was classic Sachs, according to a number of people who know him: controversial, theatrical, and offensive to those who take it literally, but irreverent and clever to those who don't.
Born in South Africa in 1972, Sachs made his name as part of the “PayPal Mafia,” the group of founders and early employees of the payments company that includes Elon Musk and investors Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois and Reed Hoffman.
He has since launched a number of companies and is a venture capital firm All in podcast — in which he and three co-hosts discuss technology and politics — and found time to produce the satirical film, Thank you for smoking. He has made personal investments in Uber, Airbnb and the companies of his old colleagues including Palantir, which Thiel founded, and Musk's SpaceX.
Thiel recruited Sachs to the startup that became called PayPal in 1999. A year later, the company merged with Musk's X.com. In 2002, eBay decided to buy it.
“PayPal and its products were faster, smarter and better for consumers” than eBay's money transfer capabilities, said one early investor in the payments group. “It was thanks to David.”
As the two companies sought to agree on price, eBay was planning to launch a competing product to eliminate its rival. Then Sachs stepped in with a piece of the company's theatre.
The night before the inaugural eBay Live user conference, “We threw a huge party… “And we gave them PayPal T-shirts.”
“A parade of people wearing PayPal T-shirts showed up,” Salito added, saying that eBay realized “if they kill us they will kill their best customers…” . . We attribute this trick to forcing their hand. Ebay called David and said, “We should talk.”
A deal worth $1.5 billion was reached. After the sale, in 2006 Sachs founded his first company, a genealogy startup. Although it failed to take off, the internal messaging tool he developed for it emerged in 2008 as Yammer, which was sold to Microsoft four years later for $1.2 billion, making Sachs his fortune.
That same month, he turned 40, and celebrated with a Marie Antoinette-style party for a few hundred guests at a mansion in Los Angeles. Charlie Sheen performed “Roast” and Snoop Dogg performed. “It was a really fun event,” says Solito.
In 2017, Sacks launched his venture capital firm Craft Ventures. The group has invested in several of Musk's companies, including xAI and X, formerly Twitter. When Musk took Twitter private in 2022, he asked Sachs to come in and help with the transition.
The pair are now set to work together again, with Trump tasking Musk with running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency. Specialization in precision musklike Sacks's book, is ambiguous.
Sachs will work to provide a clearer legal framework for cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, both of which he has invested in, along with launching his AI startup, Glue, this year. He has expressed support for open source AI projects, where the underlying code is publicly available, criticized censorship imposed by AI companies and argued that they and other high-tech startups should play a central role in enhancing US competitiveness and national security.
It is not clear how much direct power Sachs will have on these concerns. His new position is an “advisory role.” . . Which does not require David to leave Kraft,” according to the company.
Sachs also has a close relationship with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, according to people familiar with their relationship. They added that Vance, who worked for Thiel earlier in his career, helped establish the relationship between Sachs and Trump.
But Sacks has also repeatedly clashed with his online rivals and even his co-hosts and self-described “best friends” on his podcast over some of his more controversial opinions.
He's also been involved in some online spats, including this year with Paul Graham, the prominent founder of startup incubator Y Combinator, who suggested in a since-deleted post during an exchange on X that Sacks may be the “most important” bad guy in Silicon Valley.” According to Sachs, he and Graham have never met.
The feuds made Sachs a hated enemy to those who disagreed with his policies and sometimes acerbic style.
“He believes the war in Ukraine was precipitated by the West. An acquaintance who had a disreputable reputation for Sachs said: “He is strict and confident in his views.” “He's so arrogant.” . . You lack empathy for others.
Sriram Krishnan, a former partner at venture firm Andreessen Horowitz who worked with Sachs on its shift to Twitter, was more sympathetic. “David forms views from the logic of first principles,” he said. “He doesn't care if it means he disagrees with his tribe of people.”
In public, it can be seen as both sassy and provocative at the same time. A few months after Russia's full invasion of Ukraine, he called for a peaceful solution even if it meant acquiescing to some of Putin's demands, in an article titled: “Neoconservatives and the Woke Left Join Forces and Lead Us into the Third Awakening War.” “.
Sachs's hostile reputation was a concern for Joseph Nelson when he was considering where to take investment in his computer vision startup Roboflow, a choice he described as “a one-way door in the company's history.” But after talking to Sachs, he was won over.
“The person David is on stage or on Twitter is very different from the person on the board. . . . You'd be surprised at how much he listens, how down-to-earth he is,” Nelson said.
Sachs's policies are often compared to those of Thiel, who has become an intellectual beacon for libertarian-leaning tech workers in the Valley and beyond.
The pair met at Stanford University in the 1990s, and Sachs joined the Stanford Review, a conservative newspaper founded by Thiel. In 1995, they co-wrote “The Diversity Myth,” a critique of the university’s efforts to promote multiculturalism at the expense of other priorities — as the authors saw it.
The early PayPal investor said Sachs and Thiel “were very close intellectually.” “The libertarian philosophy they embraced was born in that era.”
Thiel was one of the first and most prominent tech investors to come out in support of Trump in 2016. Sachs joined later but just as effectively, hosting a $300,000 fundraiser for the president-elect in June of this year. A month later he was invited to speak at the Republican National Convention.
Sollitto insists that Sachs is his own man and not Thiel's assistant. “I think they are colleagues and peers,” he said. “David doesn't need a guiding light: he's very intelligent, very perceptive.”
However, one prominent Silicon Valley investor, who has clashed with Sachs over policy, celebrated his elevation to the role of Trump's czar. “We disagreed publicly, but he is really smart, and it is good to have smart people in government,” they said.
The investor added that the mistake critics made was to focus on Sachs's style, rather than its substance. Instead, they should take Sachs seriously, but not literally, an approach that Thiel suggested in 2016 the media should take with Trump.
“Insiders tend to believe that you have to be serious to be taken seriously,” they said. “But you have to be good at telling stories, and you have to have charisma. It is very easy for boring bureaucrats to criticize while creating nothing.
