SA-born David Sacks appointed Trump’s crypto czar

United States President Donald Trump last month appointed South African-born entrepreneur David Sacks as his artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto czar.

“It’s significant that David Sacks was appointed, but I think Elon Musk was the fuel,” said Steven Sidley, author, crypto technologist, and professor of practice at the Johannesburg Business School at the University of Johannesburg. “This position could have been given to a whole slew of candidates within and without PayPal.”

Sidley said Musk must have said to Trump, “My buddy, David Sacks, from Cape Town, he’s perfect for this. He’s invested in AI companies, he was my partner at PayPal, and he’s made $200 million [R3.7 billion].” Sidley said he believed this would have impressed Trump, and forced his hand.

Born in Cape Town, Sacks was just five when he and his family immigrated to Tennessee in the United States. He attended Memphis University School before earning a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Stanford University in 1994. He obtained a Doctor of Jurisprudence from the University of Chicago Law School in 1998.

He was part of the early stage of start-up Confinity, which later became PayPal, with fellow South African, Musk. He was the company’s first product leader, and then became its chief operating officer.

With all this success at PayPal, Sacks joined Musk to become part of the so-called “PayPal mafia”, a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed additional technology companies based in Silicon Valley.

In 2008, Sacks founded enterprise collaboration company Yammer, which was one of the first software-as-a-service start-ups to apply consumer growth tactics to enterprise software. As founder/chief executive of Yammer, David grew the company to roughly $60 million in sales and 500 employees. In July 2012, Microsoft acquired Yammer for $1.2 billion.

Subsequently, he founded Craft Ventures, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco.

“Sacks is now in the court of the president with one of the most important roles there is,” said Sidley, “This is because he’s in charge of the two most important technologies of the 21st century.”

Sacks is in charge of how the US handles cryptocurrency, “which is the redefinition of trust and ownership, which humankind has never known before” and AI, “which is the first technology that we have ever invented that can learn by itself. And we don’t know what that means, we don’t know what that portends,” Sidley said.

“Sacks has been asked to make sense of it and give input for policy direction,” Sidley said. In a perfect world, the person best qualified for such a thing is an academic, but Americans don’t tend to appoint academics. Sacks has a successful business record in all sorts of technologies.”

After Trump announced the appointment on 5 December 2024, he wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, that Sacks would be taking up “two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness”.

Trump further wrote that Sacks would “safeguard free speech online” and steer the US away from “big tech bias and censorship.”

Sacks’s mandate would also include a legal framework for the US crypto industry so that it had the “clarity it has been asking for”, Trump said.

“Trump essentially created this position [of AI and crypto czar],” Sidley said. “It’s recognition of these two technologies as transformational, both for American economic interests and American intellectual or research and scientific interests. And it’s recognition that somebody needs to be able to talk into the president’s ear about their direction.”

According to Reuters, Sacks has been a huge hero for cryptocurrency, telling CNBC in 2017 that he believed the rise of Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, was revolutionising the internet.

Sacks stood behind Trump as he signed an executive order to deregulate the cryptocurrency industry, reversing a policy made by President Biden.

Sacks was involved in Trump’s campaign, even hosting a $300 000-a-head fundraiser for the Trump campaign in his home in San Francisco in June.