In January 2025 Donald Trump created a new White House post — AI and Crypto Czar — and gave it to David Sacks, the former PayPal chief operating officer who, with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, belongs to the original "PayPal mafia" and later founded the venture firm Craft Ventures. Sacks did not take the job as an ordinary official. He took it as a "Special Government Employee" — a temporary-adviser status capped at 130 working days a year, and one that let him keep his firm. [SOURCE: NPR · SF Standard]
Before he started, Sacks sold more than $200 million in crypto-related holdings, held personally and through Craft Ventures, and divested positions in Amazon, Meta, and Musk's xAI. [SOURCE: CNBC] What he did not do was leave the firm. Public disclosures show Sacks and Craft Ventures retained more than 400 investments in AI-linked companies; one analysis of 708 of his tech holdings found 449 were AI firms positioned to benefit from the very policies he was now writing. [SOURCE: NPR · TechCrunch]
And he wrote a great deal in 130 days. Sacks shaped three landmark technology policies — the executive order creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, the GENIUS Act that became the first federal stablecoin law, and the administration's broader AI agenda — the same stablecoin framework that, in the chapter before this one, set the Trump family's own coin business on a legal footing. [SOURCE: SF Standard · The White House]
The clearest single instance is a company called Vultron. In July 2025 Vultron — which builds AI tools to help businesses win federal government contracts, billing itself as "the agentic operating system for federal growth" — raised $22 million, with Sacks's Craft Ventures among its backers. [SOURCE: PR Newswire · TechCrunch] ANALYTICAL: A firm co-founded by the official setting federal AI policy holds a stake in a company whose entire business is winning federal contracts with AI. Craft says its investment predates Sacks's appointment; what the record shows is that the position and the policy power now sit in the same hands. [SOURCE: TechCrunch]
The instrument that made the arrangement legal was the ethics waiver. The Office of Government Ethics approved waivers in March and July 2025 finding no disqualifying conflict across Craft's portfolio. [SOURCE: The White House] A government-ethics scholar at Washington University in St. Louis called them "sham ethics waivers" that "lack the kind of rigorous objective ethics analysis that would ensure that public policy is made for public benefit." [SOURCE: NPR] Congressional Democrats opened an ethics inquiry in September 2025. [SOURCE: Nextgov]
