Welcome to the conclusion of my series on David Sacks. I thought I should probably outline a thesis for why exactly I’m writing this. Admittedly, I have probably relied too heavily on innuendo and left you, dear reader, a lot to put together yourself for the sake of revealing some kind of pseudo-mystery at the end. This piece is the outline of David Sacks’ journey as a political actor after disappointing results in the 2022 midterms. You will see how exactly right wing tech capitalists came into the limelight for the first time and how they generally failed to get any real popular support. David Sacks is at the center of this, and embodies the actions and failures of many other conservatives in America.
I chose David Sacks for this project because he is probably the most interesting of these would be oligarchs. He’s not as charismatic as Elon Musk, not as Machiavellian as Peter Thiel, certainly not as rich as either, but he’s incredibly persistent in getting his point across. Musk and Thiel were both technically Sacks’ boss at one point or another, and you can see that in Sacks’ more bold approach to dealing with politics. David Sacks tries to be so many things, a libertarian, a right wing populist, an anti-interventionist, a monetary interventionist, the list goes on. In his attempts to make these all work together, he fails. David Sacks is almost impossible to describe, god knows I’ve tried. He is an ever changing ideological mosaic made up of not just the bar graphs of his investment portfolio, but also the very human emotions that come with political commitment. David Sacks isn’t cold and calculating, if he was, then I would just be writing about Peter Thiel minus a digit on his net worth. Instead, David Sacks is a man whose idiosyncratic approach reveals the human emotions undergirding the broader ideology of Silicon Valley conservatives. Among so many cynics and ironically detached peers, David Sacks is a Rosetta Stone. As I’m writing this, I find myself getting sentimental. I started this to write about this middle age South African guy who threatens to self harm his stock portfolio if Jerome Powell doesn’t pay attention to him. Finishing, I feel like I understand more, not agreeing with him on anything, but understanding David Sacks beyond a mid life crisis. I don’t know, maybe it’s just my emotions, maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome, maybe it’s because I found David Sacks’ Quora account and he was asking a lot of questions about Harry Potter.
Where was I? Oh right, David Sacks eating it in the midterms. You probably want to hear about that.
David Sacks was crestfallen at the results of the 2022 midterms. Most of the money he donated was essentially flushed down the drain, either going to a senator who would probably rather not associate with Sacks at this point or to an outright loser that did historically poorly in his state. But there was one diamond in the rough, one new ally that Sacks secured in his political misadventures of 2022. Not only was he friendly to Sacks, he was pretty much the only Republican to outperform his predicted results. In the wake of Trump-backed candidates who failed horribly, there was, at least for a moment, one shining north star for the GOP. It was none other than Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis emerged from 2022 basking in the spotlight of the country’s various pundits. He proved to them that the GOP didn’t have to lose, they could win, which was a very comforting message for those fed up with Trump’s antics. By this point, DeSantis had already been something of a media darling or pariah, depending on who was covering him. But being a pariah was crucial for DeSantis, who had been taking unusual and/or drastic measures as governor ever since the pandemic began. These weren’t necessarily all in response to the pandemic, but that’s when he first gained national notoriety. After 2020, he started doing things like severely restricting the ways public schools can teach the topics of race and sexuality, getting into legal battles with Disney, sending flights of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, and waging a general war against “woke”. It was pretty obvious to anyone that this was being done to raise DeSantis’ national profile ahead of a presidential run. You don’t pick a fight with Mickey Mouse unless you’re drunk, trying to display your culture war credentials to the country, or both. Probably the most ridiculous of these was when DeSantis declared he would fight a supposed gas stove ban that the Biden administration was going to implement to prevent climate change. That wasn’t true, there was proposed regulation on gas stoves to prevent potential childhood asthma caused by them, and only 8% of Floridians even used a gas stove [3]. Even with all this effort to appeal to the national voter base at the expense of most Floridians, DeSantis managed to still win his race by almost 20 points.
The appeal of DeSantis as a candidate is pretty straightforward, he got elected by 19 points and over performed in a year that most Republicans underperformed. Any popular governor is almost guaranteed to be floated as a name when their the primaries come around, and DeSantis was no different. On top of this electoral strength, the Florida governor had a wide range of niche appeals as well, some of which seemed to get the attention of David Sacks. Given what we know of Sacks’ predictions and assertions before the election, he clearly sees a future in “populism”. Despite this, he also dislikes Trump with a passion, believing that he lost the 2022 election with his brand of rhetoric. So naturally, when DeSantis was combining the social issues that right wing populism needs to survive with good electoral results, it was a match made in heaven. There was also the fact that DeSantis is young, which Sacks brings up in his 2022 post mortem.
Ron DeSantis had the makings of a once-in-a-generation politician. He was leading from the front in the culture war and outpacing the rest of his party. But he was also at a crossroads, facing down the prospect of opposing Trump in the primary, the man who helped get him elected by a slim margin in 2018. Instead of facing the former president down directly through the traditional avenues of discourse, DeSantis would need help getting traction for his new vision so it could be appealing to the rest of the country. It would have to get the attention of both moderate Republicans, and disillusioned Trump supporters that felt betrayed. Give the former some more sensible fiscal policies, give the latter rage and vitriol towards their enemies. It wasn’t guaranteed to work, but with this much growth potential a venture capitalist like David Sacks would be a fool to not get in on the ground floor.
DeSantis clearly sought to be a tastemaker like Trump, operating independently of the typical power structures of the GOP. DeSantis was ambitious, politically flexible, and seemingly popular, everything that David Sacks wanted in a candidate. After about eight hours of no commentary on election night from the usually politically verbose Sacks, he posted a picture at 1:37 AM on November 9th. There was no caption, it was simply the cover of the New York Post, claiming that the reelected Florida governor was ‘DeFUTURE’.
Chapter II: Under New Management
David Sacks had a lot on his plate as 2022 came to an end. There wasn't just the election, there was also the now concluded purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk that Sacks was heavily involved in. Even if Sacks didn’t like that assertion for legal reasons, it's probably no accident you get an official Twitter email a few days after your friend buys it [8]. Sacks was a member of Musk’s inner circle, along with Jason Calacanis, Musk’s lawyer Alex Spiro, ex-Twitter employee/venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan, and Neuralink CEO Jared Birchall. Musk had dissolved the board of Twitter when he took over, so these men were his go-to team for reshaping the company.
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