David Sacks Part II
Silicon Crusaders
After publishing the first part of my profile of David Sacks, I sent it to a friend. He told me that it was good, but that I should try to have these more set up for a constant release schedule. I took that to mean that I should write way more, and I kinda forgot about the consistency part. The following is easily the longest thing I’ve ever written.
I’ll also let you know that I go off on the occasional tangent. This is because it’s impossible to talk about David Sacks without talking about the people surrounding him. Some things about what Sacks may be implying or participating in do not really make sense unless the background is explained and who got Sacks roped into participating in the first place. Anyway, you came for Sacks, and you’re getting Sacks.
Edit as of 09/21/23: After some feedback, 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 my personal neutrality. The following is the outline of David Sacks’ journey from the corporate boardroom, back into politics. You’ll see how the venture capitalist quickly rose using his own money and connections to put himself at the nerve center of many of the most important elections of the past 10 years. At the end, you’ll see how David Sacks brought all of this political capital into the public sphere and began influencing the lives of everyday people, before one climactic night where he puts so much of that influence on the line.
I chose David Sacks because he is probably the most interesting of the would be tech oligarchs. He’s not as Machiavellian as Peter Thiel, certainly not as rich as either, but he’s incredibly persistent in getting his point across. The ways that David Sacks starts to differentiate himself from his old boss while still keeping a close relationship have direct impacts on the political landscape of America. We begin to see the unique ideology of David Sacks take form, even if it isn’t exactly coherent, anyone that pays close attention to the conservative movement in America as a whole will start to recognize bits and pieces of Sacks’ influence. But that won’t be for a little while. Let’s talk business.
When we last left off, David Sacks did a stint as a writer for a conservative think tank, became one of PayPals lead executives, left PayPal behind to pursue his dream in Hollywood, became a producer of an award winning film, and gave it up again to return to Silicon Valley. So much accomplished in the space of only about fifteen years. His rise is impressive, showing David to be something of a renaissance man, excelling beyond trained experts in many different fields. But he also had a past filled with right wing agitation and a lot of writing about sexual assault that may not have been too politically correct. Despite that, he maintained his fast moving lifestyle as an ambitious up and comer in Silicon Valley. For a man like Sacks, many worlds were left to conquer
As I mentioned in part I, David Sacks was going into the mid 2010s with his cards close to his chest. From his sale of Yammer to Microsoft in 2012 to the beginning of 2016, there wasn’t much of note. His LinkedIn says he worked at Yammer until July 2014, but it’s hard to imagine there was much for him to do after acquisition in terms of major decision making. Looking at his Twitter further confirms there wasn’t much of note aside from a few posts about investing in Bitcoin, so good for him in predicting that, or good on him for being part of market manipulation, either way.
News stories from the time mainly cover his time at Yammer and the PayPal Mafia phenomenon. Sacks was the subject of the news, but still not making an outsized splash for a Silicon Valley billionaire. This was fine, nobody had much negative to say about him, and what was being said wasn't going to get anyone seriously upset. It seemed like Sacks was set on mainly being an ‘entrepreneur’. His political past put behind him, he would try to focus on being the Silicon Valley hotshot that he was in the past, emphasis on ‘try’.
In early 2016, David Sacks was brought in to be the new CEO of Zenefits, a company specializing in software for human resources, particularly healthcare and payroll. Sacks was already an angel investor in the company from its first rounds of venture capital raising. Zenefits had been going through legal troubles after it was discovered that there was an internal system that allowed insurance brokers to pad their hours so that they could get certified faster. Sacks was brought in to help the company make a softer landing as it went through these turbulent times. His first move as CEO was laying off 250 employees, or 17% of the total workforce [2]. Despite the seemingly steady hand of a Silicon Valley legend, Zenefits accelerated its nosedive under Sacks’ leadership. Valuation was forced to be cut in half to avoid lawsuits from investors, and had hemorrhaged about 550 of its original 1450 employees by the end of the year. During Sacks' time as CEO, it wasn’t even the legal fees that put Zenefits in such a hole initally. One of the company's cases in Tennessee was settled for a meager $62,500, and the total amount of fees by September of 2016 amounted to $300,000 [3]. This would rise significantly by the end of the year, as the company had accrued an additional $7 million in fines from the state of California, however it was negotiated down to $3.5 million under the condition the company keeps complying with regulation [4].
Despite mere legal slaps on the wrist and efforts to improve the workplace culture, CEO David Sacks couldn’t unshatter the illusion of Zenefits that he helped to create as an early investor in the unproven company. The company lost almost $200 million in revenue during the year he was CEO, and total valuation dropped by $2 billion. After a year of trying to pick up as many pieces as he could, Sacks announced his plans to step down as CEO in December 2016. “It's not a job I sought” he said in his letter of resignation [5]. Although this letter positioned Zenefits as having a bright future, it was also clear that Sacks was burned out. He was satisfied enough with the state he left the company in at the end of 2016, and decided to move on. In February of 2017, Zenefits would lay off almost half of its workforce [6].
In tandem with the reports of David Sacks’ resignation were insider sources claiming that the soon to be ex-CEO would join the Trump transition team in some capacity [5]. This was feasible, as long time friend of Sacks, Peter Thiel, was officially on the transition team. Sacks denied having a position official or otherwise, stating that he would focus on helping Zenefits as it searched for a new CEO. It’s impossible to know how seriously Sacks considered this, or what he really thought of Trump at the time. His donations to the Clinton campaign in mid 2016 amounted to almost $70k and were more than all his previous political donations combined. He would then go on to make donations to California governor Gavin Newsom amounting to almost $60k in late 2017. Despite paying a six figure salary to the Democratic party from 2016-17, I believe that Sacks was probably just covering his bases, given his previous political activities. Hillary Clinton was heavily favored to win in 2016, especially when he donated in the summer, and Gavin Newsom was an even safer bet going into a Dem favored midterm election [7]. These donations seem more like they were attempts to buy favors from each candidate ahead of their expected victories. Sacks had immediate and good reasons to grease the palms of these two candidates.
A new president meant a new chairperson of the SEC, which was becoming a greater and greater threat to Zenefits with each passing day when David Sacks was CEO. In March of 2016, chairwoman Mary Jo White announced the SEC’s intention to take a closer look at so-called ‘unicorns’, which are private start-up firms with $1 billion or more in valuation [9]. Unfortunately for Sacks, most of his fortune came from investing in then unicorns, which included Zenefits. As CEO, Sacks had to do everything to turn the ire of federal and state governments away from Zenefits, not just to save one of his investments, but to potentially save all of them from a precedent that could spell disaster. Unicorns are always a risk to invest in, and yet their failures are part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. It’s a delicate food chain, one where Sacks was at the very top. But Sacks’ couldn’t survive in the valley if too much of his prey was being starved of capital. So when a predator is in trouble, what options do they have?
Hillary Clinton is known for being a business friendly Democrat, running to the right on economic issues against her two main Democratic presidential primary opponents over the years, and has a long list of Wall Street donors backing her up. After the election of Donald Trump, a report came out of Clinton’s potential choices for cabinet positions. These included Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, for Treasury Secretary, and Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz for Labor Secretary [10]. The former is particularly of note here, not just because she was the chief of staff for infamous deregulator Larry Summers during his time in the Clinton administration. Sandberg had a closer connection to David Sacks and his associates than you might realize. In June of 2016, Sheryl Sandberg went on record to defend the board position of our recurring cast member, Peter Thiel, in light of his controversial Gawker lawsuit [11]. Sandberg was doing all of this even after Thiel had already thrown his lot in with Trump the month prior. While Thiel was supporting Trump loudly and publicly, he was maintaining very good relations with Hillary Clinton's undisclosed potential pick for Treasury Secretary. All of this while David Sacks, Thiel’s oldest political ally, was donating to the Clinton campaign after being a Republican political operative on and off since college.
Something was up, but it remains difficult to know exactly what that was, given Clinton’s defeat in the 2016 election. Hillary clearly had a technocratic (in the sense that there were a lot of tech people) vision in mind for her administration, and tech companies donated to her in droves. Although David Sacks would still manage to beat all but Microsoft and Alphabet employees out in terms of total value of donations to Hillary Clinton in the month of July, 2016 [12]. Again, speculation about a hypothetical administration is very difficult, but I think a few inferences can be made.
By donating to a political party he never supported before, and often stood against, David Sacks had ulterior motives for his donations in 2016 beyond simply opposing Trump.
Peter Thiel took a public stance in support of Donald Trump, but maintained his close relationships with Clinton donors (Sacks) and potential cabinet members (Sandberg). This indicates that Peter Thiel was still hedging his bets going into the 2016 election and that Sacks was part of his strategy to maintain a network of political connections should Trump not get elected.
Pending actions by the SEC against Sacks’ company made influencing the choices for new positions in the expected Clinton administration much more important to his personal wealth.
David Sacks’ political ambitions are never more than a stone’s throw away from those of Peter Thiel, but the former is not necessarily subservient to the latter. They are both very close, even when they’re opposed on paper, neither comes into conflict with the other.
All of this was for naught, because David Sacks still picked the wrong horse, and wasn’t able to get the federal government on his side when it mattered most. On October 26th of 2017, Zenefits became the first private Silicon Valley company valued over $1 billion dollars to be fined by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision [13]. Zenefits was eventually acquired by competitor TriNet, for an undisclosed amount, the deal was announced in 2021 and finished on February 15th of 2022 [14].
What about that second donation recipient? A few weeks after the SEC announced its filing against Zenefits, David Sacks gave California gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom almost $60k in direct donations. Newsom would clearly be of interest to Sacks, not just as the governor of the state where most of his business was conducted, but as the state leveraging $7 million in fees against Zenefits. This didn’t work, as Zenefits continued its downward spiral, but it establishes an interesting one-sided relationship between Sacks and Newsom that will evolve later. Until then, Sacks had to rest and prepare for his next move, and the next move of his more powerful associates.
The Covid-19 Pandemic provided incredibly lucrative opportunities to the tech world. Not only were most people at home using technology to either work or replace the social functions missing from real life, but also the Federal Reserve had slashed rates to be effectively 0%. Money was cheap, and it was flowing disproportionately into the pockets of the ultra wealthy [15]. 2020 was also a year of significant social unrest in the United States, more than any time in recent memory. It could have been tech’s opportunity to shape the presidential election, more than even 2016.
But for David Sacks and his ilk, that money wouldn’t flow into candidates pockets. To give them credit, it seems like they made the right call. Peter Thiel himself sat out the 2020 presidential election for the most part, apparently citing a lack of confidence in Trump, while still backing congressional candidates [16]. Sacks didn’t throw his hat in either, with the FEC and OpenSecrets not showing any contributions.
This isn’t to say David Sacks’ was choosing to be oblivious of politics, just not making any definitive investments for 2020. On episode 12 of his podcast/Justice League for divorced men, The All-In, Sacks (referred to affectionately as Sacksypoo by his co-host) discussed his projection that the election would be a Biden victory while Democrats lost seats in the house. Sacksypoo was elated at the eventual outcome of the election, saying that the American people rejected both Trump and the radical left. Co-host and another long time Sacks collaborator, Jason Calacanis, agreed with Sacks, following up by saying the election was a death blow to “The Squad” and that Biden had effectively corralled the Bernie/Warren wing of the party. Sacks agreed, going on to say that Republicans would still have a majority in the senate, pending Florida (presumably he misspoke and meant Georgia). Later in the episode, Sacks specifically laments identity politics as a dead end for the radical left and dismisses hopes of Trump overturning the election in court, although he does say that if Trump wanted, he would probably get the Republican nomination again.
This analysis of politics is where we can see one of the main problems that David Sacks has when it comes to conveying and promoting his ideology. We haven’t really had the pleasure of knowing exactly how Sacks’ brain ticks, but now that we can hear his uninterrupted stream of consciousness, the issue preventing him from being the Machiavelian mastermind he’d like you to think he is becomes clear. It isn’t that he’s acting blatantly in his own self interest, or that he’s morally bankrupt. The problem is that David Sacks doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.
It seems like David Sacks and his ‘Besties’ assumed that the election of Biden would mark a period of depolarization, using election results as evidence. But few seriously thought the 2020 election was the ushering in of a new era of moderate politics, Republicans weren’t playing that game at all and Democrats lost their last presidential election banking hard on a moderate candidate. Democratic congressional candidates didn’t even find extraordinary success running to the center. In fact, of the 13 total seats that were lost by Democrats, 8 were members of the Blue Dog Coalition, and 2 were members of the New Democrats. In the same election, “The Squad”, which Sacks agreed with Calacanis in declaring dead, gained two additional members, in Representatives Bowman and Bush from New York and Missouri, respectively. This is to say nothing of the other side of the aisle, where the far-right house Freedom Caucus grew by a whopping 50% compared to 2018. Now, all of this wouldn’t be an underlying issue for Sacks if he was just another billionaire running his mouth, but that's not what he wants to be. It will become increasingly clear that, as the months go on, Sacks’ level of political ambition will begin to return to, if not surpass, that of his younger self.
Though I’m not usually one for symbolism, I think there’s something really striking about the fact that David Sacks was in Miami for a tech conference and had a meeting mayor Francis Suarez on January 6th, 2021. It shows the next steps he was about to take pretty succinctly, moving away from Trump and towards a more technocratic conservatism backed by friendly red state officials. But what about Miami would be so attractive to people like Sacks? Beyond just the sunny weather and numerous tax benefits, there had to be something else about Miami that attracted them.
For potential investors/inhabitants of the South Florida city, the X factor was mayor Francis Suarez. Don’t take it from me, Suarez himself made attracting Silicon Valley investors to Miami not just a matter of policy, but a personal project. Suarez was already an associate of Peter Thiel, who bought two Miami Beach mansions in September of 2020, but was also becoming friends with some familiar associates of Thiel [18]. Keith Rabois was another high profile defection from the Bay Area to Miami that Suarez was more than happy to welcome the controversial investor and a glance at Suarez's Twitter shows that the two still cooperate on projects [20]. If you remember, Rabois is the person that yelled ‘faggot’ at a professor and was subsequently given a job by Thiel.
Thiel’s decision to move to Miami has another interesting wrinkle. Those two mansions he bought in Miami Beach line up with previous real estate purchase patterns that Thiel made in Los Angeles. Thiel purchased the two Miami Beach mansions during a relationship with informal boyfriend, Jeff Thomas. Thomas reported feeling trapped by Thiel allowing him to live in one of his two Los Angeles mansions. The mansion that Thomas was living in was purchased by Thiel around July of 2021, 7 months after Thiel had formalized his move to Miami. In late 2022, Thomas moved to Miami as a way to get away from Thiel after expressing problems with the billionaire’s support for homophobic candidates, although he informed Thiel he still wanted to remain friends. Jeff Thomas was found dead in Miami on March 8th, 2023, with the apparent cause of death being suicide, according to the Miami Police Department [19].
Miami had all the amenities and services that a modern billionaire could want, so it would stand to reason that David Sacks was there for more than just a conference. He could have even relocated there, clearly he would be in good company. But Sacks wasn’t going to do that, he was needed in California. The time had come for him to take some of the lessons learned from Florida and begin his first crusade.
Part II: Crusader King
I’d like to organize the political issues David Sacks involved himself in as allegories to the crusades of old. Why am I doing this? Because Sacks is fundamentally an outsider to politics, an invader if you will. Now, he’s doing this for what he sees as a righteous cause, these are justified interventions to save the disaffected population. You’ll also see that Sacks’ crusades follow many of the same beats as the previous crusades, having similar outcomes when looked at using the right angle. Also, this was the most entertaining way for me to add some rhythm to the monumental task of retelling so much information.
The First Crusade
David Sacks’ ‘First Crusade’' actually began on January 5th, 2021, when he posted an article on Medium titled “The Killer D.A.”. This article was about the death of San Francisco resident Hanako Abe in a hit and run drunk driving incident. Sacks decided to use the woman’s final Instagram post as the cover for the article and is the first thing you see upon opening it. The driver, Troy McAlister, was a repeat offender out on parole, apparently thanks to the policies of new San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin. Sacks essentially blames the death on Boudin’s policy of avoiding incarceration as the only solution to San Francisco’s crime problems. Sacks slams Boudin in particular for his idea that decarceration is a potential solution that can stop the conditions that create criminals in the first place. One sentence that Sacks was proud enough of to highlight in his article is: “It’s bizarre and alarming to hear a district attorney argue that jail is not a deterrent and actually a threat to public safety. It’s like hearing a fire chief declare he doesn’t believe in water.” [21]
Sacks wasn’t the only one embarking on this crusade, he was joining the ongoing effort of his podcast co-host, Jason Calacanis, who had started to take action a few days earlier. To fully understand the implications of Sacks’ support and the nature of San Francisco crime politics, I think Calacanis’ actions need to be examined. Not only did he spark the outrage that Sacks’ would capitalize upon in the short term, he would also sow some of the issues that would dominate headlines, especially going into the 2022 midterms.
Now, I try to keep my writing objective, and depending on your moral standards, maybe I still am. The problem for writing about this incident is that what Jason Calacanis did under the guise of a concerned citizen is borderline disgusting, especially considering his means. Calacanis' response to the death of these two women was to create a GoFundMe, which seems like a fine idea at first, a lot of people do that when someone dies. But Jason hadn’t made this GoFundMe for the victims, he made it to hire a journalist to report on Chesa Boudin. If you remember from the fact that Jason is the host of a podcast about rich guys, Jason is a centimillionaire [22], and this GoFundMe was for $75k. The fact that a man who has more money than a regular person would know what to do with was using the memory of a slain woman whose body wasn’t cold yet to further his political agenda is something I couldn’t believe at first. On the GoFundMe for Hanako’s family, you can see Jason’s name in the list of donations, credited with giving $500 to the victim’s family. This was the same amount Jason gave to his own GoFundMe, and $500 more than he gave to the other victim of the fatal incident, who never got a promoted fundraiser from any San Francisco billionaires.
Maybe it was because the other victim, the 60 year old Elizabeth Platt, had family members that spoke up differently about how they wanted her to be remembered. A few days after she was killed, Elizabeth’s sister, Alison, talked to NBC Bay Area about what her sister would have thought of the outrage over Chesa Boudin, which had already subsumed reporting on the fatal incident. “(Elizabeth) would have opposed the three strikes law that could have kept the man accused of killing her in prison for life instead of driving a car on New Year's Eve. (...) Liz likely would have opposed recalling the district attorney who some are now blaming” [23]. The interview also indicates that Elizabeth may have been experiencing trouble finding permanent housing, despite being a resident of the city for over 40 years. But none of this mattered to Jason Calacanis, he got what he came for, and all for pocket change.
Jason doesn’t see it this way, however. He envisions himself as a community organizer, a conduit for the people’s righteous fury towards unaccountable public officials. He regularly brags about his success with this GoFundMe, and did so again recently as of the time I’m writing this. I think I could have been a bit more polite in asking him about why he’s so proud of not using his own money, but it got a response from Calacanis. He told me that the reason for this was that he didn’t want “SF Lunatics” to be able to say it was a personal project. I’ll say here what I said in response on Twitter, if what Jason did with this money was supposed to stop the ‘SF Lunatics’, it didn’t work. In fact, it empowered the lunatics, because that's what Jason is, a hysteric avatar of the rot that makes San Francisco one of the most expensive places on earth. A Brooklyn resident that only moved to the Bay Area in 2015. A proud investor in Uber, the harbinger of the Gig Economy, which razed to the ground many of the remaining protections that lower and middle class Americans relied on to feed their families. Calacanis is also a known associate of serial child rapists Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell [24]. It makes sense that Calacanis’ didn’t give any money or support to the other woman supposedly killed due to the negligence of the Boudin, because there is a good chance Elizabeth Platt wouldn’t have been on the street that night if she had a permanent place to stay, something that Jason made almost impossible for many people that were residents of his beloved San Francisco almost as long as he had been alive. What if that’s why Jason’s fundraiser had so many donations of over $1,000 from names that match Bay Area tech moguls? What if it wasn’t just Jason that realized the horrifying truth that their pursuit of greater and greater fortune had them using an entire city of real people like a child’s box of toys? What if it was guilt catching up with the children that just succeeded in getting rid of a toy they didn’t want to play with anymore. Either way, it was time for a new toy, a toy that would repeat back whatever you said to it.
The money got raised either way, and now it came time for Jason Calacanis to hire someone to cover this. Enter Susan Dyer Reynolds, food critic, former newspaper owner, not politically correct, Harley Quinn enthusiast, pitbull advocate. But Reynolds is something above all else, a core value that animates her career and personality more than any other, Susan Dyer Reynolds is willing to work for the right price. She came across Calacanis’ radar January 3rd, 2021, when a friend that lived in San Diego tagged her under the original announcement by Calacanis asking for any journalists interested in covering the story. Reynolds introduced herself as someone currently working on a piece about Boudin, as well as someone without many other distractions since selling her publication, The Marina Times [25].
The Marina Times is a still operating but formerly independent community newspaper in San Francisco, having been purchased by the LA based Street Media in late 2020 [26]. Despite the sale of the Marina Times, it would appear Reynolds is still working there in some significant capacity, not only does she still write for them to this day, she had at least one article in the January 2021 edition, and runs the paper’s Twitter account like its a second personal account (it says in the Times’ bio that all tweets are from @SusanDReynolds). Reynolds has also been involved in a fair amount of controversy involving that account. In a spat with district supervisor Dean Preston over support for defunding the police in June, 2020, Reynolds quote tweeted Preston’s statement from the Marina Times account. Now, it’s already strange for a newspaper’s account to pick quote tweet fights, that's for individual journalists and the op-ed sections to take care of usually. What is even more strange was the rather graphic and threatening nature of the statement Reynolds made.
“Do you have a child @DeanPreston? If so, suppose that’s child was kidnapped, raped, and killed like Polly Klaas. Would you want the police to respond to your call? Would you want your child’s killer in prison? If you abolish prisons you’re OK with that killer doing it again? 🤔” [27].
This kind of conduct was not looked upon kindly by Preston and at least one other fellow supervisor, who proposed in a December budget meeting that the city stop buying $3,800 in advertising from the paper [28]. They argued that not only did the paper make coded threats against Preston’s family, but that the paper repeatedly violated journalistic standards and would report any anonymous tip it received as fact. This meeting happened in early December, and the Marina Times was purchased by Street Media on the 22nd of the same month. It is unknown if the two are related.
Ten months later, Reynolds was back in the spotlight, Calacanis’ check was cashed, and she released her first article about Chesa Boudin on her Substack. By this point, the war against the D.A. had been raging for a while, which Reynolds had been fighting on Twitter the entire time. September 9th, 2021, the article itself dropped, covering the events surrounding the fatal incident. It was mainly about the supposed failure of Boudin to prosecute and lock up the drunk driver; it was essentially the same article that David Sacks had written at the beginning of the year. Speaking of, it may be time to return to the hero of our story.
I like to think of Sacks’ efforts against Boudin as his First Crusade, as it was the first political issue he engaged in using his large public persona. Even if it technically concluded after Sacks’ Second Crusade I’ll detail shortly. Much like the historical First Crusade, it was a success, with Boudin being recalled by a 10 point margin in June of 2022.
The pro recall campaign was extremely well off financially, with over 2/3s of the $7 million it had coming from one PAC, Neighbors For A Better San Francisco, which was funded by a variety of Bay Area moguls [29]. This isn’t to mention the indirect ways that cash was spent on this recall, if you remember our friend, Jason, essentially crowd sourced almost $60,000 to ‘hire an investigative journalist’ who happened to be extremely critical of Boudin. That same journalist received an additional $100,000 in a “grant” from Neighbors For A Better San Francisco [30]. Sacks himself gave $75,000 to the recall campaign, which the new D.A. appointed by mayor London Breed was heavily associated with. When the results came in, and the new D.A. was appointed, David Sacks had finally done it. He conquered Jerusalem, taking it back from what he saw as heathens ruining his beloved city. Big Tech’s divine will was once again ruling its most holy city, and devout followers could travel in peace on its streets once again.
The Second Crusade
Shortly after this First Crusade began, David Sacks embarked on his second. He was not content with just Jerusalem, there was more that he and his fellow kings of Silicon Valley could lay claim to. Beyond the bay, beyond the valley, there was one prize that could cement the gains they were making. They needed the Holy Land, they needed California.
If you remember, David Sacks donated a significant sum, almost $60,000, to the 2018 reelection campaign of California governor Gavin Newsom. This was money that Newsom probably didn’t need going into a midterm election with an unpopular Republican president in a state that heavily favored Democrats that weren’t in the Terminator movies. It was a blowout, and Newsom won by record numbers. It probably helped that he had a war chest of over $58 million, more than triple that of his opponent, John Cox. Newsom also had a wide base of support, from Silicon Valley to teacher unions to external Democratic benefactors like George Soros. Cox, on the other hand, was mainly supported by himself and various real estate developers [31]. Newsom ended up having about $15 million leftover once his campaign concluded.
After Newsom ascended to his position, he went about being a fairly standard Democratic governor, taking after his predecessor, Jerry Brown. He wasn’t a radical by any means, and did things like approving new drilling projects at twice the rate during his first year in office [32]. Even though California Democrats and Silicon Valley had a symbiotic relationship going back decades, Newsom was still elected on that aforementioned large coalition of interests. Maybe it was those interests making the first move, maybe Newsom knew that people like Peter Thiel were making tech more hostile to the Democratic party. Either way, in 2019 Newsom added amendments to strengthen an act passed by Jerry Brown in 2018 that entitled Californians to additional data privacy protections. The act caused some tech firms to bare their teeth at first, but ultimately complied when the act took effect on January 1st, 2020 [34].
The act was modeled after the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, where data selling is based on the explicit consent of a website’s users. For tech investors, this is bad news, but especially for those who rely on the razor’s edge of margins to keep their companies alive. Remember earlier when I talked about how the SEC targeted ‘Unicorn’ start ups? A Unicorn is essentially a technology company that is very high risk and has to use massive amounts of cash from VC firms to secure a place in the market. These were the types of companies that David Sacks built his empire on [35]. Shaving these margins is bad for these startups and their VC funders. While this wouldn’t be a death blow to tech firms, it wasn’t a good sign, and showed that California’s ruling party was no longer incubating Silicon Valley. Luckily, the law went into effect a few months before Covid caused the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to 0%, which infused tech with a fresh supply of cash. But the pandemic wasn’t going to last forever, and those emergency measures would go away. It was time to act, and letting a good crisis go to waste would be a disaster, especially when the future of California was on the line.
Exactly one month after Sacks’ first crusade began, February 5th of 2021 , his second began with a declaration of war that detailed what he would be saying on his next podcast episode. “this is my biggest prediction for 2021: Gavin Newsom, the consummate insider, will be recalled. Voters are sick of government of, by, and for the special interests. Recall will send a message to politicians across America” [36]. Sacks wasn’t interested in appeasement, he wanted to strike deep at what he saw as the beating heart of California’s corruption. I’ll give David the benefit of the doubt, maybe he’s being motivated by a sort of noble guilt. After giving almost $60,000 to Newsom previously, maybe Sacks needed redemption for the monster he created. To remedy this, he donated $130,000 to the recall in some form or another, so net $70,000 had gone to opposing Newsom at this point. If Sacks couldn’t beat Newsom here, he could still make Newsom’s victory a pyrrhic one, and soften the governor up going into his 2022 reelection campaign.
Gubernatorial recalls aren't unprecedented in California. The last successful recall campaign was in 2003, when the politically unburdened and extremely popular Arnold Schwarzenegger beat incumbent Gray Davis. Sacks couldn’t manage to get a Schwarzenegger tier candidate, he couldn’t even get a clean, recognized Hollywood name to use the Arnold strategy, although I don’t know who that would even be (Scott Baio?). Instead, Sacks found the third best option, Caitlyn Jenner.
Now, I don’t want to talk too much about Caitlyn, you definitely know who she is and the incredible personal struggles she went through. However, she is also a political operator, and one that clearly aligned with Sacks’ goals at the time, who gave her some good press in the lead up to her announcing her run for governor. This was done mainly in a Medium article that Sacks wrote, where he defended Caitlyn after she mistakenly called out Gavin Newsom for appointing radical DAs, even though DAs are elected. Sacks’ thesis was basically that when allowed to replace outgoing DAs, Newsom picked supposedly radical candidates. Sacks also laments the fact that Gavin Newsom has gone “From Moderate to Bernie Bro”, after Newsom opposed the classification of rideshare drivers as independent contractors and not employees. I wonder why that was the first example he could think of in terms of Newsom’s tyranny. He ends the article saying that, if the race was between Jenner and Newsom, he would endorse with an enthusiastic “I’M WITH HER” [41].
Choosing to back a candidate like Caitlyn is symbolic of all the mistakes Sacks made in supporting the recall. It would be one thing if Sacks was running a long shot candidate that stuck to a single message that ensured maximum shock value, that strategy has worked before to let libertarian-esque candidates punch above their weight, see Andrew Yang, hell, even Howard Stern. Ideally, Caitlyn would have been an Arnold like candidate, appealing to a broad electorate with her celebrity and moderate stances, while leaving the other candidates in the dust by the time the starter pistol was fired. This may well have been the plan with Caitlyn, but the fact she would do thing like compare herself to Trump [42], who she previously denounced for betraying LGBT Republicans, and wade into culture war issues to take a stance against trans people [43], made her a perplexing, inflexible candidate. This was probably why Sacks stopped mentioning Caitlyn after the beginning of May. There is a fine line between brilliance and utter stupidity; in the early months of his Newsom Crusade, David Sacks had already crossed that line. To what side? It depended on how well he handled the incumbent.
Boudin was gonna be easy, Sacks and his allies knew that when they focused fire on one DA that they could scapegoat for the problems happening in their own backyard. Newsom was a completely different beast. To garner support against Boudin, Sacks and his allies needed only to campaign in a geographically concentrated area with a well educated and wealthy population. Boudin also had to fight without the (D) next to his name in a non-partisan recall. Newsom wouldn’t be hindered by these restrictions, and would prove to be a much more difficult opponent.
The geographic issue is very prominent in a state like California. As opposed to somewhere like New York or Illinois, California doesn’t have a single concentration of urban voters to target. Sure, you can stir up otherwise ‘progressive’ voters in one city by focusing on specific problems, but that doesn’t mean much to someone in San Diego, therefore, the scope of the issue needs to be expanded. The way that this was done seemed to be focusing on Covid-19 lockdowns and Newsom’s hypocrisy in encouraging Californians to stay home while he discretely attended social events in person. I’ll just share Sacks’ list of reasons as he outlined in an August 30th, 2021 post on Twitter (I’m not using that new name).
“Arguments FOR Recall:
- Crime
- Homelessness
- Lockdowns
- Schools
- Fire Management
- Business Environment”.
Most of these reasons are vague at best. “Schools” seems to refer to the prominence of California public schools not being in person. “Schools” were ultimately hard to nail down as a definitive flaw of Newsom’s administration, especially since the governor had announced in April of 2021 that California schools would be planning on returning to in person for Fall of that year [38]. Sacks still loved to talk about public schools, despite an absence of any personal accounts of what their supposed issues were. Now, I understand why Sacks would shy away from sharing details about his kids, but the way he wields the issue of public schools is with a distinct sense of detachment. It’s always about ‘closures’ of schools or the tyranny of teacher unions. In fact, unions seem to be one of the issues that animates Sacks the most.
There are real issues with virtual schooling, many working families rely on in person schools to feed and take care of their kids while they’re on the job. Additionally, it obviously creates problems with students being less engaged with the material. And it’s so tantalizingly close, connecting increased crime with kids being unattended 5 days a week, but Sacks just couldn’t put it together. Sacks is a right winger at heart, incapable of compromising with those he finds to be truly disgusting, and when it came time for the recall election, this would become painfully obvious.
Instead of using his public platform to direct outrage against Newsom in a way that would garner support from desperately needed centrist Democrats, David Sacks rallied against the people teaching the children of California. Peter Thiel was gone from this arena, and David Sacks had finally stepped out of his shadow to lead the crusade against Gavin Newsom. He was generalissimo of the tech coalition opposing Newsom [39]. Much like the actual Second Crusade, Sacks wasn’t joined by as many as his previous adventure, with some former allies even turning and supporting Newsom. Miriam Haas, widow of Levi Strauss’ great grandnephew, donated over $130,000 to the Boudin recall, gave $5,000 to oppose the Newsom recall [40]. Surely Sacks didn’t need them, he was leading from the front, and the victory would be all his once the naysayers were proven wrong. As September 14th approached, Sacks wasn’t letting up on Twitter, he was getting jabs in at Newsom in between promotions of his new app. He had also moved on from any particular candidate as the Pro-Trump vaccine truther, Larry Elder, became the front runner among Republicans to replace Newsom. The Second Crusade ended in one climactic battle, and Sacks’ crusade would be no different. Would the outcome be any different for Sacks?
No. No it wasn’t. Much like the Second Crusade’s Siege of Damascus, Sacks’ Crusade was a failure. It was a failure for the same reason as well, the attackers just gave up after not knowing what to do. At Damascus, the crusaders were beset by a lack of food and water when attacking what was supposed to be a weak point. The crusaders weren’t well liked by those they supposedly fought on behalf of, and were seen as a perpetual embarrassment. Sacks fared much the same. The recall campaign was started based on some of the weaknesses of Gavin Newsom that could be exploited, and not on an alternative to those weaknesses or a solution to the problems they caused.
During the climactic siege, the Crusader armies planned to use the orchards outside Damascus for a constant food supply that would be able to sustain their siege. Instead, the inhabitants of the city ambushed the Crusaders that had wandered into a foreign land, slowly whittling them down before eventually retreating behind the city walls. When the siege grew more desperate, the Crusader army cut down the trees in the orchard to construct siege engines. The Crusaders sacrificed their unique advantage to build the weapons they weren’t able to bring from Europe. In the end, Damascus held, the Crusaders left, hungry, defeated, and bitter.
The Third Crusade
One thing David Sacks does better than any Crusader is get back up. Maybe it’s because he is able to commit to so many different fights at once, maybe it’s because he doesn’t have to put on an entire set of plate armor or worry about being shot by a Turkoman archer, although I’ve heard San Francisco is starting to see more of those as crime rises. What I’m getting at is, David Sacks had long term political projects set up for after both California recalls. With the 2022 midterms coming up, there was a golden opportunity to take advantage of a wavering Democratic party, we’ll see that reflected in Sacks’ spending later. Before we can get to that, we should look at Sacks’ first political project that went beyond just one issue. Launched a couple weeks before the Newsom recall,. It was an app, ironically given the name ‘Callin’.
Prelude: Callin
On September 2nd, 2021, Callin launched on the Apple app store. Funded by Sacks’ own VC firm, Craft Ventures, it was one of many new tech companies created in a pandemic/post-pandemic tornado of low interest rate cash. The idea behind this was essentially to create a platform for independent podcasters to start their shows with as little overhead as possible. It could be done from one’s phone or laptop, broadcasted live, and the episode would be published on the app afterwards. It’s a pretty novel idea, similar to other platforms like Clubhouse or Twitter’s new Spaces, but with a particular focus on podcasting as opposed to the more communal feel of its competitors [45]. You may have noticed that the name is one letter off from Sacks’ own podcast, All-In, which was the inspiration for the platform itself. “It was my own experience with the All-In Podcast that gave me the idea for Callin”, Sacks said in May of 2023. Podcasts were experiencing growth as a medium since the start of the pandemic, and a startup that lets hobbyists break into the industry more easily is a solid idea. But Callin had another purpose, a more personal one. It was Sacks’ way to control political discourse with more than just money or using someone else’s platform. Finally, after so many years, he was the one pulling the strings.
David Sacks had different ways to pull these strings, some more obvious than others. When launching in early September of 2021, Sacks was focused on two things: Callin and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. You might have expected Newsom to reappear as a topic of discussion on the new platform, but Sacks was cutting his losses at this point. Like any good empire builder, David Sacks saw opportunity in Afghanistan. The ongoing American withdrawal was the subject of the first Callin podcast episode, which was posted August 22nd… on YouTube [46].
The show was an hour long conversation between Sacks and journalist Glenn Greenwald about the withdrawal, moving on to the topic of propaganda and the media’s role in it. Throughout the episode, Sacks and Greenwald share talking points in a manner that doesn’t cut too deep, but rather covers a broad range of subjects to catch the audience up. Both Sacks and Greenwald share their skepticism of American involvement in the first place. The whole discussion manages to straddle the line between socially conscious anti-interventionism and libertarian pragmatism. I don’t think there was anything inherently malicious about this first demonstration of what Callin was. No positions are being forced and the two speakers are observers of events outside their control. I will note that there is a part where Greenwald says that the media has turned on Biden because they like the war, after which he notes that the media is in favor of liberal politicians and especially social liberalism. Still, diagnosing anything Glenn Greenwald says as having a definitive agenda is extremely difficult, and I’d rather not do more armchair psychology than I have to.
If you don’t see what Sacks’ strategy is, it’s probably because that’s the point, if you do see what his strategy is, it’s probably because you’re already aware of either Sacks’ or Greenwald’s political convictions. For the uninitiated, it might seem strange, David Sacks was trained to be a political pundit in the waning years of George. H. W. Bush administration. He even interned for Christopher Cox, a Reagan White House official that was recently elected to Congress. Glenn Greenwald was known for being an outspoken critic of both Republicans and Democrats who made those criticisms from the left of even the Democrats. So why is the billionaire, David Sacks, promoting someone known to be critical of people like him?
Instead of approaching politics head on with his libertarian conservative beliefs like he did against Newsom, Sacks began to cultivate a network of contrarian outsiders to attack his opponents in the liberal media. The traditional conservative approach of poaching a mediocre racist stand up comedian to shove into the machinery of talk radio and Fox News could have worked, but Sacks had a different idea. The Callin line up would have a line up of anti establishment and left wing pundits sharing their opinions on the platform. Even if these pundits theoretically disagreed with Sacks on most other things, it never seemed to bother him. Nor should it have, because David Sacks had the ultimate trump card to stop these pundits from getting out of line, he was paying their bills.
The roster Sacks collected was formidable, Jesse Singal, Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, Michael Tracey, Briahna Joy Gray, and Matt Taibbi all found themselves doing shows on Callin. These personalities aren’t known to be long time friends of David Sacks, that's kind of the point. Previously, pretty much everyone David Sacks worked with had a long backstory with him or with one of his associates. All had some degree of fame/infamy before Sacks offered them contracts, and that notoriety was almost always because the pundit had a falling out with ‘The Left’. Greenwald is probably the most famous one to deviate from his leftist peers, but the others still have their own melodramatic backstories. Jesse Singal is the journalist who broke out initially with a cover article for The Atlantic about transgender children, which focused on those children that regretted transitioning, despite representing a small portion of those treated for gender dysphoria. Singal is also infamous for not taking the advice of fellow journalist, Noah Kulwin. My final name of note is Matt Taibbi, the famous investigative journalist who was going further and further down the rabbit hole of Culture War issues, needless to say, Callin was part of that descent [48].
In his profile on Sacks in The New Republic, Jacob Silverman describes this roster as ‘post-left’ that don’t stand for anything as much as they stand against other things, usually policies supported by Democrats [48]. The term ‘post-left’ is hard to define if you don’t know about a post-left figure, sort of like describing a smell without relating it to other smells. If I can attempt to describe what post-left means, it has come to colloquially refer to a group of people that come from leftist spaces and drift to the right, often while still maintaining leftist aesthetics or rationalizations for their beliefs. If you read my previous article on Jackson Hinkle, you’ll get a pretty good idea of how that process of rightward drift often takes place. Post-leftists are often people that supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries, and after the end of the latter, became disillusioned with ‘The Left ™’. Sacks targeting those ex progressives isn’t just a hypothesis. One of the names listed previously as people Sacks signed for Callin, Briahna Joy Gray, was Bernie Sanders’ 2020 press secretary. A year and a half later, she’s signing a contract with a billionaire that used ‘Bernie Bro’ as a confusing pejorative for Gavin Newsom.
I should note that Callin wasn’t entirely political. There were a good number of shows that covered a variety of subjects. Sports, comedy, fitness, finance, all things you’d want out of a podcast platform [50]. I was curious about how people were selected for these shows, so I asked a friend who was paid to do a show on Callin. Full disclosure, It was a show I actually appeared on semi frequently, although I didn’t receive financial compensation. These people weren’t part of the online right, just big on Twitter. Apparently the request sort of came out of nowhere, and neither host had a previous relationship, or even ran in the same circles as Sacks. There was also “like zero oversight in terms of programming” on Callin. As much as I might make it sound like David Sacks has all of these hosts directly on call and their ideas are his orchestration, but that’s not really the case. Sacks was able to procure people that aligned with his project and didn’t need any prodding beyond cash.
Pretty much all the people that Sacks headhunted to talk about politics came from a leftist background. You wouldn’t be finding any Ben Shapiro types that were president of their College Republicans chapter doing their shows on Callin. I think this was Sacks’ approach to Callin being seen as apolitical, or at least non-partisan, especially in the wake of a contentious election that he himself said he wanted to put in the past. As much as these personalities definitely weren’t Democrats, they still weren’t Republicans, and that counted for something.
The traditional approach towards non-partisanship usually involves trying to tack towards market solutions and limited progressive social policy. This template was exemplified by Bill Clinton’s policy of ‘Triangulation’, and generally can be found to varying degrees in the ‘center’ of the Republican and Democratic parties. Sacks had a different approach. Although I generally think that charting political ideologies is an exercise in oversimplification or misrepresentation, the best way to describe the Sacks’ idea of centrism would be a more authoritarian version of Triangulation. I’m basing this off the focus Sacks himself has placed on increased policing and having mixed opinions on different social movements, saying he supports marriage equality to the point of confronting homophobic business owners, while also saying that BLM are “marxists who unabashedly stand with Fidel’s thugs” in Cuba (Fidel Castro had been dead for almost 5 years when he said that) [49]. Sacks also tends to be more anti-interventionist, another departure from the Clintonite tradition, which was on display during his chat with Greenwald. All of this is to say Sacks is still a committed right winger, he just knows how to speak in a way that covers the more extreme or unpalatable beliefs he has. You could call it malicious omission on his part, but he is ultimately trying to appeal to as many people as possible, at least for his new podcast platform.
Even though I despise the political compass, I made a couple for the purposes of demonstrating how Sacks approaches centrism. The first shows ideological realignment of the political center that Sacks is trying to portray, going from a more pragmatic libertarianism to some form of populism, and the second shows how Sacks personal statements actually align with those goals.
The second image is a bit of a joke, but serves to underline that David Sacks remains a dedicated right wing ideologue. He was one in college, he attacked Chesa Boudin and Gavin Newsom from the right, and continued to boost right wingers on his own Twitter account. Sacks supposedly libertarian economic views also aren’t in conflict with increasingly authoritarian rhetoric. Corporations are allowed to operate in a laissez-faire manner under right wing authoritarian regimes, it’s just the ones which secure political capital that are able to continue along as usual. Sacks political vision isn’t that of a banana republic, maybe more of an Apple™ Republic.
Speaking of 20th century ideologies, David Sacks picked up a few people in his search for new talent that didn’t fit in the ‘post left’ category, and were much more solidly right wing. One of the people Sacks took a particular shine to was Richard Hanania. Sacks endorsed Hanania’s book wholeheartedly, saying that it “offers conservatives a playbook for fighting woke ideology in the fields of law and politics, where they can actually defeat it”.
If you weren’t aware, Hanania was recently exposed for having a white supremacist blog that he ran in the early 2010s, before cleaning his image up and moving into more moderate conservative spaces. The kinds of things that Hanania was writing weren’t fringe in a dog whistle kind of way, he was very explicit, trading in the occasional triple parentheses for literally just rehashing speeches from the author of The Turner Diaries to post on his website. In the article written by Christopher Mathias exposing Hanania, Sacks is one of the five tech figures listed as being instrumental to Hanania’s rise [51]. Hanania made several appearances on Callin as well, he was the unofficial co-host of Michael Tracey’s show, who Sacks was underwriting. The article also notes that Hanania’s nonprofit, The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, has received almost $1,000,000 in untraceable dark money. Connect those previous three sentences as you will.
The point that Mathias made several times on Twitter, and in the article, was that Hanania’s new persona wasn’t ideologically inconsistent with his old one. Around when Sacks endorsed his book, Hanania was publishing screeds against “the pathologies of the inner city”, getting really interested in IQ scores, and writing glowing profiles of Holocaust deniers. All of this was out in the open when David Sacks said that Hanania: “offers conservatives a playbook for fighting woke ideology in the fields of law and politics, where they can actually defeat it”. In fact, two months before the story on his past dropped, Hanania spoke highly of Sacks as part of the emerging “Tech Right” (Not as good as Siliconservatives imo). Listed along other CEOs that have fought ‘wokeness’ in the business setting, or became thought leaders, Sacks' contribution is being a “major supporter of DeSantis” alongside Elon Musk.
If you couldn’t tell from “alongside Elon Musk”, Sacks was already back in the orbit of a PayPal executive, but this time, it was the man Peter Thiel once used Sacks to constrain [53]. I didn’t mean to jump too far ahead, but this tangent about Callin was meant to illustrate the methods David Sacks tried out when securing political clout. A brief post-mortem, Callin is no more, it was acquired by the social media company, Rumble, in May of 2023. Sacks was given a board position on Rumble. By this point, most of the big names had shuffled off, many to Rumble itself. Callin now is a ghost town, there is a notification you see upon entering announcing that it’s now part of Rumble, but it seems there hasn’t been any significant integration yet. When I went on, these were the only two rooms still active on Callin, an endorsement of horse dewormer, and someone talking about his favorite bugs (I listened, it was lovely).
Le Deluge: 2022 Midterms
Alright, no more of this journalism gossip, let’s get down to what this was all about in the first place: losing an incredible amount of money. In my original ‘Siliconservatives’ article, I related the rise in Federal Reserve rates to the increase in right wing activity in Silicon Valley. Obviously, this wasn’t only because of the interest rates, I would have been wasting everyone’s time up until now if it was, but it definitely didn’t calm people like Sacks down. Throughout 2022, this political tension continued to rise until reaching a boiling point in November, with the election.
To very briefly summarize by Siliconservative thesis: tech benefited from/relied on low interest rates during Covid, when those rates inevitably went back up and the squeeze was put on these tech moguls, they got very upset at the people raising rates (Biden, Jerome Powell, Jews, wokeness). Tech companies, especially the startups that Sacks and Thiel made their fortunes off with venture capital, fare much better when they can operate on the razor thin margins allowed by low interest rates. So with the 2022 midterms coming up, people like Peter Thiel upped their spending on candidates, while others like Elon Musk stepped into the political arena more explicitly. If they couldn’t actually get the Fed rate back down, the aforementioned margins of venture capital meant that any little bit could still save major investments. This was to take advantage of what was supposed to be a blowout Republican victory in 2022 and buy some friendly lawmakers in Washington.
David Sacks was already getting antsy about the economy before the interest rate hikes began. In December of 2021, he was already tweeting about the “Great Reset” conspiracy, where the World Economic Forum will supposedly impose a new world order through Covid lockdowns. Given that Sacks is supposedly a billionaire, you would think he would have some more details to share about this reset, he could just text his old friend Peter Thiel about what’s going on at the forum. Once the rate hikes came, he got a little more specific. He asked his followers on February 3rd, “Has anyone else noticed that we’re entering a recession?”. The “we’re” there is crucial to understanding the new mindset Sacks was in. Because the “we” Sacks is referring to is him and his buddies in Silicon Valley, those were the people that were most at risk of losing part of their fortunes in a bear market. We did not enter a recession, but “we” experienced a hard year for the tech stocks in our portfolios. We have to worry about the price of groceries and rent, “we” need a high inflation market, because “we” are the ones that spent two years collecting disproportionate spoils from low interest rates.
As Sacks’ annoyance seemed to turn to pseudo populist fury, he was grasping for a coherent narrative. Inflation was the issue on everyone’s mind, and if you took an economics class in high school, you know that the Federal Reserve raises the Federal Funds Rate to counter inflation, which they were finally getting around to in early 2022. How did Sacks make sense of the inherent dissonance between his need for cheap cash and the economy’s need for some kind of measure to stop inflation that wouldn't need to pass through congress? It seems like Sacks’ course of action was to blame inflation on supply chain issues, lamenting that Biden wasn’t fixing said issues, and reminding everyone that we would all be better off with low rates. A video reposted by Sacks from his podcast shows him laying this all out, adding that if rates increase, government debt will spiral out of control [54]. This video also shows him dismissing the idea’s of “liberal economists” on deficit spending, one of whom is shown to be Ayn Rand for some reason.
Of course, David Sacks never floats the idea of higher taxes or price controls, two other easy ways to reduce inflation. Corporations obviously weren’t at fault for this either, they would never price gouge. Sacks’ prescription is to do nothing while being upset that nothing is being done. ‘Fixing supply chains’ is an incredibly vague demand to fix an issue that relies very heavily on the cooperation of other countries. It’s hard to think of measures beyond what Biden was already doing that could solve the problem faster without being labeled as ‘Marxist’ by Sacks. For almost two years, Silicon Valley was making a killing off the conditions created by Covid-19. But that was coming to an end, and fast. How the hell do you get people on the side of you and your tech billionaire buddies that weren’t already?
SMO (Sacks’ Monetary Obfuscation)
February 24th, 2022, The Russian Federation declares the beginning of a “Special Military Operation” as its troops crossed the border of Ukraine. The largest conflict on the European continent since World War II had begun. Missiles fired from battle cruisers cracked the earth open, fighter jets screamed across the sky, and gun fire tore apart the tense silence as the sun rose. Internationally, Russia was slammed by the West with even heavier sanctions, the effects of which were felt almost immediately. The ruble plunged in value as oil spiked in price. In this time of rapid fire news cycles and conflicting reports, there was a need for people that could explain just what was going on. Look no further, concerned citizen, for the hero you need is here! David Sacks bravely stumbled out of his car onto the public forum, proclaiming on February 25th that there could still be an off ramp to peace if both sides negotiated with each other and cooler heads prevailed [55]. As much as I hate to give him credit, Sacks was right here, if both sides wanted to stop fighting, the war probably would end.
In all seriousness, this war did provide a rhetorical out for Sacks. He had several anti-NATO/anti-interventionist voices on Callin, who immediately got to pointing out how American involvement in eastern europe provoked this invasion. This is definitely true to a certain extent, NATO expansion didn’t make Russia feel any more secure geopolitically and emboldened militarists in the Kremlin. Sacks mirrored this point, even explicitly endorsing John Mearsheimer’s writings on the subject [56]. About one month after the war began, Sacks announced a new slate of hosts for Callin, including the aforementioned Michael Tracey and Grayzone columnist, Aaron Maté. As mentioned previously, Sacks was not following the traditional conservative line when it came to foreign policy, in fact, it seemed like he was agreeing with a lot of leftists on it. Was David Sacks turning a new page, enlightened by the moral failings of American foreign policy?
Well, don’t expect a venture capitalist to do much for free. Let’s rewind a couple weeks. Looking back, one would see that Ukraine caught the attention of David Sacks by virtue of Hunter Biden’s dealings in the country. As much as Hunter may have had shady dealings in Ukraine, nothing indicates that they prompted the invasion or caused the US to support Ukraine in said invasion. But Hunter’s business in Ukraine was, and still is, a huge political liability for Joe Biden’s administration. The same administration that was giving the Federal Reserve the Ok to hike rates [57]. Joe Biden’s approval ratings took a significant hit after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was seen as a massive foreign policy failure, one he still hasn’t recovered from as of the time I’m writing this [58].
Ukraine was not expected to survive long. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said Kyiv could fall in under 72 hours [59]. Most were expecting a repeat of 2014, where Russia rolled into Ukraine to the sound of mixed applause and heavy sighs from Western governments. America had invested billions into Ukraine’s army, but that was to make the prospect of invasion less appealing, not fight it outright. As tensions continued to escalate, the question became not if, but when. Now, imagine how devastating it would be for a president to oversee two separate military failures in a span of 6 months? It would be better than any family scandal, and it wouldn’t matter how you spun it. Did Joe Biden waste billions on a country that immediately folded? Did Joe Biden betray the people of Ukraine by not giving enough aid? Did Joe Biden endanger the rest of Europe? Was Joe Biden an imperialist? Was Joe Biden not imperialist enough? The answer to all of these would be a resounding yes.
With a midterm election coming up later that year, any opponent of Biden/Democrats would be stupid to not try and capitalize on this disaster. Sacks was no exception, choosing to needle the administration for not descelating in between praising Canada's protesting truckers and rallies against the San Francisco school board. In the days leading up to the inevitable conflict, Sacks chose to remind his followers why they should care. “As Biden embroils us to an unprecedented degree in Ukrainian politics, it’s worth remembering that Big Tech censored true stories about his family’s business dealings in Ukraine weeks before the election. As bad as censorship looks at the time, it looks even worse in hindsight” [60].
Back to the present, February 24th, 2022, planes, ships, guns, etc etc. But instead of these instruments falling silent after a few days, the symphony continued. As David Sacks was chiding various people on Twitter about the risk of World War III starting, Russia was experiencing problems. The optimist would say it was the resilience of the Ukrainian people defending their home that valiantly held Russia off from the capital, the pragmatist would say it was Russia’s mismanagement of logistics. Either way, the war wasn’t over, and Ukraine was a rare underdog story. But Sacks wasn’t done, he was committed to talking about this war, even if it was going to require some new angles.
Over the next 18 months (and counting), Ukraine would become Sacks’ ‘thing’, for lack of a better word. He would continue to chime in on the subject when it came up on his podcast or in the news. In fact, if you’ve heard of David Sacks before reading this, there’s a good chance it’s because of something he said about Ukraine. The position he took towards US support of Ukraine began as what I would call pessimistic, pessimistic about the prospect of nuclear war, more precisely. The basics of his position on Ukraine, at least initially, were as follows:
While Ukraine shows exceptional bravery, it is not the place of the United States’ government to support them if it risks angering Russia and causing nuclear war. [61]
This tragedy could have been completely avoided with a more restrained NATO expansion that wasn’t aggressive towards Russia’s geopolitical position. [62]
The war is benefitting China most of all. By weakening its arsenal and wasting money on Ukraine, the United States is more vulnerable to China. [63]
In an interview with the author and YouTuber, Robert Wright, Sacks lays out his positions a bit more clearly. The first part of the interview is Sacks talking about how the war could have been prevented. It’s remarkably devoid of substance or specifics, with Sacks citing that the US should have de-escalated this conflict, but doesn’t cite any methods that were willfully ignored or reasonably possible for the current administration besides ‘cognitive empathy’. As the interview progresses, Sacks and Wright talk more about the culture of Silicon Valley’s culture and how it reacted to Sacks’ views. He hasn’t found too many in the Valley, apparently due to lack of an anti-war tradition , but has been better received in ‘The Global South’ (India, Brazil, not Europe or the US).
There was one part of this interview that interested me more than anything described above. During this whole interview, Sacks brought up ‘elites’ multiple times, blaming them for the problems in foreign policy. It was towards the end, where Sacks was describing his ideology in regards to foreign policy, that the mask slipped. According to Sacks: “We need a new establishment, basically, almost like a counter elite, that’s my view on foreign policy” [64]. It should be obvious to anyone with an understanding of material motivations that David Sacks was never a down to earth populist. Even if he describes himself as one, it doesn’t look great next to ‘venture capitalist’ on a list of descriptors [65]. What this quote should inform more than anything else is why David Sacks is playing this foreign policy game. To him, there is not a problem with the structure of US foreign policy, his issue is what the settings of that machine are and how it can hold back his own ambitions. The “foreign policy elite” are just the regular elite, they have to be, America is a global empire. Sacks' goals don’t ever seem to involve the dismantling of this machine, even if he hires a lot of people that like to talk about it.
I don’t think David Sacks is some kind of Russian state asset. I don’t even think he’s necessarily Pro-Russia. I think David Sacks is a businessman. Ukraine and Russia don’t seem like they would matter to a man that makes his money in US startups, but they do once domestic politics can be roped in. For god’s sake, Sacks was the editor of a newspaper a few years after it was founded using the money of Irving Kristol, one of the most important figures in the creation of neoconservatism. David Sacks didn’t give a shit about foreign policy until it was time to promote his new podcasting app and rag on the guy indirectly shrinking his margins! He never cared that much about what America was doing overseas when he was editor in chief at the Stanford Review, he was too busy writing op-eds about why statutory rapists deserve a second chance [67].
Now, is there some emotional attachment between David Sacks and this conflict? Of course, it’s clearly something he’s invested in, probably beyond the point of what's necessary to get his point across. He talks about Ukraine on Twitter quite frequently, and has become notorious for it in some circles. Look at any tweet Sacks makes on the subject and there are at least an above average number of replies, usually calling him a Russian misinformation spreader, or something to that effect. But again, the truth is much less dramatic than that. David Sacks’ interest in Ukraine is a blend of personal interest, political craftiness, and intellectual autofellatio. But those all have stakes, be it time wasted, embarrassment, or a sore neck. Politics and the economy were converging rapidly as the 2022 midterms approached, and Sacks couldn’t just talk about Ukraine all the time, especially as the war set into a stalemate. Something else was needed, something more… personal.
God Save The King
You were probably waiting for his return from the first part. Arguably, a man with even more political influence than Peter Thiel at this point. Do I even need to tell you who David Sacks decided to link back up with in mid 2022? Elon Musk has been on the minds of internet users for years. It’s hard to think of any billionaires besides LeBron, Jordan, and Trump that have gotten as much direct attention as Musk. This personal brand goes back to when Musk became CEO of PayPal. Not only has his personal style of marketing himself and his products not shifted, the actual brand he brought with him to PayPal hasn’t technically changed since then either.
A quick history lesson: I’m sure you probably know the basics of Musk’s journey. From PayPal to Tesla to divorce to SpaceX to divorce to Twitter, it’s pretty easy to follow and is written about plenty. What doesn’t get as much attention is what’s important to understanding how David Sacks factors into Musk’s rise: the early days of PayPal. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk actually don’t like each other that much. Not in a sibling rivalry way, their mutual distaste would be better characterized as the relationship between two cousins that are equally embarrassed of the other at a family reunion. The differences between the two are rather dramatic. Thiel always dreamed of going to Stanford and even set up his own institution on campus when he got there, Musk went for a couple weeks. Thiel played chess, Musk played video games. Thiel was deeply serious, maintaining the 20th century ideal of a high powered business man in both his appearance and how he conducted himself, Musk was high energy, bouncing around from one job to the next. But fate bound them in one crucial way: both Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were trying to get into digital payment processing.
Long story short, Musk started an online bank called “X” in 1999 (yes, he’s really wanted to use it for this long). This eventually merged with Thiel’s PayPal in a 50/50 split in order to consolidate the company into more than the sum of its parts. Problem was, Musk owned more of X than Thiel did of PayPal, and part of the deal was that Musk got to be CEO. One of his goals as CEO was to keep the X brand alive, renaming the company to “PayPal By X.com”. Even back then, focus groups still said X sounded less like it was for banking and more like it was for pornography [67]. X.com wasn’t even the most memorable thing from the 90s with that spelling, there was already the 1994 video game “X-Com”. Elon Musk was trying to get the world to associate “X” with online banking in the same decade as The X-Files, X-Com, The X Games, DMX, and of course pornography in general. Once the turn of the millennium came, there was also the addition of Xbox and Mac OS X. I'm no marketing professional, but Jesus Christ. Maybe that’s why Musk’s age cohort is called Generation X.
Ironically, it was Musk’s insistence on doing things his way that first brought him into closer contact with David Sacks. See, while Musk had more shares in PayPal than Thiel, Thiel had cultivated a loyal circle of lieutenants that would keep Musk in check. Max Chafkin describes it this way in his biography of Thiel: “But Thiel had laid a sort of trap for Musk. Though Musk got to be CEO, most of Thiel's deputies--including Hoffman, Levchin, and Sacks filled the executive ranks. X's former executives were marginalized, and Musk was surrounded by a team that was more loyal to Thiel than to him” [68]. So, while David Sacks worked for Musk at PayPal, he was also working against him. Now, fast forward 23 years, Musk and Sacks find themselves doing business again.
David Sacks was an early supporter of Elon Musk’s effort to acquire Twitter, hopping on the bandwagon almost immediately. Hell, he was a bigger supporter of it than Musk himself, although that can also be said of the SEC and Delaware court system that forced Musk to actually follow through on the purchase. Twitter is obviously one of the most recognizable brands in the world, and a decent contender in terms of social media platforms. Obviously it wasn’t going to surpass Facebook or TikTok, but it had a self-sustaining user base and the prestige of being the platform of more intellectual discussion (I said more intellectual, not that it wasn’t still mostly stupid). Anyway, you understand why Elon would have some interest in the platform. Even if it wasn’t profitable, it would be an element of his core brand that he could use to excite investors about his other projects indirectly. He said it was about ‘free speech’ and not about making money [69]. It’s ultimately hard to say how Musk thought this would go down, but my best guess is that it was supposed to be seen as patronage towards the general public. Ideally, it would be a more hip version of Jeff Bezos purchasing The Washington Post, supplying a platform that was essentially a newspaper in its own right with some much needed cash in order to revamp itself, earning good will, and maybe even becoming profitable down the line.
David Sacks also saw an opportunity with this deal, but he was more blunt about his reasoning. Instead of just supporting free speech, Sacks went decisively on the attack, taking aim directly at critics of the acquisition who said it was an example of billionaire overreach [70]. He further shared his loathing for the “elites” who oppose Musk purchasing Twitter, citing a Business Insider piece and a tweet from journalist Jeff Jarvis. According to Sacks, ‘free speech’ is not just under threat, it’s actively being attacked with censorship, citing a tweet from writer Max Boot. Later in the podcast episode, Sacks declares the current political landscape is “populist versus elitist, that's the big battle that's happening. Elon is one of the rare billionaires who's sort of an anti-elitist”. Finally, Sacks’ last point on the episode is that there is a very real possibility that the political elites stop Elon from finishing this purchase by working with the Twitter board to tank the stock.
Again, a reminder that David Sacks is saying all of this to three other people he knows from the shared experience of being extremely rich, and is defending literally the world’s richest man from “elites” who are trying to sabotage him. The people he’s defending Elon from seem to mostly be centrist pundits being hyperbolic about how Twitter should do content moderation. I’m no fan of Max Boot, but he can’t do much to harm Elon or seriously impede his goals. Unless Elon is getting actively investigated for WMDs and sitting on large oil reserves, then I don’t think Max Boot is one of the ‘elites’ to worry about. Boot being singled out here is another example of Sacks’ rhetorical balancing act. Max Boot was one of the premier neoconservatives during the Bush era, a very public advocate for wars that the majority of Americans now view distastefully, even if they didn’t necessarily at the time.
Sit Down And Shut Up
David Sacks’ fight for Twitter would not begin and end with sharing his opinions on a podcast. In fact, Elon Musk himself wanted Sacks on the board of the new Twitter, seeing him as a strong ally in a business environment that was becoming less amicable to Musk’s charisma. In fact, Sacks was so enthusiastic to help Musk, and was more than happy to invest in the purchase himself. But this enthusiasm would become an issue, not just for Sacks, but for Twitter as a whole.
See, the deal to purchase Twitter was very drawn out and painful, more so than most acquisitions, and in very different ways. Most of the time, large corporate acquisitions go through, with some rare government intervention using antitrust laws [72]. Musk didn’t have that problem, in fact, he would have much preferred to have that problem. That’s because Musk tried to back out of the deal multiple times, supposedly out of concerns about the prevalence of bots [73]. This led to a legal battle between Twitter and Musk, during which Musk and many of his associates were issued subpoenas, one of those associates was Sacks. In the legal documents, Sacks and Musk were revealed to be discussing investment in Twitter as early as April of 2022. Normally, this would be standard procedure for the two investors, except for the fact that Sacks never disclosed this fact before he started talking about the deal extensively on Twitter and his podcast. Musk was discussing much of the same with Sacks’ co host, Jason Calacanis, in texts obtained from the same court document [74].
August, 2022. Shortly after those texts were released, David Sacks was issued subpoenas in California and Delaware. The subpoena was far reaching, but this should have been expected given the nature of the investigation and Sacks’ conduct. Sacks, apparently not learning from the subpoena he just received for running his mouth on legal issues on his podcast, addressed the issue on his podcast. “I have no involvement in this thing, but they sent me the broadest ever subpoena. It’s like, 30 pages of requests. And now I gotta hire a lawyer to go quash this thing. Because they basically want any of my communications with any of my friends over the last six months. It’s insane”.
With that quote, Sacks created an even bigger legal issue for himself. Because now he had to follow through on quashing the subpoena, which ran up hours and hours of lawyer fees as Twitter wrestled with Sacks over the subpoena he was now forced to try and not comply with. Sacks wasn’t making it any easier for himself by tweeting the cover of a 1974 edition of MAD Magazine depicting a middle finger, which he followed up with a clip from The Wolf of Wall Street where Jonah Hill’s character urinated on a subpoena. All of this for 1400 total likes across both posts and a lot of replies calling him a dumbass. Twitter exploited Sacks’ behavior to quash the subpoena definitively, although his attempt was already based on the tenuous idea that too much was being asked of him with those 30 pages. However, the length of the document was due to the fact that nearly identical subpoenas were issued in Delaware and California, and compliance with one would mean compliance with the other [75]. Sacks also admitted in his motion to quash that he sent emails to some investment bankers about the Twitter deal, but didn’t get involved himself [76]. The saga came to a rather embarrassing end for Sacks with a statement from Delaware court chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick at the end of her denial of the motion to quash. “In an apparent effort to keep Sacks’s promise to his podcast listeners, the movants created the very burden of which they now complain”. Basically, a judge had just determined that David Sacks had legally fucked himself over because he wanted to impress his podcast fans.
The King’s Crusade
No time for pessimism, no time for embarrassment, there’s a lot of business that needs to be done, and there’s only a few weeks left to do it. The midterm elections were coming up soon, and the plans would finally be set in motion. Though we haven’t heard from him in a while, Peter Thiel had been working hard to promote his candidates, donating tens of millions of dollars to Republican candidates, but focusing on two in particular, J.D. Vance of Ohio, and Blake Masters of Arizona. Meanwhile, Musk was consolidating his grip on Twitter and used the spotlight to promote his conservative views. David Sacks was the epitome of this PayPal reunion, taking the political convictions of Thiel and combining them with the company Musk was asking to help him manage.
Midterm elections are a big deal, they mark the first time that voters are able to express their opinions on the current presidential administration at the ballot box. The track record for the last two presidents was not good, both Obama and Trump faced significant losses two years into their terms as president, and the historical trend has never been much better. Republican strategists were trying to answer the question not of ‘if’ they would win, but what they would do exactly when they won. The last time Republicans won big in the midterms, the Tea Party emerged as a highly energized wing of the party which did everything it could to bog down the agenda of president Obama, and mostly succeeded. Surely, this would be a cakewalk. Joe Biden lacks the generational charisma that the 44th president possessed. While the color of his skin might not stoke racial paranoia, many of Biden’s opponents would still try to make culture war the issue of this election cycle. If it wasn’t about the president being born in Kenya, it would be about a grab bag of issues: transgender people, Hunter Biden, ‘wokeness’, January 6th, you name it. While this might not have been as electorally reliable as campaigning on economic issues. While more moderate Republicans tried to center the election around kitchen table issues, the power was clearly with the empowered right wing of the party [78]. Even if the rhetoric was divisive, winning on it would allow a certain kind of Republican to flourish and assert the party more in the national consciousness going into 2024.
David Sacks was all aboard the culture war train, following the path set by Peter Thiel. See, the two candidates Thiel spent most of his money on were people he had worked with in a business capacity. J. D. Vance, who was running for Ohio’s open senate seat, had previously worked for Thiel directly and also received money from the billionaire for a venture capital firm started in 2019. The other candidate was Blake Masters, a Stanford graduate that had been incubated by Thiel for over a decade, only officially stopping his work for Thiel in March of 2022 so that he could focus on his campaign. Both Masters and Vance won their primaries, but in both cases it was millions of dollars directly from Thiel and a delayed endorsement from Donald Trump that carried them over the finish line [80, 81]. Thiel’s investments proved they were ready for the mass market.
This is where David Sacks came in. Following Thiel, Sacks donated $1,000,000 to the Vance campaign, a larger sum than all his previous political donations put together. Sacks used to only talk politics in five digits, but now he was fluent in seven. This magnitude of increased spending shows a lot for someone who dedicated his life to making as much money as possible. Looking just at SEC donations, David Sacks spent over $1.3 million in total on the 2022 midterms. It was a fraction of what Thiel was spending, and if you consider what Musk spent on Twitter to be a political investment, a fraction of a fraction. But Sacks was still spending 10x more on this election cycle than he had on any previous one. It seemed like he was going, for lack of a better term, all in.
To get a better idea of what Sacks was actually thinking going into November of 2022, I decided to listen to some more of his podcast episodes from around that time. I’ll try to lay out the messages Sacks was putting out to his very substantial audience in the time leading up to these elections he put so much money in. Consider this in the crusader analogy as the mustering of Sacks’ personal forces in his crusade. The issues that David Sacks addressed on his show were mostly in line with what I’ve already detailed. What is of note is how Sacks went about promoting his positions rhetorically.
While Sacks didn’t get into the culture war as directly as of the people he supported, he still engaged with cultural issues. In an article he wrote for Newsweek, Sacks lamented that: “Neocons and the Woke Left Are Joining Hands and Leading Us to Woke War III” [82]. His evidence for this was that Obama increased aid to Ukraine, and that the “woke mobs” will descend upon anyone that doesn’t who doesn’t support the war. He also says that: “neoconservatives largely walked out of the Republican Party over Trump and disavowed all of their conservative domestic policy views to become commentators on MSNBC”. This is patently false, aid packages to Ukraine were voted for almost unanimously by Republicans in the House and Senate. In fact, the majority of Republican voters still hold a favorable view of the Iraq War [83]. I don’t even know what he was trying to do with the woke thing here. If you asked someone that’s “woke” or left wing about Obama’s foreign policy, they probably wouldn’t speak glowingly about it.
What about the economy? David Sacks is more than qualified to speak about that, as a man that makes up a disproportionate amount of the economy. I’ll give Sacks credit, he knows what he’s talking about generally when it comes to economics, at least when compared to his Ukraine analysis. Sacks had essentially written his narrative into a corner when it came to economic issues, but not necessarily a corner he was trapped in. Listening to his podcast statements, it’s hard to find a call to action from a man so dead set on shaping the world using his power and influence. This is best exemplified in Sacks aforementioned attitude towards the Federal Reserve and government spending.
What David Sacks doesn’t want is more government spending, but he also doesn’t seem to have any concrete demands for reducing it. You could point to his Ukraine skepticism, or opposition to the Build Back Better plan, but those don’t inform a grander idea of what to do. Deficit Hawks are almost always being disingenuous, only bringing up the deficit when their opponents are in power, but at least they usually have something that they want systematically dismantled. Listening to Sacks speak never gave me a sense of what he wanted, only what he didn’t want.
Alright well what about inflation? Sacks clearly thinks it’s an issue for millions of Americans and has constantly warned that the Biden administration's projected ‘soft landing’ inflation won’t happen. What does Sacks want to do about inflation then? Again, his solutions are confusing and often contradictory. In a December of 2021 tweet, Sacks warned that if the Fed raised rates, the stock market would tank, but if it didn’t, then inflation would get out of control [85]. In another tweet from after the first rate hikes, he clarified(???) his position was that the Fed should have raised rates sooner in fact, but didn’t give sufficient warning for when they would enact them. This line didn’t change for the run up to the election, except with some occasional shots being taken at the Inflation Reduction Act because more government spending would cause even worse inflation. In case you were wondering, The Inflation Reduction Act allocates about $900 billion to be spent across 10 years. Also in case you were wondering, Sacks was a very early proponent of granting the Federal Reserve near unlimited power to print money in order to combat Covid [87].
So what does Sacks want to do instead to control inflation, if these rate hikes are off the table? Obviously not raising taxes on the biggest individual spenders in the economy, that would be absurd. As an official backer of Republicans going into 2022 and a self described populist, you would think Sacks had some solid ideas of how to help the millions suffering under Biden’s supposedly corrupt regime. But Sacks can’t bring himself to even suggest the most barebone economic reforms to help the working class. When the topic of the minimum wage came up on episode 94 of his podcast, Sacks immediately shot down the idea of raising it for employees of large restaurant chains in California. His rationale is that the large companies will be incentivised to automate their workforce more, while nobody will apply to work at ‘Mom and Pop’ restaurants.
I want to congratulate David Sacks on his diet, because his understanding of how these chains are automating indicates that he hasn’t been in a fast food establishment in at least the past 5 years. Besides that, the other issue with his rhetoric is the problem he presents as unfixable fixes itself in the way he presents it. If more of a company’s workforce is automated, after which employees presumably lose their jobs, then it sounds like they can go work at these smaller restaurants that don’t have to pay them as much. I should also mention that he opened his explanation of this situation by saying that: “The national restaurant association and all these restaurant lobbying groups are flooding the state legislators (and) the governor with lobbying money because they want to get this bill modified”. Personally, if I was trying to get people on board for my populist political agenda, I probably wouldn’t want to explicitly mention corporate lobbyists as my allies right off the bat when introducing an issue.
All of these contradictions were the most noticeable in the final episode of The All-In before the midterm election. It was David Sacks’ last chance to get his message out to a captive audience. When the discussion eventually reached the midterms, Sacks guided it to the topic of the senate races in Ohio and Arizona, the two places Peter Thiel and Sacks put most of their money. Sacks assures that Ohio is a safe Republican seat, but as he brings up a poll showing Blake Masters has tied in some polls, co-host Jason Calacanis interrupts with: “He’s tied now? Oh god, he’s so unpopular, your guy is so unpopular”. Calacanis also noted that Masters was doing poorly because he was anti-choice. Sacks brushes this off, moving on to why he thinks the Democrats will lose, citing their hyperbolic claims that democracy was in peril and a lack of commitment to economic issues.
After handing the discussion off for a few minutes, Sacks makes a final point in this episode, one that he really rubs the pathos on to. When co-host David Friedberg says that the electorate might be getting tired of populism, citing events like Brexit and January 6th as sobering moments for populist movements, Sacks rebukes him:
“Populists did not cause 10 trillion dollars of money printing, it was Modern Monetary Theory and the experts, the fed who did that. It wasn't populists who created the great financial crisis of 2008 that caused the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy). We're still living with all the downstream effects of that. It was the experts on Wall Street who said they could manage all these derivatives and the collateralized mortgage obligations and all that stuff that they lost control over, I would argue. It was not populists who caused the horrible handling of that pandemic even though they were blamed for it. Remember we were told it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated then it turns out the vaccine doesn't stop it. It was not populists who caused the reaction to the pandemic it was the experts the CDC and Fauci, people like that who shut down our economy who caused the learning loss it was those experts. So Freeburg listen you may not like this populist waiver that we have in the country and I get that but it's in reaction to something real which is the failure of this expert class and if you want to stop having this populist wave rise up we need to start having experts in position of power who actually know what they're doing” .
What a speech. You probably saw the words I put in bold. Those weren’t the words Sacks himself put emphasis on, but they are the most important to understanding him. Sacks really wants to make ‘populism’ work here, to the point that he doesn’t see it as a style of politics, but as the basis of political conflict in America. It’s not Democrat vs Republican, not proletariat vs bourgeois, not even freedom vs tyranny, it’s the populists vs the ‘expert class’. And Sacks obviously sees himself as part of the former, his syntax emphasizes that the expert class are ‘they’ and that everyone else is ‘we’. There’s only one issue with Sacks doing this framing. DAVID SACKS IS A BILLIONAIRE CORPORATE EXECUTIVE THAT WENT TO STANFORD. HE HAS SPENT ALL HIS ADULT LIFE DOING THINGS MOST AMERICANS WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO. THIS IS ON A PODCAST WHERE YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR EXPERTISE ON BUSINESS. THE FIRST HOUSE DAVID SACKS BOUGHT WAS LITERALLY THE MANSION FROM PULP FICTION.
Goddamn, I’m sorry but, come on. You could point out that right wing populists are always hypocrites, Trump is another billionaire that took the mantle of ‘populism’. But at least Trump knew how to direct focus away from himself and towards an enemy that he clearly wasn’t a part of. David Sacks can’t seem to do that, even if he’s trying to paint himself that way. That’s because Sacks is trying to separate himself from the identity he spent his whole life cultivating. Donald Trump is very clearly not a Mexican immigrant, David Sacks very clearly is a member of the ‘expert class’.
My confidence in saying David Sacks' messaging falls flat comes from what happened three days after giving that impassioned speech. The ‘Red Wave’ failed to materialize, while the Republicans barely won back control of congress, Democrats picked up an extra senate seat. Many seats that were certain to be Republican pickups still had Democrats sitting in them at the end of the night. The Crusade that Sacks had embarked on once again had ended in disappointment. While J. D. Vance won in Ohio, this was to replace a retiring Republican and the margin by which Vance won ended up being much closer than expected. The real loss was in Arizona. Even though Sacks spent most of his direct donations on Vance, he had set up a Super PAC earlier in 2022 called the ‘Purple Good Government PAC’. $600k of this PAC’s $780k in funding came from Sacks and his wife. The PAC spent the majority of its money, $500k, on the Blake Masters supporting ‘Saving Arizona PAC’.
Blake Masters ate shit, like, he really fucked it up. Even with a slight lead in some polls thanks to the wheelbarrows of cash that Peter Thiel and David Sacks were dumping on Masters’ campaign in the final weeks, he just couldn’t do it [89]. Masters was the worst performing statewide candidate in Arizona, even Mark Finchem, who was notable for his full endorsement of election denial and promotion of antisemitic conspiracy theories, did better than Masters [90]. Maybe it was because Masters wasn’t much better than Finchem when it came to PR. Unfortunately, Masters had a habit of doing things like endorsing the Unabomber’s manifesto, and didn’t seem to push back on his opponents pointing out his extremism, aside from quietly backtracking his hardline position on abortion [91, 92].
Masters also had severe fund raising issues, the main issue being that the only big donors he could seem to get were Peter Thiel and people that knew Peter Thiel from work. Mark Kelly raked in six times the cash that Masters was able to in total. Mitch McConnell had pulled the support of the Senate Leadership Fund from Masters campaign in the weeks leading up to the election. While this led to a spike in donations from Thiel and Sacks, it showed a lack of confidence in Masters particularly. Thiel and Sacks were now focusing all their money on Masters, if he won, it would have been a decisive repudiation of establishment Republicans. But it wasn’t that, was it. In the end, there just wasn’t enough money. Peter Thiel and David Sacks thought they could use their immense wealth to hoist someone from their patronage networks into the senate. Masters was going to be their guy, while J. D. Vance had some independent success with his book Hillbilly Elegy which earned him clout as a genuine Appalachian before running. In my opinion, a book about your experience living in the state you’re running to be the senator of is a much better piece of writing to get famous from compared to a blog where you summarize Peter Thiel’s lectures at Stanford.
Masters had none of that. Blake Masters was the purest living embodiment of Peter Thiel and David Sacks self contradicting conservative ideology that works for Facebook but wants you to read Industrial Society and Its Future, the ideology that wants the police to have near unchecked power over cities but says that your free speech is under attack, the ideology that hates the homeless for serving the elites, but praises billionaires as heroes of the people. This ideology was crushed. As the remains of the Masters campaign were being scraped off the Phoenix pavement, Peter Thiel and David Sacks had sent an unintentional but very clear message to the rest of the country: “we are losers”.
During the Third Crusade, an army led by kings marched into the Holy Land. They won some battles, and showed their strength well. However, they ultimately could not crack the walls of Jerusalem. Much like the crusaders of old, David Sacks embarked on a quest he could not finish. The logistics were too demanding, and the best that could be hoped for realistically was essentially the status quo. Back in the 12th century, a steady supply of men and material from Europe was needed to prop up the crusader states and prevent them from succumbing to hostile neighbors. Now in the 21st century, the candidates backed by Thiel and Sacks are reliant on the billionaire's support to make up for lacking organic support on the ground. Masters lost outright, and Vance’s race was much closer than it should have been given Ohio’s voting patterns. Without constant reinforcements, Thiel and Sacks’ empire was unsustainable.
This is not for lack of trying, Peter Thiel and David Sacks are obviously very committed to their political projects. But while the Koch Brother(s) are able to throw $100s of millions around every two years since Obama took office, Thiel was only able to put down a comparatively meager $35 million after sitting out 2020 and Sacks could only manage around $2 million. Sure, Silicon Valley’s conservative billionaires are a lot more personable than the Koch Brothers (although that's not saying much), but they simply don’t have the cash.
It’s very difficult to find exactly how much liquid capital people like Thiel have on them at any given time. Their money is often tied up in stocks that are very reliant on their confidence, so selling risks losing significantly more money than they get in cash. This was on display when Elon Musk had to use Tesla stock to buy Twitter and tanked the stock itself by far more than he was withdrawing. Musk was only able to sell $11 billion in Tesla stock before he had to start negotiating options, meaning he was only able to access at most 5% of his wealth before actively degrading his fortune [94]. Thiel is reported to have upwards of $9 billion with about half of that being in cash, according to one Bloomberg estimation [95]. However, Bloomberg only gave their estimation ⅖ stars, saying that much of Thiel’s wealth can only be estimated. There’s also the fact that Thiel has stashed at least $5 billion into a Roth IRA, meaning a significant portion of his wealth is untaxed but unlikely to be moved until Thiel turns 60 [96]. Compare that to the privately held Koch Industries which makes its money on commodities, and there’s no wonder why there’s such a huge disparity in spending. You can count on the oil you sell being a fairly consistent price, it’s something everyone will always need for the foreseeable future, the same can’t be said for shares in SpaceX.
There are countless reasons that David Sacks’ ambitions fell short in 2022. In the episode of his podcast after the midterms, an embittered Sacks recognizes that the Dobbs decision on abortion had something to do with the Republicans having such a poor showing. What he seems much more certain of, however, is that most of the blame lies on one person: Donald Trump. When Donald Trump announced his candidacy, he ruined everything. According to Sacks, Trump threw “an extended hissy fit” about the 2020 election. Trump fucked it all up, it was his fault that the Dobbs decision went the way it did, he was so polarizing that he confined Republicans to only 40% of the electorate, if the Republicans wanted to win, they needed someone else. Luckily, David Sacks knew just the guy.
Sources:
https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/26/zenefits-is-laying-off-250-employees/
https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/13/ceo-david-sacks-on-moving-on-from-zenefits-troubled-past/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/williamalden/zenefits-ceo-david-sacks-to-step-down
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article275764621.html
https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/chair-white-silicon-valley-initiative-3-31-16
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/techies-donate-clinton-droves-trump-not-much/
https://www.reuters.com/business/pandemic-boosts-super-rich-share-global-wealth-2021-12-07/
https://newrepublic.com/article/166978/midterms-moderates-gottheimer-2022-biden
https://theintercept.com/2023/03/23/peter-thiel-jeff-thomas/
https://www.mythofcapitalism.com/guides/jason-calacanis-net-worth
https://twitter.com/SusanDReynolds/status/1345932356293562368
https://www.marinatimes.com/new-ownership-for-the-marina-times
https://twitter.com/TheMarinaTimes/status/1270181089567334400
https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-pol-ca-california-governor-2018-money/
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1357720664916979713?s=20
https://calmatters.org/politics/2021/10/newsom-recall-big-donors/
The Contrarian, Max Chafkin, page 82
https://newrepublic.com/article/168125/david-sacks-elon-musk-peter-thiel
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1349273462733357056?s=20 , https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1419146869830144001?s=20
https://twitter.com/letsgomathias/status/1687548196564725760?s=20
The Contrarian, Max Chafkin, 2021, page 71
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1451638827705982978?s=20
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1503120477828517893?s=20
https://www.axios.com/2022/01/19/biden-fighting-inflation-feds-job
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1494731964661723143?s=20
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1499464577846693897?s=20
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1504492644793126917?s=20
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1540513150188933120?s=20, https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1503419298982809601?s=20
The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, George Packer, page 125
The Contrarian, Max Chafkin, 2021, page 36
The Contrarian, Max Chafkin, 2021, page 67
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https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1515363131249213444?s=20
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/ban-all-big-mergers/618131/#
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Here are the major points why NATO has never been any threat to Russia, and Putin knows it very well:
1. "Why not? Why not?" When David Frost, BBC, asked about Russian membership in NATO in March 2000, Putin said. "I do not rule out such a possibility . . . in the case that Russia's interests will be reckoned with if it will be an equal partner."
2. “Ukraine will not shy away from the processes of expanding interaction with NATO and the Western allies as a whole. Ukraine has its relations with NATO… At the end of the day, the decision will be taken by NATO and Ukraine. It’s a matter of those 2 parties” – Vladimir Putin, 2002.
3. In June 1994, Russia became the first country to join NATO's Partnership for Peace (PfP) until it left it in October 2021. Putin indicated several times publicly that NATO was a factor of stability and was solving problems that otherwise would be problems for Russia [Putin with Ukr President Kuchma 2002 www.en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21598 and in his 2011 State Duma Address].
4. When Finland announced it would join NATO in 2022, Putin moved all its battle-capable troops from the 1200km Finnish border to Ukraine. Is he going to invade Finland?
5. The Baltic states bordering Russia have been in NATO for over a decade. They never had NATO troops and missiles on their ground before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Russia did not invade them out of fear. Check the distances from the Baltic states and Finland to St. Petersburg and Moscow and compare to the distances from Ukraine to Moscow.
6. Russia has bordered another NATO country over the Bering Strait for many decades: the USA. Moreover, Russia’s military had many drills together with NATO.
7. Russia approved in the UN most of NATO military operations, including the war in Afghanistan and abstained from certain NATO operations such as the No-Fly Zone in Libya [UNSCR 1973].
8. At least since 2009, Russia allowed cargo planes carrying U.S. troops and weapons to pass through the country en route to Afghanistan [latimes.com 2009-sep-25], and later provided supply lines & intel for NATO, moved and recovered US heavy weaponry using Rus Mi-26 helicopters in Afghanistan. Russian cargo airlines (e.g. Volga-Dnieper) and logistics companies made billions of US$ paid by NATO.
“NATO and Russia pride themselves on cooperation over Afghanistan and the fight against…” “Moscow and the Western military alliance will conduct a range of exercises this year, including a joint anti-terror drill in the Paris metro [Gen Grabar-Kitarovic] ….” “The assistant secretary general … from Brussels … said NATO's new public diplomacy strategy identifies the partnership with Russia as a priority” — The Moscow Times Feb. 20, 2013.
9. Forbes, Oct 27, 2022 — Putin moved 12,000 troops and all heavy weapons from Kaliningrad, the Russian enclave within NATO, to Ukraine. Traffic recorded: https://x.com/BadBalticTakes/status/1729388229537743151?s=20
10. Azerbaijan and Turkey (a NATO country) joined their armed forces and security systems at strategic and operational command and control, military complexes, and logistics. June 15, 2021.
11. Russia lies when it says it wants Ukraine to be neutral (i.e., out of military alliances). Several times (last 2010), Russia moved to get Ukraine in their military alliance ODKB (a.k.a. CSTO). Then, Ukraine denied it by saying they would not join ODKB because they wanted to stay neutral.
Also read: www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-promise-not-to-enlarge-gorbachev-says-no/amp/
"This is definitely true to a certain extent, NATO expansion didn’t make Russia feel any more secure geopolitically and emboldened militarists in the Kremlin."
No, it has not been true to any extent. The Kremlin knows for sure that NATO and West is the least of any entities on Earth that postures any threat to Russia. The "NATO expansion" narrative is one of many false pretexts to invade Ukraine, just like the "Ukraine Nazi" and "US biolabs" pretexts.
In fact, there is no power on in history has ever threatened or attacked the thermonuclear superpower Russia since 1941... But one: China - who actually attacked Russia in 1969.
Do you know that unlike Ukraine Moscow has had a NATO base in Russia for years? In the city of Ulyanovsk.