David Sacks: SA’s quiet kingmaker, from PayPal to Trump

Source: Wikipedia

An interesting factoid for South Africans is that Donald Trump’s new crypto czar, David Sacks, was born in Yeoville, Johannesburg, but at a young age moved with his parents to the US. He was one of the founders of PayPal, along with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (who lived with his parents for a time in Namibia).

The South Africans are definitely in the driving seat in the Trump administration.

David Sacks is an interesting character. He produced the rather excellent movie Thank You for Smoking in 2005, and in 2006 co-founded Geni.com, a genealogy site for tracing family trees. In 2008 he launched Yammer, a social network for businesses, that was eventually sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion.

After Yammer, he became interim CEO of Zenefits, a troubled HR software firm, and managed to slash losses in just 10 months. In 2017, he founded Craft Ventures with Bill Lee, a VC fund that invested in one bullseye after another: from Airbnb to Uber, Neuralink, Slack, SpaceX (Musk’s company), Palantir (Thiel’s company), and crypto company BitGo. The Venture Craft fund is still going with billions under management.

He's always been a crypto enthusiast, with a particular fondness for bitcoin.

“What bitcoin offers is a different kind of currency where it’s not backed by a government; it’s backed by math; it’s backed by encryption,” said Sacks in a 2022 interview.

“Bitcoin is an excellent store of value. It was the first digital currency and it’s the original. It’s the strongest one.”

This is the man Trump has hired as his AI and crypto chief. The fruits weren’t long in coming. Last week, Trump signed an executive order creating the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, using about 200,000 BTC (worth roughly $17 billion) already seized by law enforcement in criminal and civil cases. Sacks was front and centre—Bloomberg TV on March 7 captured him saying,

“We’ve decided that bitcoin is scarce, it’s valuable, and that it’s strategic for the United States to hold on to this as a long-term reserve asset.”

He likened it to a “digital Fort Knox” on X, pushing the narrative that it’s a no-cost move for taxpayers since it repurposes existing assets.

Some people were disappointed that the US did not announce any fresh purchases of bitcoin, but that may yet happen.

If you were waiting for the mainstreaming of bitcoin, I think we can safely say it has arrived. And that a South African-born kid from Yeoville had a firm hand in it.

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