Crackpots #24: Charlie Moe (Patreon)

Greetings---we have here a selection from CHARLIE MOE, who I first encountered as the one of the only people obsessed with Black Hammer as I was. I am a fan of his blog Moss Planet. He also does not like David Sacks, who I myself dislike very much, and he has written about that slippery eel here...

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Elon Musk and Peter Thiel---these two former PayPal CEOs have been the figures most credited with Silicon Valley’s right wing turn in recent years. Despite the close alignment of their goals, they could not be further apart in terms of personality and methodology. Musk is bombastic and engages with the public to an unhealthy degree in order to maintain the celebrity status he has cultivated for well over a decade. On the other side of the coin is Thiel, who tends to the carefully constructed image of himself as a machiavellian mastermind who rarely speaks publicly and instead chooses to manipulate the world through a network of right wing intellectuals and business associates. I personally think both of these attitudes come from the media that these two men seem to obsess over. Musk has a clear affinity for being perceived as a Tony Stark-like billionaire superhero beloved by the masses while Thiel aspires to be more like the Dark Lord, Sauron (he named his defense manufacturer, Palantir, after the orb used by Sauron to see behind enemy lines).

But you already know this about Musk and Thiel, like I said, they’re pretty infamous. Who you probably don’t know as well is fellow PayPal alum, David Sacks. Sure, Sacks has been making some noise recently announcing the Strategic Crypto Reserve in his role as Trump's ‘AI and Crypto Czar, but the journey that led to his position is much longer than most realize. David Sacks is the beating heart of the tech right’s ascendancy to the Trump administration, not Musk or Thiel. While those two spent most of the last few years finding some way to dispose of inconvenient romantic partners, David Sacks slowly built the infrastructure and connections required to take over the federal government.

My goal here is to provide some of the context of Sacks’ rise to power, from college newspaper editor to Crypto Kingpin.

If you want to fully grasp Sacks’ rise to power, you’ll need some backstory first.

David Sacks was born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1970. This puts him in league with a disproportionate number of South Africans employed by PayPal in its early days, which includes Elon Musk, former CFO Roelof Botha (no relation to the Apartheid era president, nephew of ZZ Top opener, Piet Botha), and to some extent Peter Thiel, who spent part of his childhood in modern day Namibia while his father worked on developing a uranium mine for South Africa’s recently greenlit nuclear weapons program. Sacks’ family moved to Memphis, Tennessee around the time he was five years old. I was informed by a friend who grew up in the Memphis Jewish community that South African Jews are apparently fairly common, which was a big shock to me personally, as I assumed every city from the former Confederacy had about 20 Jews each at most.

Anyway, the real fun starts when David Sacks arrives at Stanford University in the early 1990s. These were the years when ownership of personal computers began to increase sharply. Importantly for the business minded, these were the years when Microsoft’s stock price began a steady ascent through the S&P 500, canonizing software as equal to hardware in terms of importance. Stanford had a working relationship with Silicon Valley since well before the invention of the personal computer, with the titular Bill Hewlett and David Packard of Hewlett-Packard being the first notable success stories coming from the school.

Stanford was where David Sacks met Peter Thiel, then a law student, but always a sinister, moist looking, presence. This makes Sacks essentially Thiel’s oldest friend in the industry. Thiel had been active on campus since his undergrad years when he founded The Stanford Review in 1987, a paper founded on the model of the conservative Dartmouth Review founded in 1980. The Dartmouth Review had been brought to national attention by the time Thiel founded his paper by the antics of then editor, Dinesh D’Souza. In his book, The Contrarian, author Max Chafkin describes what D’Souza did to extend his paper’s reputation beyond its campus:

“During D’Souza’s tenure it had published, among other things, an anti‒affirmative action column written by a white student entirely in mock-Ebonics, an interview with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, and a confidential list of members of the gay student group, some of whom weren’t out.”

It’s especially ironic that Thiel decided to take after D’Souza, given that last detail, but maybe he was just more interested in the general concept of a list of gay guys (allegedly). On that list, we return to David Sacks, who was made an editor shortly after arriving on campus. Once in his new role, Sacks took the paper in a new direction. The way he did this was a much greater focus on sex, specifically rape and why it’s prevalence on campus was apparently severely overstated. In his book, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, George Packer states this explicitly: “under its new editor, Thiel's friend David Sacks, the Review moved on to speech codes, gay rights, and sex (in 1992 an entire issue was devoted to rape)”.

Sacks’ most notable contribution was the aforementioned ‘Rape Issue’ of the newspaper, which included an impassioned defense of Stuart Thomas, a Stanford senior basketball player who had recently pled no contest to a statutory rape charge. To quote Max Chafkin again:

Sacks included a graphic description of the encounter, noting that the seventeen-year-old victim “still had the physical coordination to perform oral sex,” and “presumably could have uttered the word, ‘no.’ ”

Some of you may realize that this case rhymes with the 2015 rape case against Brock Turner. Turner was also a student athlete at Stanford who committed sexual assault and was able to be brought to criminal trial for it. The main difference in the cases is that Stuart Thomas seems to have gotten off relatively unscathed in terms of his career (remember the name if you’re buying real estate in Huntington Beach), while Brock Turner received a national media broadside that, ideally, has somewhat corrected the relatively light sentence he received. If we want to extrapolate, it’s not hard to imagine a world where the Stuart Thomas case gets a little more attention from national media and the half of the would-be PayPal Mafia is permanently kept away from power by their association with the case.

It is unfortunately very difficult to find most of what was written in the Review during Sacks’ tenure, as the old editions of the paper are locked up in Stanford’s library and are only able to be viewed upon request in person*. This is strange, as I don’t think there is a student newspaper that people would be more interested in reading years after it was printed than the early editions of the Review. Fortunately, we have some idea of what was in those papers, because after graduation, Sacks and Thiel decided to write a book. The book is called The Diversity Myth, and covers most of what the pair were saying at the Review, but now published to a wider audience by the libertarian Independent Institute.

*If you’re someone with access to the Stanford library, email me

I won’t rehash the book, like I said, it was pretty much the same as the content at the Stanford Review. What I will note is how Sacks’ spent his time on the DC circuit. It was rather hard to piece together but from what I gather, Sacks spent his summers at Stanford and some of his time post graduation working as:

A legislative assistant to Christopher Cox, a then California House Representative who later worked as the chairman of the SEC from 2005 to 2009 (He didn’t do a great job evidently). Cox is notable because when Sacks worked for him in the mid 90s, he was near the the top of the Congressional Republican hierarchy as the Chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, being behind only Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, and Tom Delay. Later in his career, Cox would be an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq War, appearing next to Ahmad Chalabi.

A research assistant to Robert Bork. Bork was a longtime judicial opponent of antitrust legislation who has the dubious honor of being one of the few Supreme Court nominees to get rejected outright by the senate. This was partially due to Bork’s role in the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ during Watergate, during which Bork fired special prosecutor, Archibald Cox. Sacks’ was researching for his book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, which was the same pointless schlock about how ‘The West Has Fallen’ that’s been written 10,000 times at this point. The last thing to know about Bork is that you should look up a picture of him from the 80s. I was not aware until recently that white people could look like he did back then.

Associate of the Independent Institute. This was where Sacks wrote his book with Peter Thiel. Of note for the Independent Institute is that they were caught taking donations from Microsoft in the late 90s while running ads in the New York Times that decried the anti-trust legislation against the company that was being pursued at the time. It is under the name of the Independent Institute that Sacks went on CSPAN to advocate an invasion of Iraq in 1998.

I’m going to fast forward now. Past the early PayPal days, past the overthrow of Elon from his position as CEO of PayPal, past the first time David Sacks donated to a presidential candidate in 2012 to Mitt Romney and again in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, past the Chesa Boudin recall, past the Ron DeSantis Spaces launch, past the public emotional breakdown after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. It’s June 6th, 2024 and a new beachhead has been made with the Republican establishment by the fine folks of Silicon Valley led by David Sacks. This landing comes in the form of a Trump 2024 fundraiser that is held at Sacks’ San Francisco mansion. The haul from this fundraiser was significant, north of $11 million. It also netted Sacks an appearance of Trump on his podcast, The All-In, during which the then former president seemed to mostly bowl over Sacks and his co hosts' questions.

The most interesting question was asked by venture capitalist and Epstein list resident, Jason Calacanis, on H-1B Visa holders and ‘skilled immigration’ as a whole. Trump then proceeds to go on a tangent about immigration policy that would make the top r/Neoliberal posters blush. Trump promised that: “If you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country”. This is a policy that would essentially allow undocumented residents to buy their way through the immigration system by going to college, which Trump later mentioned would include trade schools. ‘Citizenship For Trade School’ sounds like a line from a version of Starship Troopers directed by Matt Yglesias, but it was nearly a Trump policy. After the debut of the episode, campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt clarified that the policy would not cover “communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters, and public charges”, which we now know to mean anyone who is slightly critical of Israel.

The lesson from this podcast appearance isn’t that Trump is being guided on a subtly more pro immigration path by Silicon Valley, but rather how susceptible he is to suggestion by a group presenting themselves as experts. In fact, immigration is the field where Sacks’ and Co have the least interest. Being able to manipulate Trump is far more useful when it comes to policy proposals that would clash with old guard Republicans who are much more skeptical of concepts like a ‘Strategic Crypto Reserve’ or massive spending on AI. But you can’t hope to seriously influence a presidential administration with just podcast appearances (believe me, I’ve tried). Sacks’ would need an inside man to secure his interests in a future administration. Thankfully, he had a professional associate that would work perfectly.

I was lying when I said we were going to skip right ahead, because some important context is needed first. JD Vance was saved by the patronage of the PayPal Mafia twice in his life. The first time was at age 32, when Peter Thiel gave him a job at his firm, Mithril Capital. The second time was at age 37, when Peter Thiel and David Sacks gave him a job in the US Senate. When JD Vance decided to run for Senate in 2022, he faced extremely long odds in the Republican primary. Despite an initial war chest of over $10 million from Peter Thiel, Vance was getting absolutely demolished in polls. In February, less than three months before the primary, Vance was only polling at 8%. His brand of hard right politics did not combine well with his previous comparisons of Trump to Hitler, even if they might have been meant as compliments in retrospect. Thankfully for Vance, Peter Thiel had spent too much money for him to fail. On April 15th, 2022, Donald Trump bestowed his endorsement on JD Vance. This essentially the nomination for Vance, but did not mean he was out of the woods.

Despite the fact Ohio was considered a solid red state by this point, Vance’s general election polling margins were looking concerningly slim. This was also during a year when Democrats were supposed to be at a disadvantage, making Vance’s candidacy a potential disaster that could haunt the party for the next six years. Peter Thiel was now joined by David Sacks in saving his campaign in the only way they know how: spending money. I say Thiel saved his campaign, but Thiel eventually somewhat retreated from Vance’s general election campaign somewhat to focus his money on another of his acolytes, Blake Masters in Arizona. Of the over $15 million that Thiel gave to Vance, only $5 million came after the Trump endorsement. In comparison, David Sacks gave $1 million only after the primary ended, making his contribution more significant to Vance’s eventual, but underperforming victory.

That brings us back to July 15th, 2024. The RNC is in its first day in Milwaukee, I’m attending the March on The RNC, there’s a person showing me the mini crossbow they kept in their purse and another wearing a World War I French infantry helmet, Dave Weigel is awkwardly referring to me by my Twitter @ before we have a pleasant conversation about the protest, someone is wearing their ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ shirt, and JD Vance is all but confirmed as the vice presidential running mate for Donald Trump. Vance was something of a dark horse pick initially, given that he had been in office for barely a year, had underperformed in his election, wasn’t from a must win swing state, looked stupid, and didn’t appeal to a particular demographic who wasn’t 16 years old and/or living in Jakarta.

The choice of Vance was certainly risky, and no doubt required the spending of serious political capital, which makes the timing of Sacks’ June 6th fundraiser relevant to not just the Veepstakes, but the administration as a whole. Vance was as much of a dark horse here as he was in the primary, and faced stiff competition from some of the nation’s most formidably boring Republican politicians. But the combination of Sacks’ influence and luck allowed Vance to worm his way in. For as trite as Hillbilly Elegy is, it was still more palatable than the book fellow VP hopeful, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, wrote about her passion for murdering dogs.

Normally, the position of Vice President is not incredibly influential, or at least easy to sideline. But Donald Trump is different, because Donald Trump is really fucking old and, unlike fellow really fucking old person Joe Biden, Donald Trump is very susceptible to outside influences after so much turnover of his inner circle over the years. This is compared to Joe Biden who still thought Golda Mier was the Prime Minister of Israel and was communicating with the ghost of Scoop Jackson on all his decisions. All this is to say that before Elon Musk joined his campaign/polycule, Silicon Valley had its claws deep in Trump.

It’s hard to parse exactly what in the administration is the result of Elon Musk and what was influenced by David Sacks. Both are very close professionally and obviously hold similar views, but vary in terms of some business interests. Elon owns a few massive companies, the value of which is highly contingent on his personal actions and government contracts.

David Sacks, on the other hand, is as charismatic and pleasant to talk to as every other one of Elon’s groupies, and derives his wealth from a series of companies founded through his venture capital firm, Craft Ventures. Specializing in funding software start ups, Craft Ventures (and by extension David Sacks) has unsurprisingly invested heavily in both AI and crypto. If you remember, David Sacks’ new position in the administration is ‘Crypto and AI Czar’, which gives him the ear of the president on any issues pertaining to those industries.

If you’re a big a fan of the bibliography for the Chapo Trap House series ‘Seeking a Fren for the End of the World’, you’d know that back in August, I interviewed Charles Johnson, a former Thiel associate who spearheaded the billionaire’s lawsuit which destroyed Gawker. I met with Johnson at some tables outside a high end grocery store in suburban Minnesota, joined by a friend who took notes. Most of our interview was spent trying to hack through the self aggrandizement and tedious metaphors that come with any conversation with a right winger who paid attention in college.

The most important nugget we managed to mine was about why certain parts of Silicon Valley turned right in the past few years. I treated most of Johnson’s answers with extreme skepticism (his Wikipedia page has 17 separate entries in the ‘Controversies’ section, one of which is “Holocaust Denial”), but this was one where I could sense he wasn’t creating a story, but reporting an observation. Johnson told us that the people like David Sacks were acting out of fear and necessity. Their investments were extremely vulnerable to regulation and an incoming Harris administration would not be kind to venture capital. Sure, Harris probably wouldn’t go after big tech, one of her closest advisors was a VP at Uber, but the start-ups that venture capitalists make money off of aren’t big tech, and far more exposed to risk from potential legislation.

The fear isn’t misplaced. In 2023, venture capitalists raised only $66.9 billion, declining 60% from the previous year. Despite a Silicon Valley Bank bailout and a friendly administration, the confidence of investors was shot. Fortunes built on venture capital are highly volatile, and can disappear far quicker than fortunes built on more traditional financial assets. It wouldn’t be necessary for the government to stay off the backs of venture capitalists, they would need to become the government.

Image source: PitchBook Data, Inc

I don’t think it would be fair to say David Sacks’ has had more of an impact on the Trump administration than Elon Musk has. I also don’t think he has to be to accomplish his ultimate goals. The animating cause for David Sacks’ support of Trump is equal parts deeply held reactionary beliefs and pragmatic business dealing. It makes his scope more limited than Elons, who clearly wants to remake the entire government in the vision of memes he’s been sent by his 46 year old alcoholic reply-eunuchs. But this makes it far easier for David Sacks to achieve what he wants while his old coworker soaks up all the attention.

Since David Sacks entered the White House, we’ve seen the Trump administration go on a campaign to restore confidence in crypto. Not only with the strategic reserve but also with various policies that the administration has proposed to boost the value of various coins. The limits on AI are being torn down as well, allowing any possible juice to be squeezed from the industry at the expense of the general public. Thanks to him, the predatory nature of crypto and AI will be fully realized over the next four years. Just like the start of his career back at Stanford, David Sacks is truly at home when he is exacting revenge on those he feels have wronged him, where would he be if it was any other way?