Everything about David Sacks, the former head of PayPal and Trump fan
David Sacks organized a mega fundraising event for Trump's election campaign: here's who the ex-PayPal executive linked to Elon Musk is and what he did in life
David O. Sacks changes horse and, after having sponsored the now abortive campaign for the nomination of Florida governor Ron DeSantis and then moving on to support Vivek Ramaswamy and even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the controversial venture capitalist jumps on the bandwagon of Trump (but in 2016 he had donated 70 thousand dollars to Hillary Clinton's campaign and after 6 January 2021 he had defined The Donald as a finished man) supporting him with a very glamorous fundraising event in his residence in San Francisco to access which the ticket entry fee is as much as 500 thousand dollars per couple.
But who is the former Paypal COO, better known as a tech podcaster and a great expositor of anti-woke opinions expressed on the social platform of his friend and fellow countryman Elon Musk, and what has he done in his life? Here is a portrait of him that draws on his biography on EarlyNode and a portrait from the San Francisco Standard as well as other information gleaned from the internet.
Sacks' first steps
Born in 1972 in Cape Town and moved with his family to Tennessee, after studying at Stanford and obtaining a doctorate in Chicago, Sacks obtained his first prestigious job as a manager consultant at McKinsey.
He entered the empyrean of digital capitalism in 1999, when he became Paypal's first chief operating officer with a role destined to last three years during which he helped the company increase revenues that reached 200 million dollars.
Paypal mafia
The move to Paypal is a move that leaves a profound trace in his biography as well as in his reputation, as an exponent of that group of former Paypal employees universally known with the not benign label of "Paypal mafia" coined to indicate that group that over a Sacks includes men like Musk who went on to found successful technology companies.
For Sacks the turning point came in 2006 when he created Geni.com and above all in 2008 when he inaugurated his social network Yammer, which would reach the top of the TechCrunch ranking, which in rewarding the company defined it as "a Twitter with a business model ”. The platform was acquired in 2012 by Microsoft for the remarkable sum of 1.2 billion dollars.
The founding of Craft Ventures
The other fundamental turning point dates back to 2017, the foundation together with other partners of venture capital company Craft Ventures which will significantly increase its wealth. It immediately stands out for investments in emerging cryptocurrencies.
But that of investment angel of a San Francisco company destined to grow immediately is only one of the professional identities of a man who accumulates assignment after assignment among which we note that of member of the boards of Scribd, Roboflow and Hyperloop One and of CEO by Callin and Zenefits.
The other Sacks
But a significant part of his notoriety comes from being one of the most visible and active users of Twitter and from his "social podcasting" activity, a hybrid between podcasting and Clubhouse-style direct interaction that he uses to address together with his guests the topics of tech, startups and the economy without giving up forays into the field of more narrow politics. His podcast “All-In” is awarded with 300 thousand subscriptions.
In reality, politics, and to be precise his polemical talent, is what makes Sacks one of the most prominent figures committed to countering the woke wave with an activism that is rooted in his youthful years in which he was editor of the conservative magazine Stanford Review and co-author together with billionaire Peter Thiel, member like him of the Paypal mafia, of an essay with the indicative title: "The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance of Campus" for which a controversial statement on the rape of female students he was forced to apologise.
Along the same lines, in 2005 he helped produce the film “Thank You for Smoking” based on the satirical novel by Christopher Buckley.
The friendship with Musk
From this background comes the mutual sympathy with Elon Musk, to whom he more recently provided decisive advice in the acquisition of Twitter and the subsequent restructuring of the social platform.
The two also recently organized an "anti-Biden dinner" at Sacks' home in Los Angeles which boasted Rupert Murdoch and former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick among the guests.
And since in Washington and the surrounding area there are whispers of Musk's role in the not unlikely Trump 2, who knows if the same thing won't arise from the dinner in San Francisco for his friend from Cape Town.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/david-sacks-raccolta-fondi-donald-trump/ on Sat, 08 Jun 2024 05:20:04 +0000.