David Sacks and the Entire American Tech Stack Win!
Something funny is happening over at Xitter.
Yesterday, NYT published a 3,000-word profile of David Sacks describing how his installment as the White House AI and crypto czar has led to a number of decisions that may not benefit the US, such as sharing AI technology with UAE in seeming exchange for personal gain for others, including Trump. The profile quotes Sacks’ own spokesperson explaining that poor David Sacks just “wants the entire American tech stack to win.”
It also quotes Steve Bannon, which might hint at where the article came from, warning of the “road to perdition”!
Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and a critic of Silicon Valley billionaires, said Mr. Sacks was a quintessential example of ethical conflicts in an administration where “the tech bros are out of control.”
“They are leading the White House down the road to perdition with this ascendant technocratic oligarchy,” he said.
In general, the article is a bit of a squish. As one critical example, it doesn’t mention Sacks’ role in fueling a run on Silicon Valley Bank only to whine and whine and whine until Sleepy Joe Biden bailed out the billionaires, the most significant lesson to explain Sacks’ installation.
The closing paragraphs nod to the significance of all this: that at a time when both crypto and AI need a bailout — a vastly bigger bailout than SVB needed — David Sacks is there to ensure that gets prioritized over real America.
In the keynote speech, Mr. Trump described Mr. Sacks as “great” before signing executive orders to speed the building of data centers and exports of A.I systems.
Then he handed Mr. Sacks the presidential pen.
The tech bros need a bailout and Sacks is there to deliver it to them.
But NYT doesn’t lay out the stakes. If this was a Bannon-attempted hit job, it missed its mark.
Or so I thought until I watched the Xitter response to Sacks’ whiny 1,500-word complaint about how he lawyered the article, to which he attached a much longer letter from defamation lawyers.
In response, every one of the loathesome crypto and AI bros whose installation Sacks served piped up to describe what a hero poor beleaguered David Sacks is.
Mark Andreessen who of course hosts or hosted a private chat of tech bros talking up other tech bros, may have kicked it off with his claim that Sacks was performing some kind of noble citizenship, which Daddy then picked up.
Marc Benioff seconded Gavin Baker’s tautology even while treating AI bros as “builders.”
David Marcus described tech bros’ efforts to collapse dollar hegemony in glowing terms while scoffing at “incompetent technocrats.”
Zach Witkoff — the man facilitating corrupt foreign investment in precisely these technologies — hailed Sacks’ role in “helping advance the ball forward on AI and Crypto.”
Martin Shkreli, who misspelled Sacks’ name, nevertheless insisted this is the kind of guy Americans want selling away American power.
And they all tagged Sacks and he RTed them (well, except for Shkreli) and all these billionaire tech bros were performing a circle jerk for the benefit of the foreign trolls their host has installed, as if that performance itself could affirm the value of all this tech brobery to real Americans.
None of this exposes the real underlying problem here, the degree to which the American economy has been hollowed out so these bro boys can attempt to divorce themselves from the physical reality of real people entirely.
But it performs it.
A lot of heat without light, as sure a sign as any that the burst of yet another big tech bubble is on the way…
‘the burst of yet another big tech bubble is on the way…’
Leading to large helpings of brobery crumble?
Exactly. They’re trying to burrow in, Russian style, and grift off of us.
We must, at all costs, maintain our dominance in the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires.
(Meanwhile, I’m rebalancing my retirement portfolio today…)
We must not allow a Billionaire gap!
I wonder whether any of these snowflakes could survive even a week of doing RLHF (Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback – essentially content moderation for AI training) in one of the electronic sweatshops in Kenya or Cambodia that they and their friends use to avoid the niceties of U.S. labor law and pay scales.
(See Empire of AI by Karen Hao for details.)
They’re refusing to pay American workers and still can’t make a profit. (Read Ed Zitron or Cory Doctorow on the AI bubble if you haven’t already.)
Ugh. I admit to having had a little chunk of Salesforce stock for years, having bought it when I thought the company had a decent grasp on customer relationship management. The company has been slipping for a while; stupidly, I figured they’d find their footing and sort it out.
With CEO Benioff in this Sacks sausagefest I have to say nope, nope, nope. Liquidating my position because he’s clearly out of touch.
Was it Martin Shkreli agreeing with Benioff’s position that tipped you off? I have to wonder what these inflated Bozos think they are promoting when Martin Shkreli takes their side.
But the whole thing is so craven and greedy it kind of makes sense.
No, it’s Benioff’s own words in his post above. While I may not trust the NYT, Benioff is missing the growing distrust of AI and tech oligarchy. The number of users who’ve rejected MSFT’s forced conversion of PCs to Win 11 should have warned him, but if he’s only looking at enterprise clients he’s not reading the weather.
Alongside that “growing distrust of AI” we have an administration that wants to prop it, along with crypto, up, artificially.
Last week my GP enthused about his own new AI helper, which records visits and then boils them down to “essentials” for him, leaving only the editing for him to do later. He let me read the AI transcript of my own appointment; it was pretty impressive but got a few, potentially key, details flat wrong. He said he would catch these. But would all overworked doctors?
He is, advertantly or not, proselytizing for AI. My husband, after much resistance, has selectively used it in his high school teaching. These professionals need to be consulted before The Future Is Now.
@ Ginevra – There are definitely some real positives from this Machine Learning (LLM). Note that I am not using the “AI” moniker here. Transcriptions of spoken words, analysis of digitized images (CT scans, echocardiograms, dermatology scans, etc.) in the medical world are real benefits.
Yes – there will be errors made in transcriptions and analyses. But those are present in the non-ML world also. That’s why most critical professions require more than one set of eyes/interpretations on anything important.
At a minimum, the Billionaire Tech Bros are espousing the tech version of “What’s good for General Motors is good for the nation.”
They either cannot or will not see the pitfalls and dangers of AI and crypto.
They may even be much worse – they may not even care much about the nation-state. They are seeking hegemony for themselves.
Oh, I think it’s a given that they don’t care about nation-states, what with those having governments that introduce the messy idea that people should have a say in their fate. I think most of them are still in the juvenile thrall of Ayn Randian “philosophy.” They are the noble “builders” who are far better and above the hoi-palloi and their silly governments. Governments only get in the way of their rightful ascent to godhood. That hoi-palloi is unworthy and can just be quick about it and die so as not to clutter up the perfect world they are building.
Some of them don’t even want to build their perfect world here. The archetype for that kind of thinking is Musk and his insane obsession with colonizing Mars. He’ll just build his perfect world there without all these worthlesss takers in the way. Only the truly worthy will be admitted and the rest can disappear in oblivion.
With the exception of Trump, who couldn’t get through one of her novels if he paid someone to do it for him, we certainly do have an administration by and for the Rand acolytes.
This is galling for a multitude of reasons (justification of rape, railroad symbolism, flat characterization) not least of which is that many of us thought Rand and her “philosophy” got left in the trash bin of the mid-twentieth century. Her books excite twelve year old boys, and the men who never grow up.
“Brobery” is just brilliant, Marcy!
Thank ya!
I was a bit chuffed with it myself.
LOL. The Brobery Pirates. (Yes, I realize it’s a mashup of bribery. But why not spread it further?!)
I was searching for a word in my Piece Deal lyrics (“Fridays with Nicole Sandler, Thanksgiving Wednesday Edition!) and finally settled on villainy. But I wasn’t really satisfied with that.
Now I can see that brobery is much better. The thing is, AI and spellcheck are going to do their damnedest to override it. It figures! But that’s not going to stop real people. No way!
Oxford new word 2026
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YES! That put a big smile on my face!
And I really like Brobery Pirates, too, SL!
atrios noticed the word “tranche” in one of these tongue-baths recently and noted that he hadn’t heard that word in a while. I’m fairly certain that the tech bros will get a bailout if AI stocks crash or if their companies go bankrupt, because it was the somehow the peasants’ fault.
Oooh! ‘Tranche’ is a very bad word.
I’ve recently been involved in a discussion about whether AI is ‘sentient.’ The shill taking this position pointed me towards a ‘published paper’ which said AI is capable of introspection, then complained when I noticed that the paper hadn’t been refereed or peer-reviewed, and was hosted on a site which only published stuff by Anthropic (an AI company.) I think ‘AI is sentient’ (it’s not) is the fallback position by which AI companies will insist that they shouldn’t ever be shut down, no matter how much money they’re losing. (The unexamined assumptions in the paper made me weep for humanity. It gave the feel of someone who’s summoned Godzilla while wearing cotton oven mitts for ‘protection.’)
So not only are we seeing the word ‘tranche’ again, we’re also back to ‘your house will never lose value again’ levels of bullshit! By chance do you have a link to the discussion of tranche? I’d love to both read that piece and possibly post it elsewhere.
That’s trillions, am I right? Do trillions of dollars actually exist or are they imaginary like “democracy” & “freedom”?
Why is Bannon still a source for anyone, let alone the NYTimes?
Bannon has bits of insider gossip to dole out and gives good pithy quotes. That’s all that matters in modern journalism.
Bannon still harbors dreams of coming out on top of the Great American Re-Org only he can see clearly. The techbros are a rival faction in his world, so he’ll take a swipe at any opportunity, such as when journalists call looking for a pithy quote for a “story”.
The notion of Steve Bannon opining on the “quintessential example of ethical conflicts” in the Trump Administration is rather rich.
So to speak.
No one gets rich like Trump gets rich. See the investments in Jared’s investment fund at the end of Trump 1.0, and the multitude of things since then. The Guardian had a rundown a couple of months ago that is sadly now out of date, but still provides a sense of what the Standard Operating Procedure seems to be.
Considering the corruption is so out in the open these days (see the Rolex and engraved gold bar given to Trump by Switzerland) it’s hard to imagine how much worse it could get–but the cynic in me has faith that it will continue to get worse. His supporters don’t see the corruption as a problem–they want to know how they can do the same.
Sean
As titans of the cruel, extremist, uniquely American version of capitalism, not to mention their obsession with waste, fraud and abuse (when it applies to others), Tech Bros should be the last people on the planet to deserve a govt bailout.
As an aside, David Sacks’ daughter, Reagan, was just presented to international society in Paris this weekend at Le Bal de Debutantes.
https://www.hellomagazine.com/fashion/royal-style/869709/best-dressed-le-bal-des-debutantes-2025/
So I am sure that he has what is best for the common man front and center in his mind.