Are Musk Lieutenants David Sacks and Jason Calacanis Actually In "The Mob"?
Are Musk Lieutenants David Sacks and Jason Calacanis Actually In "The Mob"?
Is the PayPal mafia actually a mafia?
A recent high net worth individual I met with told me that he believed we are in a new geopolitical reality — that we are essentially making it up as we go — and that 2023 could well be one of the most significant years of my life.
“You only make money on the turning,” he said. “For my father’s generation that turning was 1991. For us, it’s now. What you do in this coming year will determine the rest of your life. Things are happening.”
These are the moments where things are made up on the fly.
This HNWI is connected to the PayPal mafia and a close business partner of one of the main players and so I’ve thought a lot about this PayPal photo in light of recent events.
I’ve elsewhere argued that David Sacks deserves more attention than he has gotten as the real don of the PayPal mafia and in this piece, I’ll examine his and Jason Calacanis’s considerable ties to organized crime.
These ties are timely, especially given Musk’s own ties to organized crime and given the advice that both Calcanis and Sacks give Musk and indeed the wider tech community.
There are two seminal moments in the 20th century that are on a collusion course. The first is, of course, World War II and its aftermath undergirds much of the global order even today. Every major global institution owes its existence to this period when the oligarch fortunes — Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller — were dragooned into the service of the state. The best book on this period is Inderjeet Parmar’s Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power.
The second, perhaps equally important though far less studied, is the collapse of the Soviet Union and attendant descent of the greater Russian empire into criminal bedlam. Why precisely the Soviet Union fell deserves a post in its own right, but suffice it to say, I’ve come to conclude that much of what happened is that the CIA director-turned-President George H. W. Bush worked with the Chinese to end the Soviet Union as a going geopolitical concern after the plot to topple the Chinese — Tiananmen Square — more or less failed. (If you haven’t read Seymour Hersh’s piece on the George H. W. Bush tenure, I highly recommend it.)
China, who had backed Putin since his days as vice mayor of St. Petersburg, ultimately wound up being the beneficiary, while America’s drunken proxy — Yeltsin — more or less collapsed under the weight of criminal drunken mismanagement. The teetotaler Putin and his oligarchs looted Russia and sold whatever they could to the Chinese and the Germans. Russia has become a vassal state of China — a gangster ridden resource colony masquerading as a country.
Chimerica became the new global order and American money would flow to China to purchase cheap goods manufactured by what were essentially slaves. The Chinese, having got those dollars, would deploy them in myriad ways, such as Jared Kushner family’s real estate funds, bribes to Latin America or African despots, or tech investing through Sequoia.
A better way to think about this is that China and America ruled the global order, more or less together, always uneasily. Neither one fully trusts one another, of course, and so they installed immigrants to act as “go between” between their respective empires: Steve Jurvetson (Estonia), Peter Thiel (Germany), Paul Graham and Michael Moritz (Britain), Sergey Brin (Russia), Luke Nosek (Poland), Elon Musk and Roelof Botha (South Africa), Max Levchin (Ukraine) and so on. The essential things — Amazon and Ali Baba — remained firmly in the hands of the American and Chinese deep state respectively precisely because of their value to the intelligence community.
You can get a real sense of this period by reading Sebastian Mallaby’s The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future. Mallaby’s book, though, is a bit dated despite having just come out. He didn’t look at the intelligence or organized crime ties or both of many of the people he profiled. He treated them more or less as the legends they claim to be.
At each of these seminal moments there’s a sort of new founding that takes place. Post-World War II, it was the Foundations. Post-Cold War, it was the Founders. What we are witnessing now is the Founders being turned—or crushed.
Writer Wes Clark Jr. — fresh off of his essential podcast American Psyop — says that everyone who had ops run against them had some tie in to the American founding. His experience jibs with mine. I am a son of the American Revolution on both sides of my family and yes, I have been targeted by foreign intelligence operations on U.S. soil in part because I have been so critical of a lot of the tech ecosystem. I have even been blacklisted by some of these oligarchs.
As in Russia, so, too, in America. Just as with the Russian oligarchs, so too with the Founders—an elite which has been perched on top of us, to loot us, to addict us, and to raid us, and to grind us. This elite is in large measure a fake elite because it has no sense of noblesse olige and indeed, nothing ties it to the United States, or even conventional morality as we might understand it. Musk banned people from seeing where his private jet was flying is so that we might not notice that it was flying to known drug corridors. We aren’t supposed to talk about or even know the role that the drug world plays in technological developments.
In ZIRP world, information, people, goods must flow at all costs and yes, that does include drugs of which Musk is a fan.
There are these moments where things are made up on the fly and so in those moments, you need a charlatan to sell your vision of the world. You need a hype man.
You need a David Sacks or a Jason Calacanis promoting and supporting your lies.
We will turn first to Sacks who seemingly married into the mob.
In other words David Sacks married into the mob.
Jason Calacanis, by contrast, was born into the mob. Jason’s father ran a mob bar called Beards. The bar was not successful. The U.S. Marshals “came with shotguns and took everything” and took all the money. He described his “childhood as the first act of Goodfellas.”
Calacanis “started working at his dad’s bar very early on, where he claims to have been exposed to a lot of commerce that awakened in him an interest in money and power,” and “ [Calacanis] would receive tips from cops, members of the mafia, hippies, and Hell’s Angels.”
Calacanis continued with the strange mob ties into adulthood. Here he is with an interviewer in 2020.
Ben: Jason, I'm going to deviate from our little outline here a little bit. I know you're a prolific poker player, I know semi-pro is the right word but you play with pros, you're friends with pros. A lot of your investing patterns sort of match poker patterns.
Jason: Informed by, yeah.
Ben: Yeah. Did that start here?
Jason: I was exposed to gambling at a very young age. I didn't participate in it. My exposure to poker came when I was in New York. A friend of mine, Adeo Ressi, who started the Founder's Institute just started a $20, $30 poker game. Myself, Scott Heiferman from meetup.com, Nick Denton had come to a couple of games, Jeff Dodgiest from Razorfish and now, One Drop, which I'm an investor in, just a bunch of the Silicon Alley folks would play cards and I'd play cards with them. It was like one of those card games where people said, "What's better, a straight or a flush?" I had to look it up kind of thing.
Ben: You have the whole card next to you on the table or you're sort of referencing it?
Jason: Yeah, literally. That was like that. It was just an excuse. We used to play down at a place called Forlini's, which is still down in Chinatown, which is like an Italian restaurant and leave it at that. We used to play in the back. If you go to the back table, it says Tuesday poker group, there's a little placard on the wall. Basically, cards too.
Forlini’s, which recently closed, was a mob hangout spot.
My friends Eric Garland and Sinews of War rightly ask the question of who was backing Jason’s Silicon Valley spotting.
I’ve more or less concluded that Calacanis acted as a spotter for organized crime in New York to put money into tech deals.
He’s expanded from there. He’s now a scout for Sequoia, the Chinese-backed venture fund.
Oh, and did I mention he was a great pal of Jeffrey Epstein? And also of Russian front Esther Dyson?
In taking down the mob it was always essential to focus on the lieutenants. I recommend starting with the blabbermouths.
Generation X is losing the geopolitical moment.
The intelligence community is taking control — and that’s a good thing.