The GenX Files: David Sacks, Subpoenaed By Twitter, Enemy of the State
The GenX Files: David Sacks, Subpoenaed By Twitter, Enemy of the State
The damage wrought by the roguish billionaire continues apace
“If meritocracy exists anywhere on earth, it is in Silicon Valley.” — David Sacks, as quoted in the New York Times, December 23, 2014.
It is said that one of the tricks of rock stars is that they don’t want you to know that they had parents. As with rock stars, so too, with the tech oligarchy.
You’re supposed to look on with wonder and not ask yourself if, perhaps, there’s more going on beneath the carefully constructed story. You’re not supposed to ask if it might all be a lie and what the purpose of that lie might be. It’s bad form and in bad taste.
I was recently asked by a friend in Northern Virginia to write about the subject of the private tech empires and how they intersect with the nation state and how the nation state might reclaim some of its power. America, he said, is going through its own ‘Jack Ma’ moment and the very wealthy will be permitted to come on team America… or be destroyed. Their fortunes will be pressed into the service of the state, or at least a portion of them. The smart ones have already been turned already. The dumb ones think that their predatory behavior — Thiel with his weird fellowship and Musk with his literal child miners — won’t catch up with them.
My North Virginia friend implored me to help with what parts of the network were salvageable. I said that I would. “Direct your forensic skills to telling the true story of the American tech oligarchy,” he said. In a just world, I’d even get a book deal.
I confess that I saw the subject of chronicling the private empires as somewhat mammoth. That is, until we consider that these empires are all around us, warping our economy and distorting the sorts of companies which are backed and not backed by Silicon Valley cash. These empires just don’t look like empires but they have all the features of a royal court with the best minds of my generation turned into reluctant consiglieres or courtiers. As if to rub it in Sacks once hosted a Marie Antoinette themed 40th birthday party. Let them eat cake!
This sort of thing is deeply obnoxious but it is revealing and the rumor mill has noticed. When I told a few friends that I was writing about Sacks they pointed out how much of a dick he was — even for PayPal standards.
There’s too much focus on Sacks’s alleged anti-feminism and I can’t add anything there.
So, drawing inspiration from the Twitter subpoenas against Chamath Palihapitiya, Steve Jurvetson, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, and Keith Rabois, we will examine each in turn. We may also include Joe Lonsdale and Larry Ellison, who also received subpoenas. We’ve already pointed out Chamath’s history of fraud here and we’ve discussed Elon Musk quite a bit already. (We don’t know as yet if Sequoia was also subpoenaed. but I think it’s fair to assume that it was.)
The decision to get involved with the Twitter deal has already resulted in quite a bit of problems for those involved. Qatar Investment Authority’s technology, media and telecommunications head Sumit Pande resigned abruptly right after proposing Qatar get involved in the $44B deal.
Discussing the GenX files will also involve telling the story about the predatory, tragic nature of Gen X tech investors, who have benefitted from their close ties to China and position at Stanford. Mikhail Gorbachev came to campus and declared “the ideas and technologies of tomorrow are born here in California.” It was, I suspect, easy to get swept up in the end of history as the US looked triumphant against the Soviet Union and Silicon Valley got billions in Chinese cash.
But as Silicon Valley ends, so, too, will they. Perhaps their departure for Miami reveals that the boom times have already ended and they want to retire to the decadence of the beach.
We begin with David Sacks, whom I have met but don’t know well. We do have quite a lot of friends in common, especially as Sacks holds forth on all his foreign policy views and throws around money in DC and California politics. A fool and his money are easily parted and all that.
I am, I have to say, somewhat loathe to hold too dearly the oddities of youth. I was, after all, an odd youth. And I, too, was a Claremont fellow though, as the Washington Post recounts, I have broken totally with the organization which I regard as dangerous to the civic discourse. Sacks then is an example to me of the sort of thing I might have become. Indeed he began his career in right-wing, neocon politics— just as I did. (I’ve since come to the view that such anti-social behavior is a posture, not a program, and certainly not politics.)
Still, once upon a time (and long before he was a billionaire) David Sacks stole Julie Ponzi’s car and drove to Las Vegas during his Claremont Publius fellowship. David’s defenders like to suggest that this was the impertinence of youth but I’m not so sure. I think it revealed a real character flaw.
I think David has been gambling ever since — with Silicon Valley money, with Chinese money, and most of all, with American security. He has played politics at the highest levels. His ascent from young fellow at the Heritage Foundation to start up impresario to self-declared bien pensant in foreign policy has been breathtaking to say the least.
In fact I no longer believe that it is Peter Thiel who is the don of the PayPal mafia but his co-author, David Sacks. Sacks doesn’t like the term mafia but then mafiosas so rarely do. They prefer to call themselves euphemistic terms, like, say, entrepreneur, or perhaps venture capitalist. (I wonder if that’s the new “movie producer” or “investor.”)
Sacks preferred the term diaspora.
“It’s not a club. It’s more like a diaspora movement,” Sacks said. “What basically happened is, you know, our homeland got taken over. They burned down our temple, and they kicked us out. We’re more like the Jews than, like the Sicilians.” (The Founders, p. 394)
The distinction may be without a difference and neglects the longstanding ways in which the Sicilians were in cahoots with the Jewish mob. (Incidentally a very good book about this subject — But He Was Good To His Mother: The Lives and Crimes of Jewish Gangsters (2000) — makes the subtext explicit. There were Jewish gangsters too. Indeed much of the State of Israel owes its very existence to these gangster Jews, like Meyer Lansky, whose life is chronicled in the eponymous 2021 bio pic, Lansky.)
I’ve long had the view that PayPal itself was a money laundry and that the cardinal sin of eBay was in acquiring the company. Just look at who PayPal partnered with! Deutsche Bank! Joi Ito’s IdeaLab!
Could it be that eBay took out a money laundering operation by acquiring it? It does, in fact, seem to be just that. In subsequent posts we will examine the role that the deep politics plays in the formation of companies like eBay, Uber, and FanDuel.
For what it’s worth EBay’s CEO Meg Whitman went on to become Biden’s ambassador to Kenya which is not the posting you get without a deep state tie or two.
Who helped make it so easy to move money everywhere? That would be David Sacks, the only PayPal employee to beat Peter Thiel at chess.
By their investments ye shall know them. Let’s take a look at Sacks’s book of business.
It’s my contention that each of these investments has an intelligence tinge.
Bird, electric scooters
Couldn’t we have figured out better uses for rare earths materials than a bunch of scooters? Why is Sacks’s the second largest investor in Bird?
The lion share of Bird’s rare earths came from the Democratic Republic of Congo — which are mined by children.
Geni.
Genealogy is very important in espionage. Polish intelligence would only recruit agents once they knew genealogy up to three generations. On his podcast Steve Hsu recounts how people in China from prominent families have their family books. Making legible family ties is a key asset of any state’s intelligence service. Geni was, of course, sold to MyHeritage, itself a Chisraeli project.
Yammer.
Yammer is the way of spying on all the goings on at major companies. ‘Nuff said.
Zenefits.
Zenefits became the first ever Silicon Valley startup to be sanctioned by the SEC for wholesale regulatory violations. Incredibly Sacks skated from being drawn into the SEC’s ire.
Right-wing tech. Sacks sold Locals, designed naturally by an Israeli intelligence connected programmer, to Rumble, backed by J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel. Their parent company — Truth Social — is under investigation by the Feds. (Rumble has a big investor in Cantor Fitzgerald’s own Howard Lutnick).
Movies. Thank You For Smoking — a send up of PR culture. Chris Buckley’s novel. Curiously the movie departs from the book in key ways. (Nick Naylor actually goes to prison in the book. Without the prison there simply isn’t any moral arc to his character, which, I’ve come to think is precisely what Sacks and his co-producers were getting at. ) What are we to make of Buckley’s involvement as the chief speechwriter for George H.W. Bush? Sacks recently said that he bought the rights to The Founders and he hopes to turn it into a docuseries like The Last Dance. The hagiography continues…
Politics. JD Vance, Mayor Francisco Suarez, and Michael Shellenberger. Sacks proposed and promised funding Shellenberger’s campaign to the tune of millions but failed to deliver more than a few hundred thousand. He was a cheerleader of the recall Newsom campaign which utterly failed.
So who is David Sacks? And what does he want?
In a word, power.
His recent donations show it in his unctuous way.
Sacks oddly seems to have donated to Hillary Clinton.
Consider that the next time you hear him prattle on about how the “foreign policy” establishment getting things wrong, as he did with Robert Wright.
It’s hard to get more foreign policy establishment than being a Hill Shill.
But the system is responding to him.
Sacks was recently subpoenaed in the Twitter matter to which he has responded by giving the finger — literally.
Sacks continues to tweet about the subpoena and to be defiant. Frankly I think the Delaware courts should sanction him.
It doesn’t have to be this adversarial. Sacks could take the money he’s made and do meaningful things. And he needn’t look far.
After all, David Sacks’s father — Dr. Harold S. Sacks — did meaningful work first in Africa and later in Tennessee.
Sacks’s father worked on diabetes. But the very GOP which Sacks backs to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars opposes a $35 cap on insulin prices. Like Sacks, it, too, seeks to gouge people.
More to come…