Clinton, Iowa, is topographically flat and economically declining. The sawmills that made the city rich in the late 19th century have been repurposed as a museum. One of the Victorian mansions long since abandoned by the old lumber barons is open for tours, but tourists are scarce. Clinton has shrunk to about 24,000 people, and the town center, along the Mississippi River, feels nearly empty. On the west side, miles of deep-green corn and soy fields are crisscrossed with transmission wires and zoned for heavy industrial use. The city’s economic activity includes corn processing, pet-food production, and methamphetamines. With available land and a dire need for investment, Clinton seems like the perfect place for a gigantic data center.

In January, a Clintonian named Stephen Figg, who owns a small firm that builds technological infrastructure, including for data centers, heard from a customer that a broker was making inquiries about buying farmland on the west side, north of Highway 30. In mid-February, a father of two girls named Ryan Wisor, who had obtained a residential exemption to live in that area, noticed surveyors with boring rigs working in the field behind the house he’d built. He asked his stepsister, who sits on the city council, if she knew of a planned development. Several weeks later, she told him of a proposal for a data center. He learned that the project would border his house on two sides and come to within 65 feet of his well.

For almost two years, city officials, utility companies, and a pro-business nonprofit, Grow Clinton, had been in discussions about the construction of a data center in Clinton. It later emerged that an international developer called Quality Technology Services (QTS), owned by the trillion-dollar private-equity firm Blackstone, planned to build one of the country’s largest AI data centers—10 buildings of 500,000 square feet each—on behalf of a client that remains anonymous. Private meetings, nondisclosure agreements, and even a code name (“Saturday River”) had kept the plan’s existence quiet until Andy Sokolovich, the president of Grow Clinton, unveiled the proposal at a county-board meeting on April 27. He had wanted to keep the project confidential longer, but word was getting out.

Theresa Andrews, a quality analyst at a chemical company, had heard a rumor in mid-March about a development planned for the cornfields in her area, but she’d blown it off. After watching the April 27 county meeting online, she went on the city’s website and noticed dozens of requests for information about the status of parcels of farmland; a few of them were right across the street from her house. Andrews stayed up late for several nights creating a spreadsheet of the parcels and then a map of the projected site. The scale was almost unimaginable: 1,100 acres, or 832 football fields—about the size of Central Park. This would be a “hyperscale” data center, and it turned out to be far along. From FOIA requests, Andrews learned that plans for upgrading utilities in the area had been in the works since 2024.

This was how the Data-Center Rebellion of 2026 came to Clinton, Iowa. Not through Chinese propaganda, or misinformation on social media—though both are plentiful—but because a small group of residents accidentally got wind of a megaproject planned for their community. Andrews, Wisor, Figg, and others had concerns about water consumption, electrical-grid capacity, soil contamination, low-frequency sound waves, nonstop light, an invasion of out-of-state contractors, and—for those in the leviathan’s shadow—the permanent destruction of their rural life. “There’s no proven history of these things,” Wisor told me. He imagined playing in the yard with his 9-year-old daughter and worrying what their colossal new neighbor might be doing to his family’s health. “I go sit outside and all I think is, This could all be gone. You can’t turn it off.”

Large numbers of Clintonians began to attend contentious city-council meetings. On June 9, the council voted down a proposal for a 120-day moratorium that would have allowed more time to assess the risks of something so immense and unknown. The city proceeded to draft an ordinance for a data center’s construction and use. Legally, QTS could begin without one. According to Andrews, city officials “were trying to tell us we have to hurry and get the ordinance in place so QTS won’t just start building: ‘You should want us to push fast.’ ” Instead, she and other citizens formed Clintonians Against Data Centers.

Even in a city as small as Clinton, the seven members of the group’s steering committee—four women and three men, all white, most of them middle-aged—were at first strangers to one another. The group includes Republicans and Democrats, probably more of the former, but they didn’t know one another’s political affiliations and didn’t seem to want to. Political comments unrelated to artificial intelligence are scrubbed from the Facebook page. “It’s a fun collection in terms of their politics,” Chris Baldus, the editor of the Clinton Herald, told me. “Outside of this, there’s no way in hell these people are talking to each other.”

Celeste Robbins, who works in law enforcement and describes herself as both “artsy” and “very religious,” is a disenchanted Trump voter. “If you want to get rich as a state or as a town,” the president said in September, “you’re going to want a data center.” Robbins told me, “I do not agree with him about this.” She lives far from the proposed site, and her opposition comes down to AI itself: She hates the ease with which it replaces human thought, and she fears the mass elimination of jobs. Figg, who couldn’t bring himself to vote for either candidate in the last presidential election, has worked in tech all his life and welcomes the progress that AI might bring. He had just finished eight months of work on an Amazon data center in Indiana when he learned about the proposal for Clinton. He started attending city-council meetings to offer his expertise. “But the more that I try to provide this knowledge to the city and the city council and the mayor, the less receptive they are,” he told me. “That makes it very difficult for me to want to continue that pursuit instead of the pursuit of just trying to prevent it.”

With four children and a small business, Figg had never been involved in local activism before joining Clintonians Against Data Centers.

According to a recent NBC poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of a data center in their area. Kevin Bradley of Clintonians Against Data Centers observed that this many Americans haven’t agreed on anything since 9/11: “This is affecting all of us—rich, middle-class, and poor. We’re coming together because we’re not happy.” More than 500 jurisdictions have passed moratoriums or bans. This grassroots movement rose so fast and spread so widely that politicians in both parties, including Iowa’s candidates for governor and senator, are struggling to catch up with their constituents. The meteoric emergence of the data-center rebellion is a response to the speed and scale of construction, which in turn reflect the sudden ubiquity of generative and agentic AI. President Trump’s policy has been to turn everything about the technology, including data-center construction, over to private industry. He derides people like Robbins, Figg, and Andrews for wanting to remain “backwards and poor.” But on this issue, most of Trump’s base remains angry and opposed to him; the only precedent might be the case of Jeffrey Epstein. By pushing so hard and promising so much, tech companies, venture capitalists, and their political allies ensured that AI would create a firestorm.

Supporters of data centers point out the benefits—jobs, tax revenues, the many advantages of AI itself. Clinton’s mayor, Scott Maddasion, told me that the project could bring $20 million in annual property taxes to a city with a $24 million budget. Sokolovich, of Grow Clinton, told me it would be closer to $30 million. He said that QTS has requested no tax incentives and will pay for 100 percent of the utility improvements required for the center to operate. A spokesman for Alliant Energy, the region’s regulated electric utility, promised residents that costs related to the data center’s extreme demand would not fall on existing customers.

[Read: The one town that wants a data center]

Clintonians Against Data Centers was not immune to bad information and conspiracist thinking. One member speculated that the sudden appearance around Clinton this past spring of three giant trolls, sculpted from local reclaimed lumber by the Danish artist Thomas Dambo to commemorate the trees consumed by the sawmills, had been funded by QTS to create a “diversion.” A pro-data-center councilman mocked Robbins when, after touring another QTS project in Cedar Rapids, she reported having seen only one bird. Baldus, the newspaper editor, complained that the opposition doesn’t understand how city government works, “and they come in hot.” Sokolovich analogized data-center opposition to COVID skepticism and election denialism.

But the facts about water consumption and tax revenues, though important, are not the crux of the matter. Opposition to data centers comes from a deeper concern than NIMBYism, resource misuse, or environmental harm. Over and over, Clintonians expressed a feeling of being misled, ignored, disrespected, betrayed—of having no say over basic matters in their own lives. The data center seemed to be a deal made among secretive insiders—huge, far-off entities in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in Washington, as well as the local leaders of their own city. To the tech giants, QTS, Blackstone, and the Trump administration’s AI boosters, Clinton is an empty space on the Mississippi that looks like an opportunity. That the industry seeking to buy 1,100 acres on the west side of town is in the business of replacing human beings with machines—and perhaps, according to some AI experts, even rendering them extinct—only intensifies a sense of powerlessness.

The data-center rebellion, with its local origins and compounding grievances, is thoroughly American. In the 18th century, rural citizens rose up against heavy taxes and farm seizures. In the early 20th century, a time in many ways similar to our own, Louis Brandeis spoke of the “curse of bigness”: concentrations of money and power so great that the individual almost ceases to exist, and democracy itself is threatened. Like other heartland communities, Clinton has suffered “a history of abandonment,” Matt Parbs, the vice president of Grow Clinton, acknowledged. “Clinton since 1980 has internalized the downturn in midwestern industry.” What if, in a few years, 5 million square feet of steel, concrete, computer servers, and microchips in the cornfields become obsolete and go the way of the sawmills, or of the liberal-arts college in Clinton that was bought by a for-profit, moved entirely online, and closed?

I tried to imagine a hyper-scale data center engulfing the yard where Ryan Wisor’s daughter plays with the family’s chickens. Against such an immense force, with all the wealth, political power, technological sophistication, and claims of historical inevitability behind it, a sense of dignity can only raise a small voice in protest.

In a city the size of Clinton, the controversy over the data center was bound to hurt personal relationships. Linda Chapman, whose husband was the city’s fire marshal, knows all seven members of the city council and has stopped trusting most of them. Wisor and his stepsister on the council no longer speak. Andy Sokolovich, of Grow Clinton, can’t appear in public without someone sticking a phone camera in his face and asking him incendiary questions. The mayor received a death threat. But the converse is also true: To get anything done, Clintonians can’t just abuse one another on Facebook or podcasts. They have to sit in a room together and talk face-to-face.

Throughout the summer, the city pushed ahead with an ordinance while Clintonians Against Data Centers kept raising objections that were mostly ignored, hoping to stall the process until QTS decided to look elsewhere.

In early September, I attended a council meeting where the language of the ordinance was to be hammered out. To accommodate several hundred people, the meeting was held not at city hall, but in a cavernous pole-frame lodge at the northern end of the city, in a park overlooking the river. The president and vice president of Grow Clinton were not present. “I don’t want to say I’m intimidated, but the opposition has been vocal,” Sokolovich told me. “I’m growing weary of it.” Baldus, of the Clinton Herald, attended grudgingly, out of professional duty; he didn’t seem to regard coverage of the data center as the most exciting opportunity for his paper. Theresa Andrews, who was routinely staying up past 3 a.m. to research the issues and prepare for meetings, arrived with a tense look on her face and a binder full of scientific studies on topics such as the effects of noise and light on livestock.

The seven members of the steering committee, some in green CLINTONIANS AGAINST DATA CENTERS T-shirts, sat at a long table with their backs to the audience, facing Mayor Maddasion, the council, and other city officials. This would be a parley between two groups in which everyone now knew everyone. The mayor, an Air Force veteran in his early 40s with a receding hairline, slender and mild, gaveled the meeting to order and led the room in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

The meeting went on for more than five hours, while darkness fell over the Mississippi. With a draft of the data-center ordinance on the table in front of him, the mayor briskly led the council members and city officials through it section by section and took their comments. Then he heard out the criticisms and suggestions of Clintonians Against Data Centers. The most contentious issue was setbacks—the required distance between data-center buildings and neighboring residential properties. The draft ordinance called for 1,000 feet. Andrews, quoting a study from counties in Pennsylvania, argued for 1,500 feet—a distance that might make the whole project untenable. A councilman named Cody Seeley, who did most of the talking for the pro-data-center side, said that the developer and property owners could negotiate the setbacks, adding, “I think 500 feet is adequate,” which also happened to be QTS’s position.

Cries from the audience of “No! No!” The mayor called for silence. Ryan Wisor, for whom the setback question meant the defense of his homestead, said with a slight quaver in his voice: “My frustration is this ordinance is meant to protect the citizens and our property. This isn’t meant to conform so that we can fit a particular business in a particular piece of land.” He added, “For us to give up our rights, it’s not fair.” General applause. It was the emotional high point of the night.

I found the proceedings both mind-numbing and inspiring. The seriousness of purpose, the attention to detail, the stamina required to talk and listen—all of it moved me more than it seemed to impress anyone involved. Clintonians Against Data Centers still felt patronized and ignored. Perhaps the council came away exasperated with the NIMBYs and gadflies who were making the process such an ordeal. (Later, the mayor admitted to me, “We’re learning that there’s probably more ways that we can communicate with the citizens.”) In all likelihood, this small populist uprising will not achieve its goal; a hyperscale data center will come to Clinton, Iowa, amid widespread unhappiness and damaged friendships; and AI will continue to roll over the fields of the republic. But a democratic pulse was still beating along the Mississippi River. That was something.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Great Data-Center Rebellion.”

Illustrations by Mike McQuade

The courtship between Silicon Valley and MAGA was consummated on June 6, 2024, in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street known as “Billionaires’ Row,” at the 22,000-square-foot, $45 million French-limestone mansion of a venture capitalist named David Sacks. Along with Chamath Palihapitiya, a fellow venture capitalist and a colleague on the All-In podcast, Sacks hosted a fundraiser for Donald Trump. He knew that other technology titans were coming around to the ex-president but remained in the closet. “And I think that this event is going to break the ice on that,” Sacks said on the podcast the week before the fundraiser. “And maybe it’ll create a preference cascade, where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth.”

A few years earlier, Sacks had described the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as an “insurrection” and pronounced Trump “disqualified” from ever again holding national office. “What Trump did was absolutely outrageous, and I think it brought him to an ignominious end in American politics,” he said on the podcast a few days after the event. “He will pay for it in the history books, if not in a court of law.” Palihapitiya was more colloquial, calling Trump “a complete piece-of-shit fucking scumbag.” These might seem like tricky positions to climb down from—but the path that leads from scathing denunciation through gradual accommodation to sycophantic embrace of Trump is a well-worn pilgrimage trail. The journey is less wearisome for self-mortifiers who never considered democracy (a word seldom spoken on the podcast) all that important in the first place. One prominent traveler who had already shown the way was a guest at the fundraiser—Senator J. D. Vance, whose attendance helped close the deal on his selection as Trump’s running mate. Any lingering awkwardness between the hosts and their guest of honor was dispelled by the fundraiser’s $12 million haul, much of it from cryptocurrency moguls.

Opportunist doesn’t really describe Sacks. He doesn’t come across as slippery or two-faced. There’s no evasive glance or roguish smile. He can argue at great length, in a steady sinal drone, with an aggressive debater’s ability to make an evidence-based case for any position he holds—but the position always happens to coincide with his benefit. The only consistent principle of his career is a ruthless devotion to self-interest. Sacks has identified as a “libertarian conservative” all of his adult life, but he has sought government intervention on behalf of his investments when it’s suited him. In 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, Sacks demanded that the federal government bail out the uninsured deposits of start-up companies, much of the money from crypto firms. “Some libertarians care about the freedom of only one person,” Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur, investor, and right-wing provocateur, once said of his friend Sacks.

[From the May 2026 issue: What Noah Hawley learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat]

In this sense, though Trump is impulsive and narcissistic while Sacks is cold-eyed and logical, they are well matched. “Sacks is a spirit animal for part of the president’s brain,” a former Biden-administration official told me. “The plutocratic part.” After the election, the new president appointed Sacks as his special adviser, or “czar,” for AI and crypto. After decades of keeping as far from Washington as possible, Silicon Valley would finally have its own man in the White House.

But Sacks has always taken a dim view of politics. At 25, appearing on a C‑SPAN talk show while still in law school, he expressed a preference for “the ethos of Wall Street” over “the ethos of Washington” and quoted Calvin Coolidge on the business of America being business, avowing: “I’d probably rather live in a greedy country where people don’t share than in an envious country where people are stealing from each other.”

Sacks went to Washington on behalf of business, including his own. But business and politics demand different, sometimes opposing talents. “Sacks’s policies are misaligned with his own party,” a congressional aide with a close view of how Sacks operates in Washington told me. “He doesn’t really understand how D.C. works.” His efforts in government on behalf of the tech industry have exposed the president to the charge that Trump is selling out his populist base on behalf of the country’s richest men, driving a wedge through the MAGA coalition.

Sacks once called a rare victory over Thiel in a game of chess one of the greatest moments of his life. In a photo, his arms are raised skyward, ecstatic disbelief on his face. He spent the early years of his career as a kind of junior partner in Thiel’s shadow. Sacks was born in 1972 in South Africa, and moved to the United States at age 5. He grew up in Memphis and attended an elite boys’ prep school before going on to Stanford University. As a sophomore with right-wing views he inevitably gravitated toward Thiel, who was by then in law school, and joined The Stanford Review, the conservative campus publication that Thiel had started as an undergrad. It took aim at the politically correct orthodoxy and anti-Western ideology that swept over American higher education in the late ’80s and early ’90s and never really left. But the outnumbered young conservatives’ mockery almost always overshot the target. An entire issue was devoted to making light of rape, including a contribution from Sacks that challenged whether statutory rape should be a crime. (He has since expressed regret for some of his youthful writings.)

Thiel was determined to be a public intellectual like his hero William F. Buckley, so he began writing a book on left-wing campus extremism. When he found the work too onerous, he turned the research over to Sacks, and they co-authored The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, published in 1995 by a libertarian think tank. Sacks attended the University of Chicago Law School, but law was too much like the detested public sector, and in 1999, when Thiel co-founded an online-payments company in Palo Alto that was soon to be called PayPal, Sacks left a consulting job to lead the company’s product team. He made important contributions to PayPal’s success; by various accounts, including Sacks’s own, he was also known for telling co-workers in blunt terms that they were wrong. A former colleague told me that with Sacks, “there’s masters and there’s slaves. He doesn’t have partners: ‘You do what I tell you to do, or you’re one of the few people that tell me what you want me to do.’ ” The former colleague added, “Part of his drive is that he believes he is one of the small number of elite people who really get it and are capable.” (The former colleague and some other Silicon Valley sources requested anonymity to discuss a figure who has power over their businesses; some government officials requested anonymity to speak about White House conversations, because they were not authorized to talk about them. Sacks declined to be interviewed.)

PayPal became famous for surviving the dot-com crash in 2000, and for producing a spawn of Silicon Valley stars known as the PayPal Mafia, including Sacks. Roger McNamee, a longtime tech investor, watched its success with admiration and apprehension. The PayPal Mafia saw before anyone else that the cost of starting an internet company was going to drop significantly. “They realized that the limits on processing power were going to go away,” McNamee told me. But these 20- and 30-somethings were not inspired in the same way that the founders of earlier Silicon Valley companies were: “They didn’t follow the vision of Steve Jobs, that tech can democratize power. They came to get rich.” McNamee added, “If their value system had been different, we would have a completely different country today.”

I met Sacks in 2011, at a dinner at Thiel’s house in San Francisco with a small group of entrepreneurs and investors, most of them PayPal alumni. They despised higher education, worshipped the creators of tech companies, wanted to found libertarian colonies on the high seas and be cryogenically frozen for future resurrection—eccentric outliers then, but forerunners of a broader political trend in the Valley. One guest was an AI expert named Eliezer Yudkowsky. Last year, he co-authored If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, which concludes that artificial superintelligence will kill literally every human being on Earth—thereby causing Thiel to label him “a legionnaire of the Antichrist.”

[Read: AI is grown, not built]

Sacks seemed the most normal of the group. He was a businessman with conventional libertarian views, more optimistic than Thiel about the economic power of the internet, less apocalyptic about the decline and fall of “Western civilization,” a key term in The Diversity Myth that Sacks seldom used after publication, showing no consistent ideological attachment other than to capitalism. His distaste for politics remained strong. “This is the battle,” Sacks told me. “Can the web disrupt the rest of the economy, or does the old economy fight back using politics to keep the new economy from taking over?” At the time we spoke, he was trying to disrupt the car-wash business. He had invested in an app that allowed you to send your car’s location to a person who would come wash it while you were off getting sushi or founding a company or taking a meeting in Hong Kong. The app, called Cherry, lasted only a year, but Sacks did better with another early-stage investment in a company that sent a town car to pick you up. “It’s totally disrupted the taxi business,” Sacks said of Uber, with undisguised pleasure.

He did extremely well, with a movie he co-produced in 2005 (Thank You for Smoking ), with a company he co-founded in 2008 (a Slack-like social network for businesses called Yammer), and with his investments: in Facebook, Palantir, and SpaceX after PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002; in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies after he sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012. That year, he threw himself a Marie Antoinette–themed 40th birthday party in a rented ancien régime–style Los Angeles mansion, with special guest Snoop Dogg. “Part of believing in capitalism is you don’t have to feel guilty,” Sacks told me.

He conducted himself in the usual way of an aristocrat of the second Gilded Age: buying lavish properties, contributing to mainstream politicians (Mitt Romney in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016), and guarding his family’s privacy. He deplored the deterioration of urban life and funded the recall of San Francisco’s ultraprogressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin. Unlike Thiel, he didn’t publish writings on reactionary philosophers and the virtues of monopolistic capitalism.

The politics of the Valley was always a liberal sort of libertarianism: pro-choice, pro-immigration, idealistic, even utopian, arrogant about its mission of empowering individuals and connecting humanity, but indifferent to and ignorant of government, with an engineer’s contempt for the creaky workings of bureaucracy and the cluelessness of elected officials. Leave us alone to do our magic, which you can’t possibly understand, and everyone will benefit.

But about a decade ago, tech’s free ride ran into trouble. In 2013 Marc Andreessen, an inventor of the first popular web browser in the ’90s and now one of the Valley’s most successful venture capitalists, predicted to me a public backlash against technology companies over privacy rights, intellectual property, and monopoly power. With more foresight he would have included the addictive and corrosive effects of social media. Three years later, in 2016, Facebook enabled Russian meddling in an election that inflamed American divisions and sent Trump to the White House.

Trump and his populist followers made Big Tech a favorite target; so did progressives such as Senator Elizabeth Warren. Under bipartisan pressure, Silicon Valley had to search for ways to keep the government out of its business. Executives and investors spent fortunes on lobbying and campaign contributions. Mark Zuckerberg showed up in Washington to stand before Congress with his hand raised—eyes wide, as if stunned by the reality of representative government—and explain in tortured sentences why Facebook’s platforms weren’t driving America’s children to anxiety and depression while shredding the country’s civic ligature.

“Concern with tech monopoly was big in the first Trump administration,” Tim Wu, an antitrust expert and a professor at Columbia Law School who served in the White House under President Biden, told me. “This has been largely forgotten, but the first Trump administration brought the first cases against Facebook, which are under appeal, and against Google, which we won under Biden.” Biden’s Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust division of his Justice Department pushed anti-monopoly policies even harder. The tech giants “wanted to be able to get in and tell us what to do about everything,” Wu said.

Still, the confrontation between Washington and Silicon Valley under Biden was more rhetorical than substantive. His administration failed to push through any meaningful regulation of the industry, and its legislative achievements in infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing, and clean energy directly benefited the technology sector. Yet during Biden’s presidency a highly visible element of Silicon Valley turned against the Democrats. It became known as the tech right.

Its most famous figure was Thiel, who had kept a lonely vigil for Trump in Silicon Valley since 2016. But by the early 2020s its most vocal spokesperson was Andreessen. For the tech right, technology is Promethean fire. The founders of the most successful companies in the Valley play a godlike role, for they alone can save America and “Western civilization” from Europe’s hyper-regulated stagnation and from communist and Islamist totalitarianism. Fred Turner, a Stanford professor who studies the culture of technology, told me that deep within Silicon Valley’s libertarianism lies “the idea of a community of saints, of special people, entrepreneurs, philosopher kings.”

In 2023 Andreessen published a litany of pseudo-Nietzschean credos called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” On AI: “We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone—we are literally making sand think.” The AI revolution is coming, just as electricity did; it will exalt mankind, and any attempt at regulation would be tantamount to mass slaughter: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.” Among the “Patron Saints” of this cult of the entrepreneur, Andreessen included John Galt, the hero of every libertarian teen who reads Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and the 20th-century philosopher James Burnham, best known for predicting that the modern world would be run by an amoral class of “managers,” with the talented few ruling over a mass of semi-slaves. Elsewhere, Andreessen has said that oligarchy is inevitable.

The nearly hysterical voice of “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” is that of a man who has freed himself from a deeply uncomfortable position. Andreessen was a longtime contributor to Democratic candidates. The political change of Silicon Valley figures like him was less a conversion to Trumpism than a deconversion from liberalism, caused by pressure from below and above. In 2025 Andreessen told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat that the new progressivism of the 2010s had “radicalized” young tech workers, turning them into spiteful and, once COVID hit, indolent rebels who intimidated their white, male, for-profit bosses into bowing to the Great Awokening. Andreessen was willing to pay high taxes and support liberal causes and candidates as long as he was regarded as a hero. But during the past decade, what he called “the Deal”—admiration and a free hand for Silicon Valley in exchange for building great companies, making the world better, and supporting Democrats—was broken, when first young people and then the Biden administration turned against the tech industry.

According to Andreessen, the administration wanted to kill the entire cryptocurrency sector by keeping the regulatory rules vague while threatening companies with devastating enforcement actions. He also described a meeting that he and his partner were given with senior officials at the Biden White House in May 2024 that, from the point of view of early-stage venture capitalists, was apocalyptic. Regarding AI, Andreessen claimed, the Biden people declared that the whole industry would be limited to a few heavily regulated large companies, with no place for start-ups: Because social media had turned out to be a disaster for democracy, Silicon Valley had to be nationalized or destroyed. Out in the West Wing parking lot, Andreessen and his partner decided to support Trump in that year’s election.

(I spoke with former Biden officials who disputed what Andreessen claimed he and his partner were told about AI; if anything, the officials said, those present had simply predicted how the capital-intensive technology would play out in the next few years. They pointed to several administration efforts on AI and start-ups that directly contradicted Andreessen’s nightmare account of Biden’s policies. “He needed a conversion story,” one former official told me.)

In 2020, during the pandemic lockdowns, Sacks and three other venture capitalists started All-In; the weekly podcast would offer market analysis, political argument, and tech-bro banter about poker and cars. It made them famous online, with Sacks (nickname: “The Rainman”) the smartest, most conservative, and least funny of the four. Shortly after January 6, when Facebook and Twitter banned the soon-to-be-former president and other MAGA figures, Sacks stopped talking about Trump as a threat to democracy. Instead, he denounced the “Big Tech oligarchs” who were threatening free speech in “the biggest power grab in history.”

Free speech—at least as it concerned right-wing political figures—was Sacks’s entry point into MAGA, and he never let it go. Anytime one of the “besties” on All-In mentioned January 6, Sacks countered with claims of censorship. His rhetoric became more polemical, a return to his anti-PC youth, but now in the spirit of Trump, not William F. Buckley, as if he was talking himself into a new political identity. At times his enemies were woke oligarchs, at times mid-level technocrats, at times entry-level radicals, but always “elites.” He criticized the elite’s forever wars and trade giveaways to China, and “the collusion between Big Tech and our security state.” He called himself a “populist” and identified with the two-thirds of Americans who are working-class. In 2022, on the Honestly With Bari Weiss podcast, he said, “I think that the next Republican who’s going to be successful has to take a page out of TR’s”—Teddy Roosevelt’s—“playbook here, which is: ‘We do not represent the interests of these oligarchs and these big, powerful companies. We represent the interests of the working man and woman to have the right to free speech, to make a living, to conduct payments. And it should not be up to tech oligarchs to decide who has those rights.’ ”

[From the March 2024 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on the rise of techno-authoritarianism]

If venture-capital populism seems like a stretch, Sacks resolved it this way: End mass immigration of the mentally average, and you’d lay to rest the heartland’s suspicion of Silicon Valley. The solution to inequality is a smaller, less intrusive government, combined with unbridled technological innovation, which would inevitably increase productivity and wages. (Sacks was unaware or unconcerned that decades of unregulated tech and deregulated finance had coincided with growing economic inequality.) “If the Biden administration had only been letting in people with 150 IQs, we wouldn’t have this debate” about immigration, Sacks said on All-In. “If they were just letting in the Elons and the Jensens”—referring to Musk and Jensen Huang, the CEO of the chipmaker Nvidia—“we wouldn’t be having the same conversation today.”

After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Sacks voiced alarm about the dangers of American involvement in the conflict. Soon he adopted whole hog the “realist” line (which was also the Russian line) that NATO’s eastward expansion had provoked Vladimir Putin into a defensive war. No matter how often Putin claimed Ukraine as a historic part of imperial Russia, how many times he refused to negotiate seriously, how many provinces he annexed, how many Ukrainian civilians the Russian military killed and cities it destroyed, Sacks stuck by his theory. Eventually, it sank him into conspiratorial waters.

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s newest annexation is dire for Russia too]

“This is basically a manufactured conflict that I think really started with Russiagate,” Sacks said in a 2024 speech, “where somehow this fantasy was created that somehow Putin was controlling our elections.” The American left, the “neocons,” and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky managed to fool the U.S. and Europe into risking what Sacks called “Woke War III.” “Somehow, this Russiagate hoax has metastasized into a new cold war with Russia.”

It’s worth asking how someone so committed to facts and logic could end up spouting such nonsense. If Sacks made investment decisions on this basis, he would go bankrupt. An obvious explanation is that a successful businessman might not know much about history and politics. But an intellectual deficiency can be compounded by a moral one. It’s striking that the ordeal of a fragile democracy fighting for its life while under assault by an aggressive empire leaves Sacks so cold that he ends up sympathizing with the perpetrator. If you neutralize any sentiment of right and wrong, Ukraine just looks like a risky bet.

In the 2024 Republican presidential primary, Sacks supported Ron DeSantis—not because Trump had disqualified himself, but because he “just gives his political enemies so much to work with.” A moral objection had become a practical one—so when Trump blew away the Republican field, the final step to complete support was easy. Two weeks after the fundraiser, Trump was invited onto All-In and raved about the splendor of Sacks’s house. Sacks returned the compliment. That July, he delivered a six-and-a-half-minute speech for Trump at the Republican National Convention. By August, he had downgraded January 6 to a long-past event that admittedly “wasn’t great” but had been hyped by Democrats into a “fake coup.”

Jeff Giesea, a fellow Stanford Review alum and entrepreneur who had been a Trump supporter in 2016 before turning against MAGA, gave me a sympathetic account of the calculus made by Sacks and the tech right. “The story Sacks told himself, I imagine, is that, regardless of Trump’s flaws, the benefits to society from pro-tech policies would be a great improvement over an administration that was mired in safetyism and identity politics,” he said.

Sacks had taken the measure of Trump and found a kindred spirit. After getting to know the ex-president at the fundraiser and on the podcast, he reported his findings: “All of his instincts are Let’s empower the private sector; let’s cut regulations; let’s make taxes reasonable; let’s get the smartest people in the country; let’s have peace deals; let’s have growth. ”

In December 2024 Sacks was named the White House special adviser for AI and crypto, with a venture capitalist from Andreessen’s firm installed as his deputy. Sacks’s status as a “special government employee” allowed him to stay on as a partner at his company Craft Ventures, while working no more than 130 days over the course of a year at his government job. He also continued as a co-host of his All-In podcast, analyzing technology, influencing market perceptions, making predictions—all while playing a central role in shaping public policy on AI and crypto.

Because special government employees are subject to most of the conflict-of-interest rules for regular government employees, the Office of Government Ethics (whose head had been fired at the start of Trump’s second term) required two waivers to allow Sacks to keep a foot in both the public and private sectors. They were written by the White House counsel, David Warrington, a Republican operative who had acted as Trump’s personal lawyer after his first term. A spokesperson for Sacks told The Atlantic, “Mr. Sacks and Craft Ventures had to refrain from investing in companies directly affected by his duties as a government adviser and furthermore had to seek approval from the White House Counsel Office for all potential investments.” In essence, the waivers argued that Sacks’s holdings were so large that keeping dozens of small investments in companies related to crypto and AI would pose no conflict of interest for him, because they made up such a tiny fraction of his overall portfolio. But the waivers give only percentages, and their language is so opaque that it’s impossible to know the actual value of these investments. “They try to finesse the issue by saying, ‘Oh, it’s a relatively small percentage of his portfolio, and he’s so rich, it couldn’t possibly affect him,’ ” Kathleen Clark, an ethics lawyer who teaches at Washington University’s law school, told me, adding that this stance beggars belief.

In November, the Times published a lengthy investigation of Sacks, finding that, despite large divestments, he continued to hold stakes in hundreds of companies that advertised themselves as AI-related, and that key policy decisions benefited both Sacks and his Silicon Valley associates. A chorus of them, including Andreessen, rushed to his defense. Sacks called the Times article a “hoax,” hired a defamation-law firm to write a threatening letter, and argued that he had cost himself and his company a lot of money—$200 million in crypto holdings alone—to work in government voluntarily without pay. Clark waved aside the question of whether there’s personal corruption on Sacks’s part. “I urge you to limit your use of the term conflict of interest,” she told me, “because it doesn’t begin to capture what’s going on.”

What’s going on is that Sacks joined the most corrupt administration in American history. Throughout his year in the White House, his work on tech policy brushed up against the spectacular grift of his boss at almost every turn. Giesea, the former Stanford Review colleague, who remains an admirer of Sacks, said, “He is an asset to the Trump administration on AI policy. But now he’s trapped in a corrupt clown show.” The pervasive rot makes it almost impossible to distinguish public policy from private venality. The Trump administration’s corruption requires a taxonomy of its own.

[George Packer: America’s zombie democracy]

At the most blatant level are the gifts the president accepts from abroad: the $130,000 gold bar and the gold Rolex desk clock from Swiss billionaires, followed by a lowering of U.S. tariffs on Switzerland; the $400 million jet from the Qatari royal family that might cost another half a billion or so to be outfitted as Air Force One, followed by a presidential visit (Trump’s first major foreign trip in his second term) to a country accused of sponsoring terrorism; the Trump-family memecoins sold to wealthy favor seekers. Clark called such brazen bribes “power corruption”: displays intended to show that Trump can get away with anything—“the equivalent of shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue.”

A slightly less glaring kind of corruption abuses government power for private gain: presidential pardons handed out to past and future benefactors; investment deals floated by Trump’s two favorite diplomats, his real-estate buddy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, during the most sensitive peace talks in Russia and the Middle East; major investments in Trump-family crypto and real-estate businesses by foreign governments with extensive U.S. interests; stock trades and prediction bets likely based on insider access to official information, including about war.

Criminal anti-corruption statutes are still on the books. But these embarrassing shows of personal turpitude go uninvestigated and unpunished because the mechanisms for holding public officials accountable have been destroyed. When whistleblowers go unprotected, inspectors general are fired, incompetent loyalists replace nonpartisan civil servants, the Department of Justice is turned into the president’s own law firm and police force, and Congress abandons any oversight function, nothing is left to prevent the rot from spreading into every cell of government. (When Senator Warren wrote to Sacks asking for information on potential conflicts of interest in his role as a special government employee, the answer was silence.) The effect is to demoralize the public, to instill a sense of powerlessness. “We’re living in an era when the corruption is occurring on an unprecedented scale, orders of magnitude larger than anything we’ve seen in the history of this country,” Clark said. “And yet the more important story is what Trump has done to enable that corruption, which is dismantling the rule of law.”

Finally, there’s what Lawrence Lessig, of Harvard Law School, calls “institutional corruption,” which may be perfectly legal: the warping of public trust toward private ends, the replacement of the country’s priorities with those of a special-interest group. This brings us back to Sacks.

In his 2025 inaugural address, Trump declared America to be at the start of a “golden age.” His administration put crypto and AI at its center.

Cryptocurrency is a long-standing libertarian project—the dream of a privatized financial system. The founders of PayPal originally aspired to create a tool that gave people around the world access to finance, including in poor and corrupt countries without reliable banking institutions. But in practice, crypto’s anonymity and volatility have made it extremely prone to criminal activity and risky speculation. As a candidate in 2024, Trump, a former crypto skeptic and a latecomer to investing in it, won the industry’s lucrative backing on a promise to put the federal government to work on its behalf and turn the U.S. into “the crypto capital of the planet.” Back in office, he pardoned convicted crypto executives, neutered consumer protections, ended investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission into crypto firms with ties to Trump’s businesses, and disbanded the Justice Department’s crypto-enforcement team. In May 2025, investors paid up to $400 million to buy $TRUMP memecoins in exchange for access to the president at a private crypto gala. Since 2024, Trump’s crypto wealth has grown by at least $7.5 billion.

[James Surowiecki: Crypto is a victim of its own success]

Sacks’s main item of business was to push through Congress a bill that would create a regulatory structure for cryptocurrency—something that the Biden administration hadn’t done, to the frustration of the industry and venture capitalists. The GENIUS Act required issuers of a type of crypto called stablecoin to back their digital currency on a one-to-one basis with assets such as dollars and short-term U.S. Treasury bills. According to Sacks and other supporters, the GENIUS Act would position the dollar as the default currency of the digital economy, while providing guardrails against fraud and other abuses. Critics argued that the guardrails were inadequate, and that crypto issued by private firms with government backing could undermine the entire financial system because of weak regulations and nonexistent enforcement actions. The law also does nothing to prevent government officials from profiting off crypto. When the GENIUS Act passed on a bipartisan vote in July, Silicon Valley and Sacks won the first big return on their investment in Trump.

If Sacks’s purpose with crypto was to bring it under a federal regulatory regime in order to make the industry more viable to buyers and valuable to investors, his goal with AI was to keep it unregulated, and to align administration policy with the industry’s wishes. His motto became “Let the private sector cook.”

At the start of his term, Trump revoked a Biden executive order that, among other measures, required AI labs to share the results of safety testing with the government. Though one company found that complying with the order required just one day of work for a single employee per year, Trump pronounced it onerous. Safetyism became a dirty word on the tech right, almost as contemptible as the phrase woke AI—an all-purpose indictment of Biden-era attempts to limit harm from AI to the public, especially children. Yet in the early weeks of the new administration, its policies reflected more continuity than rupture. Not only did Trump keep Biden’s restrictions on licensing the export of advanced AI technology to adversaries such as China; he even strengthened them.

Sacks’s influence increased when Elon Musk, his old friend and fellow PayPal mafioso, who was running the Department of Government Efficiency near the czar’s office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, walked away from his work of stripping the executive branch. “You see a more conciliatory approach to China emerging only after Musk has his falling-out with the White House,” Oren Cass, the founder of the conservative think tank American Compass, told me. “With Musk out of the picture, I think Sacks certainly became more prominent.” In April 2025, David Feith, a China hawk who was a senior director for technology and national security on the National Security Council, was fired in a larger purge after the right-wing influencer Laura Loomer warned Trump that Feith was disloyal. Soon after, the NSC’s whole technology directorate was eliminated, clearing the way for Sacks to become the loudest voice on tech policy. His goal was to keep AI free of regulation and let the private sector sell the most advanced American technology to the world—even to China.

On May 13, Trump scrapped a Biden rule, about to take effect, that would have restricted the global spread of advanced AI technology by dividing countries into three categories of trust, with China fully denied access. (A former White House official called it “the most ‘America First’ rule the Biden administration ever had.”) That same day the president traveled to the Middle East to consummate a deal, which Sacks had helped negotiate, to sell 500,000 AI chips to the United Arab Emirates. This astonishing figure alarmed national-security officials: Some of the chips were likely to end up in China, where strict export controls still applied, and the sale would make it easier for the Emiratis to acquire enough computing power to build their own AI capabilities.

The smell of corruption hung in the air before Air Force One took off for Abu Dhabi. At the beginning of May, one of Witkoff’s sons had announced that the Emirates’ AI-investment firm would put $2 billion into the crypto exchange Binance, using a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, the crypto company founded by the Trump and Witkoff families. A co-founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, was pardoned by Trump after serving four months in a U.S. prison in 2024 for failing to comply with anti-money-laundering measures. In January of this year, The Wall Street Journal reported an even more blatant scandal: A few days before Trump’s inauguration, a powerful Emirati politician known as the “spy sheikh” (almost always photographed wearing sunglasses, even in the Oval Office) had bought a 49 percent share of World Liberty Financial. These deals made the UAE chip sale look like a giant payoff from the administration.

No one is allowed to be more corrupt than the president, but Sacks may well benefit from Emirati goodwill. The nearly $3 trillion UAE sovereign-wealth fund, of which more than half is controlled by the spy sheikh, offers an immense pot of money for venture capital. Although Sacks had no financial interest in the chip deal that he helped broker, it could put Craft Ventures in a sweet spot for a future round of funding. Is it unfair to point this out? Sacks’s position makes it naive not to. Remaining an investor while serving in an administration rife with graft and shaping policies that could significantly affect present and future deals blurs the line between public and private into indistinction. “It’s hard to disentangle his ideology from his personal interests,” the congressional aide who has followed Sacks closely said. “Maybe they’re one and the same: ‘Let the private sector cook,’ and it just so happens he benefits handsomely from that.” (Sacks’s spokesperson told The Atlantic that future investments “would not be a violation of government-ethics rules. Qualified people would not want to serve in government if it meant permanently giving up their careers.”)

On July 23, the White House released its “AI action plan” at an event in Washington co-hosted by the All-In podcast. Trump called out each of Sacks’s “besties” from the show, and they shared the stage with Vice President Vance and other administration leaders. (Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, had nixed the original idea for All-In to be the sole sponsor, perhaps out of a sense of propriety.) The 28-page plan, “Winning the Race,” called for rapid development of AI technology and construction of data centers so the U.S. can achieve global dominance. It was co-signed by Sacks, but its main author was Dean Ball, a technology researcher who served as a White House adviser for four months last year. Ball pointed out to me that the plan didn’t pose a choice between innovation and safety, nor did it take a position on changes in export controls: “What it does say is we should enforce the chip-export controls that we have more robustly than we currently do.”

But Sacks had already undermined this key aspect of the plan. A week before it was released, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, the world’s leader in AI-chip production, had announced the resumption of the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, which the Trump administration had banned in April, before Sacks became the dominant official in tech policy. AI is an industry in which the U.S. has a significant advantage over its main rival. China is able to produce less than 3 percent of U.S. computing power—200,000 chips a year to America’s 12 million or so. Hardly anyone except Sacks was able to explain how the decision to lift the ban on selling chips to China fit with “winning the race” for global dominance, or with an “America First” administration.

[Read: Trump wasted no time derailing his own AI plan]

“I would define winning as the whole world consolidates around the American tech stack,” he said on All-In. “If we have 80 to 90 percent market share, that’s winning.” In other words, sell advanced American AI everywhere, including China, to make U.S. technologies and companies dominant. The counterargument, made to me by former Biden-administration officials as well as conservative critics of the Trump-Sacks policy, is that China will never allow itself to become dependent on U.S. technology. Instead, the People’s Republic will do what it’s done in other sectors: steal U.S. technology and innovate its own—the long-term “indigenization” strategy of Xi Jinping, and the reason the regime has prevented Chinese AI companies, which are hungry for American chips, from importing anywhere close to the numbers the Trump administration has made available for sale.

“Folks on the pro-export side have a story about how actually selling more of these advanced chips to China will addict them to our technology stack and slow their progress,” Oren Cass said of the Trump-Sacks policy. “I find it a ridiculously inadequate story that never holds up to 10 seconds of scrutiny.” Cass distinguished between an ideological view of U.S.-China competition (“two incompatible systems that can coexist but can’t be integrated in any meaningful way”) and the commercial view that has always been Trump’s, and seems to be Sacks’s. The key figure in moving American tech policy on China to the commercial view was Huang, who was eager to gain greater access to the Chinese market. Sacks now had the clout to accompany the CEO of the world’s richest firm into the Oval Office. “When Jensen comes to town, it elevates Sacks’s stature,” the congressional aide said.

I asked a former White House official with knowledge of the discussions if Sacks had achieved his goal of lifting the ban on selling chips to China simply by sitting down with Huang and a president with a well-known weakness for plutocrats. “Yes. That is exactly what happened,” the former official said. As for Sacks’s motive, “there is not a rational explanation. I think doing favors for Nvidia is the only real explanation, or else he believes Nvidia’s talking points that no one else buys.” (In a letter to The New York Times in November, Sacks’s lawyers wrote that the policies Sacks had advocated for benefited “all American chip companies” and that “Mr. Sacks has independently arrived at his views on chip policy by consulting and reading hundreds of experts in the space.”)

Even if Sacks is solely motivated by a sincere belief in free-market capitalism, his portfolio companies could now have privileged access to the world’s most coveted computer chips in a market where demand is stronger than supply. “This is why the person who’s regulating AI for the U.S. government shouldn’t also be running a venture-capital firm that has money all throughout the tech industry,” the former White House official said. “Of course he’s picking the winners that in some way benefit him.”

In December, Huang secured an even more valuable victory when the White House allowed Nvidia to begin selling to China one of its most advanced AI chips, the H200. This was too much for some conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. Jim Banks, a MAGA-aligned senator from Indiana, had already introduced bipartisan legislation, called GAIN AI, that required Nvidia to put American customers, such as start-up companies and universities, ahead of Chinese companies for its limited supply of AI chips. Sacks, determined to prevent government from limiting tech’s commercial potential, began lobbying hard to keep GAIN AI out of the annual defense-appropriation bill. His efforts to get Republican senators to strip it from their version failed, but when the White House declared its opposition, House Republican leadership killed GAIN AI just before the final vote in December. “What ultimately happened is Jensen talked to the president about this, the dam broke, and Sacks got his way,” the congressional aide told me.

Sacks had less success when the administration tried to get Congress to pass a 10-year moratorium on state AI regulations. The measure lost in the Senate in July, 99–1, but its unpopularity didn’t deter Sacks from trying again. In December, Trump signed an executive order, written by Sacks, that banned states from passing laws to regulate AI. By then, state legislatures had introduced hundreds of bills—chiefly in blue states such as California and New York, but also in Florida, Utah, and Texas—and enacted dozens.

Sacks’s heavy-handed interventions in Congress on behalf of tech companies did not sit well with some of Trump’s MAGA allies. Stopping the spread of sexual material, protecting children from harmful chatbots, preserving individual privacy, heading off catastrophic threats such as bioterrorism, preventing large-scale unemployment—these things turn out to matter to Americans across the partisan divide. Polls consistently show that a majority fear AI will do more harm than good. Citizens of the world’s AI leader have a more negative view of the technology than those of almost any other country. Appearing on All-In in December, Tucker Carlson gently pointed out to Sacks and his co-hosts that Americans already feel powerless—“and all of a sudden you have a technology that promises to concentrate power still further in the hands of people other than them, and so they’re touchy about it.”

Oren Cass told me, “One of the challenges of the tech right is they are—what’s the opposite of adept ?” I offered clumsy. “They are very politically clumsy and don’t have a very good feel for the realities of the American electorate, how politics is conducted, what it takes to be successful.” Steve Bannon, a leader of the populist wing of the MAGA movement, recently told me that Sacks’s efforts on behalf of Silicon Valley are blowing up in his face. “Sacks is the best thing to ever happen to the populist revolt against the oligarchs. His unique blend of arrogance and incompetence has single-handedly delivered humiliating defeat to the AI supremacists.”

Meanwhile, AI’s capability is doubling about every four months. It is already changing work and life for millions of people, with the potential to transform fields such as medicine and war. Its inventors spend hundreds of billions of dollars to develop the technology even as they issue dire warnings of its dangers: It might kill us, but we have to make it as powerful as possible as fast as possible. Sacks dismisses or minimizes the potential for harm. In public comments he has claimed that AI isn’t addictive like social media, that productivity gains will more than make up for lost jobs, and that the number of teenage suicides caused by chatbots is small. Because China doesn’t care about things like copyright protection, compensated journalism, and restrictions on export licenses, we can’t afford to either. He accuses skeptics of belonging to the cult of effective altruists—“doomers,” funded by a few anti-AI Big Tech billionaires, who peddle lies to invite global control of the technology for their own financial gain.

One of the doomers, Nate Soares, a co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, told me: “The lab leaders say this is horribly dangerous, the employees say this is horribly dangerous, the eminent scientists and researchers who developed AI decades ago say this is horribly dangerous. The only people who say ‘Don’t worry’ are the venture capitalists. They’re the ones who stand to profit from it but aren’t close enough to understand it.”

Unlike Andreessen, Sacks doesn’t equate regulating AI with mass murder. But for every concern, he has the same answer: AI is coming, just like the tide. If America doesn’t win the race, China will.

Once in government, Sacks learned to adopt his boss’s language and defend the indefensible. He derided “fake news” and called climate change a “hoax,” January 6 prosecutions “lawfare,” the notion of White House corruption “nonsense,” and the killing of two protesters by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis a consequence of “antifa-style operations” intent on thwarting the president’s deportation of “criminal aliens.” He liked Trump’s idea of seizing Greenland and predicted that the war in Iran, which he blamed on “that whole neocon establishment,” would probably be short and decisive because the markets wanted it over and Trump’s political instincts were “impeccable.” But on the threats of censorship, politicized justice, state surveillance, and monopoly power, which had once animated his outrage, and which now came from the Trump administration, he had nothing to say. Sacks had become what he always despised—political.

[From the July 2025 issue: The talented Mr. Vance]

In March, he left his position as AI-and-crypto czar, saying that he had completed his 130 days of service, and returned full-time to Craft Ventures. In December he had moved from San Francisco to Austin, just in time to escape a proposed tax on billionaires that may appear before California voters this November.

Silicon Valley will still have a valuable line to the White House. When Sacks stepped down, he was named co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Its members include Andreessen, Zuckerberg, Huang, Sergey Brin, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, a co-founder of a cryptocurrency exchange, the CEO of a semiconductor manufacturer, and a billionaire investor who co-hosts All-In with Sacks. (Among the 15 there is one academic scientist.) This lineup, almost a parody of crony capitalism, signals the final union of America’s interests with those of its wealthiest citizens—tech power fused with state power. The private sector is cooking in Washington.

In his year there, Sacks achieved his two central goals: putting the government’s seal of approval on crypto and keeping its hands off artificial intelligence. He was also a founding member of an exclusive MAGA-aligned club in Georgetown, with a fee of $500,000, called the Executive Branch, and he midwifed the creation of an AI-industry lobby, Innovation Council, that plans to spend at least $100 million in support of the Trump administration’s technology policy in this year’s midterm elections.

In winning his policy battles, though, Sacks might have lost the war. What Tim Wu calls “the turn away from populism to corruption in tech policy” has alienated important parts of the MAGA coalition from Trump and his rich backers. Steve Bannon says that he and his anti–Big Tech allies are going to make the Innovation Council “the moral equivalent of AIPAC: You take that money and you’re dead.” At some point, an unlikely left-right alliance could unite against the tech oligarchs. “Donald Trump and his administration are using the presidency to make themselves and their billionaire friends richer,” Senator Warren told me, listing Sacks’s policy achievements in crypto and AI. “We are at an inflection point where very powerful AI systems threaten to displace jobs and transform our economy—and we will be living with the consequences for years if Sacks gets his way.”

AI could well be the most important issue in the 2028 presidential election. Sacks has moved Trump into the camp of the Silicon Valley saints, selling a world few people actually want to live in, where the state is the handmaiden of industry, wealth accumulates to insider elites tainted by grift, and ordinary people find that they’re losing the last power they have left, over their own minds.

Every so often, the hosts of All-In remember that staggering quantities of money are pooling upward in America, while discontent roils down below. Suddenly sounding earnest, almost chastened, one of them will call on the group to “fix this inequality gap,” end “ostentatious displays of wealth,” do more in the mode of Carnegie and Rockefeller to benefit the public, maybe even support a wealth tax to stave off the coming class war. But Sacks will have none of it. He alone remains committed to the principle of self-interest. He still believes that capitalism means never having to say you’re sorry.

This article appears in the June 2026 print edition with the headline “The Venture-Capital Populist.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.