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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the conflict-of-interest frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Conflict-of-interest frame
A venture capitalist with stakes across crypto and AI was given policy authority over those very industries, and the resulting deals — chip sales to the UAE, the GENIUS Act, killing GAIN AI — blur public service and private enrichment beyond recognition.
Tech-right realignment frame
Silicon Valley's libertarian class broke with Democrats over regulation, woke culture, and crypto enforcement, and Sacks embodies the deconversion: a pragmatic alliance with Trump to secure pro-innovation policy and head off European-style state control of AI.
MAGA-coalition fracture frame
Trump's populist base wanted Big Tech tamed, but his AI-and-crypto czar is delivering the opposite — chip exports to China, blocked state regulation, unrestrained AI — and the contradiction is opening a left-right opening against the oligarchs heading into 2028.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot A
The unmarked line between portfolio and policy
A government-ethics lawyer would argue —
The waivers that let David Sacks keep his stakes in hundreds of AI- and crypto-adjacent companies while writing federal policy on AI and crypto don't dissolve the conflict — they document it. The argument that his holdings are a small percentage of a vast portfolio is precisely backwards: the dollar values are large enough to dwarf most Americans' lifetimes of earnings, and the policy decisions he shaped — the GENIUS Act, the H20 and H200 reversals, the UAE chip deal negotiated alongside Witkoff-family crypto transactions, the executive order pre-empting state AI laws, the killing of GAIN AI — track the commercial interests of Craft Ventures and its peers with uncanny precision. When inspectors general are fired, whistleblowers unprotected, and the OGE head dismissed, 'trust us' is not an ethics regime. It is the absence of one.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.