An attorney for David Sacks called a Sunday story by the New York Times a “hit piece” and a “willful misunderstanding” of the tech mogul’s special government employee status as the Trump Administration’s AI and crypto adviser, saying many details of the roughly 4,000-word article, with five bylines and months of reporting behind it, are easily debunked.
Sacks posted a copy of the four-page letter sent from his Virginia-based attorneys to the Times’ general counsel Sunday on X.
“Five months ago, five New York Times reporters were dispatched to create a story about my supposed conflicts of interest working as the White House AI & Crypto Czar,” Sacks wrote in his post. “Every time we would prove an accusation false, NYT pivoted to the next allegation. This is why the story has dragged on for five months.”
The Times alleges Sacks helped craft the White House’s new A.I. policies while continuing to work as a major Silicon Valley investor. As a “special government employee,” an unpaid role permitted to maintain certain private business interests, the paper wrote that Sacks offered significant White House access to tech executives and pushed for looser A.I. regulations that positioned major chipmakers like Nvidia to potentially gain up to $200 billion in new global sales.
The Times review shows Sacks holds 708 tech investments, including 449 in companies tied to A.I., many of which could benefit from the policies he supports.
“His public ethics filings, which are based on self-reported information, do not disclose the value of those remaining stakes in crypto and A.I.-related companies,” the Times wrote. “They also omit when he sold assets he said he would divest, making it difficult to determine whether his government service has netted him profits.”
The story included a statement from a Sacks spokeswoman as well as White House spokeswoman Liz Huston, who said he addressed potential conflicts before starting the position and brought insights that were “an invaluable asset for President Trump’s agenda of cementing American technology dominance.”
Sacks was part of the consortium of young investors, including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, who started PayPal and other successful tech firms. Trump asked Sacks to join his administration after the 2024 election, and he agreed – as long as he was able to continue to participate in certain ongoing ventures like Craft.
Sacks’ attorneys say his divestments actually cost his personal bottom line. Besides personal financial benefits for his tech and crypto ventures, the Times story suggested that Sacks’ policies, like selling American-made AI chips internationally, have presented national security risks.
Sacks’s attorneys accused the Times of building the piece on a fundamental misunderstanding of Sacks’s role as a special government employee, a category specifically designed by Congress to bring private-sector experts into government. The attorney says the Times repeatedly shifted theories as earlier claims fell apart, framing the reporting as a pattern of “non-scandal to non-scandal.”
The letter also rejects any suggestion of an improper relationship between Sacks and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang after the Times removed a reference to a dinner between the two that never happened.
The letter further disputes the Times’s claims about Sacks’ highly successful “All-In” Podcast, saying Sacks forfeited any revenue tied to A.I. or crypto companies, and that the Times falsely implied the podcast pursued financial gain from hosting an A.I. Summit.
The response accuses the Times of selectively downplaying similar or more significant conflicts involving Democratic SGEs, including former Biden adviser Anita Dunn and former State Department official Huma Abedin. The letter concludes by urging the Times to abandon the story, asserting that months of scrutiny produced no evidence of wrongdoing and that the reporting is driven by a desire to discredit Sacks politically rather than by actual findings of conflict.
