Craft Ventures—Craft Ventures founder appointed White House AI and Crypto Czar while retaining 449 AI investments
In December 2024, President Trump appointed Craft Ventures co-founder David Sacks as White House AI and Crypto Czar as a special government employee, allowing him to continue working at Craft Ventures. A November 2025 NYT investigation found Sacks held 449 AI company investments that could benefit from his policy decisions. Ethics experts called his broad waivers 'sham ethics waivers' lacking rigorous analysis. Craft Ventures invested in BitGo, a crypto company that benefited from the GENIUS Act stablecoin regulation Sacks backed. He also played a role in removing Nvidia chip export restrictions while having grown close to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Senator Elizabeth Warren launched an ethics investigation in September 2025.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate Governance | -against | secondary | -0.50 |
| Corporate Transparency | -against | secondary | -0.50 |
| Regulatory Capture | +toward | primary | -1.00 |
| Overall incident score = | -0.787 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (critical ×2) × confidence (0.59)
Evidence (1 signal)
NYT investigation reveals Sacks holds 449 AI investments while shaping AI policy as White House czar
The New York Times reported in November 2025 that David Sacks maintained 449 AI company investments that could benefit from his policy decisions as White House AI and Crypto Czar. His ethics waivers were characterized by government ethics expert Kathleen Clark as 'sham ethics waivers' that 'lack the kind of rigorous objective ethics analysis.'