A featured speaker on the opening day of the San Francisco billionaire The tech venture capitalist earned the spot by raising $15 million for former President Donald Trump’s second bid for office. Sacks used his time to give a right-wing diatribe which included an unusual take on foreign policy blaming the war in Ukraine on…Volodomyr Zelensky.

Sacks was recruited to MAGA world by J.D. Vance, Trump’s newly selected far-right running mate. In recent months, Sacks has been among those who urged Trump to select Vance as his partner having become acquainted during the Ohio Senator’s relatively brief foray in the world of finance.

Venture capital is a clubby business. A handful of leading companies collaborate on the juiciest deals that make them and the entrepreneurs they invest in obscenely rich. Vance was once part of that exclusive circle, making useful connections that paid off when he moved from finance and into politics.

A central figure in this ultra-rich conservative constellation is  Peter Thiel, another billionaire venture capitalist known at least as much for his techno-fascist leanings as for his lucrative investments. Thiel hired Vance to work for his firm Mithril Capital only two years after the new Republican vice-president nominee graduated from Yale Law School. Upon taking that job, Vance moved to San Francisco where he lived for a few years before returning to Ohio. After Vance left his lucrative private sector position for politics, Thiel was an enthusiastic supporter, contributing $15 million to his protege’s 2022 run for a United States Senate seat from Ohio. 

Sacks and Thiel are also old friends and, along with Elon Musk, were members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia.” The Mafia, a group of early employees of the online payment company, went on to found or invest in a handful of the technology industry’s biggest names including Tesla, Yelp, LinkedIn and YouTube. Musk, like Thiel — and now Sacks — are ardent Trump supporters. Thiel, who spent $1.2 million on the former president’s 2016 campaign, is said to have brought Trump and his former protégé Vance, once a never-Trumper, to a rapprochement. Musk promised to donate $45 million a month to a Trump PAC, created, in part, by fellow techies. Days later, he denied having made the offer. Sacks is expected to follow up the June fundraiser held at his Pacific Heights home with even bigger donations. Other Trump supporters include top-tier venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of the eponymously named Andreessen Horowitz. The duo have told employees they intend to make large contributions to the Trump campaign. 

Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists say they’ve abandoned the Democratic Party because of its embrace of “woke-ness.” Like Thiel, Musk and Andreessen ascribe to a form of right-wing libertarianism and are avowed enemies of what they deride as political correctness. Andreessen, like many in Silicon Valley, is a fan of Balaji Srinivansan, an Andreessen Horowitz partner who has written a self-published book on the Network State, a plan for technology elites to exit democracy and form their own sovereign states. Srinivasan’s proselytizing for the Network State now includes conferences and other fora. 

Somehow Silicon Valley’s brand of libertarianism is, paradoxically, married to a kind of authoritarianism. Andreessen is not the only wealthy tech leader to back Srinivasan’s strange — and scary — ideas. Garry Tan, who runs Y Combinator, the world’s largest incubator of technology companies, is also a believer. Tan is making a splash in San Francisco politics as a director of GrowSF, a political action committee spending lavishly on right-wing candidates and causes. 

A far more compelling reason for Silicon Valley’s support for Trump is greed. In choosing Vance as his running mate, Trump has signaled to Silicon Valley investors that he has their backs. That means he will block any attempt at regulation — any limit on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency — or taxation that will cut into their bottom line. “A Bestie adjacent as the VP?!?!?!” tweeted Chamath Palihapitiya, the venture capitalist who cohosted the Sacks fundraiser. “Trump/Vance LFG!!,” Musk posted in agreement.

Vinod Khosla, a 40-plus-year veteran of the tech business who held a fundraiser for Joe Biden in May, stated the obvious when he said many of his tech brethren believe “less regulation makes me more money.” In a sharply worded response to Musk, Khosla tweeted: “He may cut my taxes or reduce some regulation but that is no reason to accept depravity in his personal values. Do you want [a] President who will set back [the] climate by a decade in his first year? Do you want his example for your kids as values?”

All this is important for San Francisco because Trump‘s Silicon Valley fans have strong ties to the billionaires looking to move our city sharply rightward. San Francisco billionaire Michael Moritz, creator of TogetherSF, the conservative PAC backing right-wing candidate Mark Farrell for mayor, was once the managing partner of top-tier venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital. Sequoia partners Shawn Maguire and Doug Leone are two of Trump’s most vocal supporters. GrowSF’s Tan is a longtime friend of Thiel’s, recently hosting his billionaire buddy at a “fireside chat” on Christian theology and technology. 

No surprise, then, Tan and Moritz have borrowed MAGA rhetoric and themes to make their case for right-wing initiatives like criminalizing poverty. Moritz and William Oberndorf, the Republican real estate billionaire behind Neighbors for a Better San Francisco, it should be noted, petitioned the United States Supreme Court to allow San Francisco to resume homeless sweeps. They have backed Mayor London Breed’s efforts to criminalize drug use, a return to the Reagan era’s War on Drugs, a trillion-dollar failure that destroyed the lives of millions. 

"In my hometown of San Francisco, Democrat rule has turned the streets of our beautiful city into a cesspool of crime, homeless encampments and open drug use," Sacks told the crowd at the Republican convention. Replace “Democrat” with “progressive” and the message is identical to any one of a dozen mailers from TogetherSF, GrowSF or Neighbors for a Better San Francisco. That is no coincidence.