Can there be competency without conflict in Washington?

Sacks is a tech-industry mainstay: He was one of the OG PayPal Mafia (as COO in the company’s early days), became a founder and successful venture investor, and has earned a national following through his All In podcast.

Five Times reporters dug into hundreds of Sacks’s investments, made primarily through his firm Craft Ventures. The article concluded that Sacks “has positioned himself to personally benefit” from his role in Washington, which Sacks has denied. A number of Silicon Valley titans, including Sam Altman, Marc Benioff, and Elon Musk, came to Sacks’s defense.

On the surface, it’s another billionaire-vs.-legacy-media spat. But at the heart of the matter is an important question: Can we have competence without conflict in Washington?

No one can erase the searing memory of Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 testimony before a U.S. Senate joint committee, in which then 84-year-old Orrin Hatch asked the Facebook chief what his business model was. (His response, after a long pause: “Senator, we run ads.”)

When it comes to something as important as nailing the United States’ AI future, who would you rather have shaping it: a serial entrepreneur and AI investor who has been steeped in the technology for over a decade—or someone like Hatch?

Given his estimated $2 billion net worth, it seems unlikely Sacks’s main D.C. goal is to grift. Sacks says he has lost significant net worth by divesting in startup and fund positions in an attempt to shed conflicts and that, in the view of the US Office of Government Ethics, he is conflict free.

At the same time, if he does his (unpaid) job well advising the president, Sacks and his Silicon Valley friends will naturally benefit financially from the administration’s policy decisions about AI. That risk is probably a small price to pay to have aptitude versus ineptitude in our government.

We should all demand radical transparency, no special treatment, and the avoidance of major conflict from anyone with close proximity to the president. But a world where we discourage the smartest people from advising the government on the most difficult policies is not a world where America’s economy will thrive.

As one billionaire supporter of Sacks said to me: “No conflict, no interest.”

When I reached Sacks by phone this week, I asked what he thought of the phrase.

“You get certain kinds of experience working in the private sector that you don’t get as an academic or at a Think Tank,” Sacks told me. “And that is a problem in D.C. You’ve got all these Think Tank intellectuals who have little real-world experience, especially with technology. They don’t have a feel for how the technology industry really works and how damaging some of their ideas might be.”