Image by DALL-E 3.5 and Affinity Photo

The Ministry of Disruption

Centa-millionaires and billionaires are reshaping our world in ways that are both outside the box and terrifying.

Albert Bates
9 min readSep 11, 2024

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David Sachs was the COO of PayPal for its first 3 years, until Peter Thiel and Elon Musk sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. In 2008 he launched the platform that was to become Slack and sold it in 2012 to Microsoft for 1.2 billion, the fastest billion-dollar exit in tech history. He is a general partner of a venture capital fund he co-founded in late 2017, now with $2 billion under management. Angel investments include Facebook, Uber, SpaceX, and Airbnb. In June 2024, he hosted a campaign reception for Donald Trump at his home that raised $12 million.

On his All In Podcast on August 30, Sachs said, “The argument now is that Silicon Valley is expected to support Harris even though she wants — and her campaign is confirmed she wants — a 44% capital gains tax. She wants a 25% unrealized gains tax. These are things that I think the vast majority of Silicon Valley considers to be disastrous for the startup ecosystem. Should we support her in spite of those things? And why?”

Reid Hoffman, who followed Sachs as COO of PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook before founding LinkedIn, picking up $3 billion in net worth, held a fundraiser for Harris. He said…

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Albert Bates

Emergency Planetary Technician and Climate Science Wonk — using naturopathic remedies to recover the Holocene without geoengineering or ponzinomics.