David Sacks tried to kill state AI laws — and it blew up in his face
November 25, 2025
On Wednesday, a rumor began popping up in Washington about a momentous policy change: the White House, it was said, would issue an executive order on Friday that would finally preempt state AI laws, handing over those regulatory powers to the federal government. The minute it leaked online, lawyers and policymakers began to scour every sentence of it. There was a lot about it that seemed politically unfeasible; there was even more that seemed overbroad, possibly illegal. There were a lot of agencies that had suddenly been cut out.
But crucially, they noticed how much power would have been handed to a certain South African tech-billionaire-turned-special-government-employee who’d tunneled his way into the West Wing — not Elon Musk, but the other one.
