In August 2024, Trump wrote that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg could “spend the rest of his life in prison” for allegedly plotting against him in the 2020 election. Eighteen months later, Zuckerberg is on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), the body charged with advising the White House on science and technology policy.
He’s not the only tech exec on the board. Seven of the council’s 13 members are tech company CEOs or co-founders. including Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Safra Catz of Oracle, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, Lisa Su of AMD, Michael Dell of Dell Technologies and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Two more, Marc Andreessen (who opined that software was eating the world in 2011) and Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam, are tech investors. Nobel laureate and quantum physicist John Martinis of UC Santa Barbara is the only academic. Su and Catz are the only women.
The council will be co-chaired by David Sacks, Trump’s outgoing AI and crypto czar and a co-host of the “All In” podcast, and Michael Kratsios, the OSTP director, who are both former associates of Peter Thiel. Notably, Sacks’s “All In” co-host David Friedberg also sits on the council. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who led last year’s DOGE effort, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who personally donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, were not on the list.
Here is what the composition of the council looks like:
