Trump reboots pcast with zuckerberg, huang and ellison on deck
The White House soldered science to Silicon Valley power on Monday, naming Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang and Larry Ellison to the president’s resurrected science-and-tech board—an opening gambit that fuses campaign-trail populism with the supply chains that already steer the global economy.
David sacks and michael kratsios will co-chair
Both men orbit Trump’s inner circle: Sacks, the PayPal mafia alum turned venture provocateur, donated $1 million to the inaugural fund; Kratsios, former CTO under Trump 1.0, returns after a stint at Scale AI. Their mandate, buried in an executive order signed late Sunday, is to keep the United States in what the administration labels its “Golden Age of Innovation”—a phrase that sounds like press-shop gloss until you realize it is stapled to a directive ordering quarterly workforce-impact reports on every emergent tech from large-language models to 3-nanometer fabs.
The rest of the roster reads like a NASDAQ leaderboard. Zuckerberg brings Meta’s Llama herd and a $65 billion-a-year ad engine; Huang ships 80 % of the world’s AI training chips; Ellison’s Oracle cloud is the quiet back end for half of Washington’s legacy databases. Add Safra Catz, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and you get a panel that can, in a single conference call, move more CapEx than the GDP of Portugal.
Chips, jobs and the 2028 electorate
Trump’s first-term PCAST disbanded in 2021; Biden’s version favored academia and climate modelers. This reboot flips the mix: only three of 24 seats are reserved for university presidents, and even those must show “proven commercialization records.” Translation: the administration wants fast, patent-protected wins it can billboard in swing-state factory tours before the next election.
The timing is not decorative. TSMC’s Arizona plant fires up pilot wafers this summer; Intel is begging for CHIPS Act disbursements; and Meta just signed an undisclosed multibillion-dollar order for Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs—enough silicon to train models the size of GPT-5 three times over. PCAST will be asked whether those chips stay domestic, how many welders and photolithography techs get hired, and which ZIP codes pocket the upside.
Staffers whisper that the council’s first 90-day sprint will produce a “Workforce Risk Heatmap” ranking every U.S. county on its exposure to AI-driven job displacement. Think of it as a political Dow Jones for economic anxiety: if your district turns crimson on the map, expect a presidential visit and a ribbon-cutting.
History offers a caution. Every president since Roosevelt has weaponized technical advisory boards—Truman for atomic energy, Kennedy for Apollo, Obama for precision medicine—but none has seated three CEOs whose combined market cap tops $5 trillion. The last time tech titans clustered this tightly around a Republican White House was 1982, when a young Intel lobbyist convinced Reagan to keep Japan’s semiconductor tariffs alive. That move birthed Silicon Valley’s modern lobbying machine. Forty-three years later, the Valley is no longer lobbying; it is inside the Oval, drafting its own homework.
The council’s charter expires automatically at noon on January 20, 2029, unless renewed. By then the chips will be baked, the fabs staffed—or empty—and the electorate will have rendered its verdict on whether this marriage of code and capital was a renaissance or a rent-seeking coup. No one on the board gets to vote twice.