Top tech spouse poised for State job overseeing Trump AI War
Jacob Helberg, the husband of magnate Keith Rabois, has charted course as China hawk, prolific donor to Dems and Rs
WASHINGTON _ In the wild and combative world of President Donald Trump’s second term, one Silicon Valley insider is poised for a rare bipartisan victory overseeing the nation’s AI war with China.
Jacob Helberg, a veteran donor to Democrats and Republicans, appears to be coasting to approval rapidly for the newly consolidated position of Undersecretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment – a super-position under Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the newly gutted agency.
Trump has reupped his focus on AI recently, in the wake of a series of big summer weeks stretching from the bomb strikes on Iran and passage of his sweeping tax, spending and immigration plan to the recent scandal over Jeffrey Epstein.
The president travelled to Pittsburgh last week to highlight investments in AI and will deliver a speech to Helberg’s premier group, “The Hill and Valley Forum”, Wednesday.
Helberg did not respond to requests for comment from 24sight News sent to Palantir, where he has long been a senior adviser to the president and the Hill and Valley Forum, which he co-founded.
But in interviews and podcasts over the past year, Helberg has said that the United States needs to be more combative in its stance with China.
“Keeping the peace means reinventing war, and technology is the key,” Helberg said in April in his opening remarks at the “The Hill and Valley Forum” at the U.S. Capitol.
Helberg has long been ensconced in national security and tech debates as a member of the Silicon Valley elite. His 2018 wedding to “PayPal Mafia” member Keith Rabois was presided over by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Helberg and Rabois have been prolific political donors.
Helberg previously supported Pete Buttigieg in his 2020 run for president, but he told Jewish Insider last year that he flipped from supporting Democrats to Trump and the Republicans because of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel and the Israel/Hamas War.
Installing top tech executives and billionaires throughout the overhauled government is nothing new, starting from the beginning of the second term when Elon Musk’s revamped U.S. Digital Service deployed young Silicon Valley workers to access troves of sensitive U.S. data through a series of nominations of other top Silicon Valley investors to prominent government jobs.
The emergence of Silicon Valley “broligarchs”, as dubbed by commentators and critics, as a central faction of power in Trump’s second administration has rankled longtime conservatives and nationalist populists, like former Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon and others who have dubbed them “techno-feudalists”.
And behind the scenes, some conservative skeptics have groused at Helberg’s nomination to the powerful position at the State Department, arguing that previous support for Democrats has been a reason for pulling nominations since the start of the second Trump administration.
But one person close to the Trump administration’s vetting process said the crucial difference between Helberg and “the NASA guy” …
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