Elon Musk took Twitter private in 2022, but he didn’t do it alone: The deal had backing from his wealthy Silicon Valley allies, embattled hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, and holding companies based in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, according to a court document ordered unsealed by a federal judge on Tuesday, which was first seen by the public late Wednesday night.
The shareholder list was revealed thanks to a motion filed by a nonprofit group called the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press on behalf of independent tech journalist Jacob Silverman, who argued that the public deserves to know “who owns a position of importance to public discourse and whether the major free speech contributor is collaborating with censorship dictatorships.” Musk’s company, now branded X Corp., had until Sept. 4 to comply with U.S. District Judge Susan Elston’s order to disclose the investors.
One group represented in the document was far from surprising: the wealthy elites of tech and finance, many of whom have joined Musk in backing Donald Trump’s bid to retake the White House. Representatives include venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, Bill Ackman’s hedge fund, 8VC, a firm where Palantir Technologies co-founder Joe Lonsdale is a managing partner, as well as Sequoia Capital (partner Sean Maguire was an early Trump supporter in Silicon Valley) and the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. Scott Nolan, a partner at Founders Fund, co-founded by Peter Thiel, was also named, as was Ross Gerber, CEO of Kawasaki Wealth and Investment Management. Gerber complained earlier this year that Musk’s behavior was hurting sales of Tesla, in which his fund is an investor — prompting Musk to call him an “idiot” on X.
Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and CEO until 2021, was one of the financiers who bankrolled Musk’s acquisition of the platform. While he was once optimistic about the company’s future under Musk’s ownership, he has since publicly criticized Musk’s disastrous changes to the platform and suggested the deal should never have happened.
But it’s unclear whether any of the other shareholders regret investing in what would become X, as Musk lost valuable publicity and bled ad revenue, telling brands that fled the site over its increasingly hateful rhetoric to “go to hell,” and launching a series of desperate lawsuits to try to recoup lost money. But there’s one individual who might have put his fortune to better use: Sean Combs. In the months since the Twitter acquisition, he’s been facing a reckoning for a long history of alleged sexual abuse and violence, and earlier this year, law enforcement raided his homes as part of a federal sex-trafficking investigation. (He has vehemently denied all the allegations.)
The next book Character Limits: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by New York Times Reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mack recount an awkward scene in which Musk tried to reassure the CEO of Revolt, a media company that Combs founded, about the spike in racist content that accompanied his appointment as Twitter’s CEO. (Combs sold his stake in Revolt this summer.) That company’s CEO, DeTavio Samuels, was worried that black users were being attacked with hate speech. Musk deflected by saying, “I don’t know if you know this, but Pavlov is the guy who hates black people.” [one of Combs’ former stage names] “He’s an investor in Twitter,” he added. “He’s a good friend of mine, you know. We text a lot.”
Meanwhile, Silverman’s speculation that Musk, a vocal advocate of free speech, may be associated with “surveillance dictatorships” has been confirmed: Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud is listed as a shareholder alongside Kingdom Holding Company, of which he is CEO and owns 95 percent. The billionaire and Kingdom Holding bought a 3 percent stake in Twitter for $300 million in 2011. According to Amnesty International, the Saudi monarchy strictly limits freedom of expression online and has been “brutal” in its crackdown on citizens who use the internet to express views they find objectionable, even sentencing some to lengthy prison terms. QT Holdings, another Musk investor, is a Qatari company; its leadership overlaps with that of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority. Qatar is also known to filter and monitor internet data.
The exact size of the stakes each shareholder bought is unknown, though one shareholder, financial services firm Fidelity Investments, indicated in a January filing that it had marked down its stock value from $20 million in October 2022 to about $5.6 million, a total loss of 71.5%. It had already written down the value of the stake by 65% within a year of Musk’s purchase. All told, it appears to have been a bad bet for Musk — and no one came away richer.
