These Are the Investors Who Helped Elon Musk Acquire Twitter in 2022

Almost two years after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X, for $44 billion, the official checklist of buyers who took half in the October 2022 deal has lastly been revealed. Shareholders embody the likes of investor Bill Ackman, hip-hop determine Sean Combs and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, in keeping with a lately unsealed doc that was first reported by The Washington Post.

The checklist of stakeholders backing Musk’s buy was initially filed by X in 2023 as a part of a lawsuit filed by former workers requesting the cost of arbitration charges from their employer. The doc was unsealed on Aug. 20 following a movement from the Studies Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that gives authorized sources to journalists, to make the data public on behalf of unbiased reporter Jacob Silverman.

The nearly 100 stakeholders listed on the doc embody various enterprise capital corporations like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which each lately participated in a $6 billion funding round for Musk’s A.I. startup xAI. The agency 8VC, led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, additionally helped Musk along with his X acquisition and is moreover a backer of Musk’s tunneling enterprise The Boring Company. Gigafund, one other Boring Firm investor, invested in X too; as did Scott Nolan, a former SpaceX engineer who’s a now a companion at Peter Thiel’s enterprise capital agency Founders Fund.

A few of the checklist’s inclusions aren’t all that stunning. The cryptocurrency alternate Binance, for instance, had beforehand revealed that it invested $500 million in 2022 for Musk’s takeover. And it’s no shock that investor Cathie Wooden, a longtime Musk fan, was concerned in the acquisition by means of a subsidiary of her Ark Enterprise Fund.

Musk himself, too, was named in the doc below the Elon Musk Revocable Belief. Regardless of having beforehand engaged in public clashes with Musk over his imaginative and prescient for the social media platform, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey additionally aided the 2022 buy below an entity named Jack Dorsey The rest LLC.

Different distinguished names formally revealed as X stakeholders embody Invoice Ackman, whose Pershing Square Basis—a non-public basis related along with his hedge fund Pershing Sq. Capital Administration—was included amongst the checklist. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a former board member at Musk’s Tesla, is an X investor; as is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one other backer of xAI. Sean Combs Capital, a fund linked with rapper Sean Combs, was additionally named in the unsealed doc.

Was X an excellent funding?

Nearly 30 entities on the doc are linked to the mutual fund supervisor Constancy Investments. The asset supervisor lately revealed that its funding in X has resulted in losses, disclosing in a November portfolio replace that its stake in the social media platform was valued at $5.6 million—a 72 p.c lower from its worth in Oct. 2022.

Regardless of introducing options that cost customers for verification and use of its A.I. chatbot Grok, X nonetheless primarily depends on advert income for earnings. However Musk’s loosening of content material moderation insurance policies has continued to spook advertisers, with the platform reportedly seeing a 24 percent decrease in ad revenue for the first half of 2024 at $744 million, in comparison with $982 million in the first six months of 2023.

Earlier this month, X sued the World Alliance for Accountable Media, an promoting business coalition, for allegedly impacting X’s income by influencing manufacturers to participate in an advert boycott on the platform. The group has since shut down, stating that whereas it denies Musk’s claims, it doesn’t have the monetary sources to struggle his authorized claims and proceed working.