Elon Musk’s X is apparently getting money from some pretty shady people.
A federal judge ordered Tuesday that a list of investors who helped fund Musk’s $44 billion takeover of X, formerly Twitter, in October 2022 be unsealed. Buried among the lengthy list of nearly 100 investors are several particularly troubling figures.
One entity listed is Sean Combs Capital, LLC—better known as Sean “Diddy” Combs, the rapper who has been accused of rape, assault, forcible drugging, and even implicated in a sex trafficking operation.
In the early days of his X takeover, Musk once touted his relationship with Combs to push back on another investor’s concern about increasing racism on the social media platform.
In the forthcoming book Character Limit by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, Detavio Samuels, the CEO of the media company Revolt, voiced his concerns about anti-Black speech being emboldened on X.
“As you continue down the path that you’re going, I really recommend that you have conversations with this specific community, and we make sure that whatever solutions are created are solutions that make them feel safe and in a welcoming space,” Samuels said.
While Musk said he wanted to make sure people were comfortable, he thought that Samuels might be comforted to hear that one of his high-profile Black friends had also invested in Musk’s social media site. “I don’t know if you know this, but Puff is an investor in Twitter,” Musk said, using Combs’s nickname. “You know, he’s a good friend of mine, we text a lot.”
The list also includes several Silicon Valley entities run by billionaires like Musk himself and backing Donald Trump in the 2024 election.
One of the first names included is Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm run by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who recently announced that they were backing Trump in 2024. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” Andreessen claimed, making clear that he was ignoring Trump’s platform on immigration and abortion, for a more favorable view on issues like crypto—in which Andreessen and Horowitz claim to be some of the world’s largest investors.
Also on the list is Sequoia Capital, run by Douglas Leone and Shaun Maguire, who donated a whopping $1 million and $500,000 respectively to Musk’s pro-Trump super PAC, the America PAC, which is currently under investigation for the shady way it was collecting voter information.
Another investor is 8VC, a venture capitalist firm run by Joe Lonsdale, who also donated $1 million to Musk’s PAC in June. Lonsdale is a co-founder of intelligence contractor and data analysis platform Palantir, which was also headed by Peter Thiel. While it’s hardly surprising that Musk’s billionaire buddies are invested in his social media company, it’s clear that X is being heavily underwritten by the same individuals funding Trump’s campaign.
Also included on the list of investors is Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, who has long had a stake in the social media company. In 2015, bin Talal owned 5.2 percent of Twitter, more than the company’s co-founder Jack Dorsey.
In November 2017, bin Talal was arrested as part of a sweeping “anti-corruption” purge that forced numerous wealthy Saudis and members of the royal family to sign over their assets to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, an autocratic dictator with no tolerance for dissent. This sparked major concerns that Twitter was being used by the Saudi government to surveil its own citizens.
After Musk’s takeover, bin Talal and Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Holding Company maintained their ownership of X shares valued at $1.89 billion, making them jointly the company’s second-largest investors, according to Al Jazeera.
Another notable entity is the Pershing Square Foundation, which is headed by Bill Ackman, the CEO of the giant hedge fund Pershing Square Capital Management. Last year, Ackman, a staunch Zionist who funded violent pro-Israel counterprotesters on college campuses, spearheaded the campaign to see Harvard’s President Claudine Gay removed from her seat.
Earlier this week, it was reported that the debt on Musk’s $13 billion in loans borrowed from several banks in order to buy X was never off-loaded from these banks’ balance sheets, leaving his debt “hung” in industry terms. Not only is X the longest-lasting hung deal since the 2008 financial crisis, it’s also reportedly one of the biggest. While the banks have been able to collect a hefty interest, it’s unclear how Musk will ever repay the principal if X continues on its current trajectory.
