A court decision recently required Elon Musk’s X to divulge its full list of shareholders, as of June 2023, to the public.
Several well-known figures in the tech sector, including Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, and the cryptocurrency startup Binance, were already known to have supported Musk’s attempt to acquire and take private the social media platform that was then known as Twitter. These figures included VC firms Andreessen Horowitz, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Sequoia Capital.
The role of Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is reportedly an investor through Sean Combs Capital (the Daily Mail earlier reported on his stake), is less well known. Through the Pershing Square Foundation, activist investor Bill Ackman, who recently garnered media attention for his efforts to quell activism at Ivy League universities, holds shares in the company. Likewise, 8VC, the venture capital firm that Joe Lonsdale of Palantir co-founded, has been linked to Russian billionaires.
The list of stockholders is contained in a court document dated June 9, 2023, but it was made public this week in response to a motion made on behalf of independent journalist Jacob Silverman by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Although the whole list of investors was made public on a blog post, Silverman noted that ownership percentages are not included in the list and that many of Musk’s supporters were well-known already. Nevertheless, he described it as “a great starting point for researchers, activists, journalists, regulators, and anyone else who wants to know what’s going on behind the scenes of this important company.’