Cryptocurrency commentator and “Easy Money” author Jacob Silverman has persuaded a U.S. District Court judge to order Elon Musk to reveal who owns shares in X (formerly Twitter), after intervening as a non-party to an unrelated court battle in California over Musk’s last-minute attempt to take the platform private.
Silverman explained his reasoning succinctly: “People need to know who owns important sites for public debate, and whether their fundamentalist free speech majority shareholders are doing business with censorious dictatorships.”
According to the judge, Silverman’s disclosure request was granted because he filed the request in a timely manner, “too late to deny the intervention under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 24(b),” and did not prejudice or rehear any issues that would have denied the intervention request.
Instead, he generously imposed a valid legal burden on the defendant that was “not onerous.”
The judge said the list of Twitter shareholders “does not contain scandalous information or trade secrets” and so could be made public “in the public interest of understanding the judicial process.”
U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ruled that Company X must “submit redacted corporate disclosure documents to the public record” by September 4. For the first time, the world will know the names of all of the company’s major shareholders at the time Musk bought it.
Read more: X was a crypto-scam-filled failure for Elon Musk — what happens now?
Jacob Silverman wants the world to know who’s behind X
Silverman has written critically about Musk’s messy acquisition negotiations over the past few weeks with Jack Dorsey and the company’s board. In his view, Musk bought Twitter to empower Republicans and techno-capitalists who feel harmed by changing societal norms.
In fact, Musk is a vocal supporter of Trump and subscribes to many right-wing views, including attacks on gender pronouns. He has also called the Democratic Party “the party of division and hate.” While Musk publicly claims to strengthen free speech on X, Silverman believes he actually just wants to influence political outcomes.
Following this logic, Mr. Silverman is curious about foreign interests who own Twitter shares and may have persuaded or rewarded Mr. Musk’s bid to take the company private. Mr. Silverman has intervened in at least two lawsuits seeking disclosure of companies named on Twitter’s cap sheet, and won at least one bid.
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