Elon Musk’s X has struggled to retain advertisers since acquiring the social media platform in 2022. Photo: Leon Neal/Getty Images
Nearly two years after Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now TwitterX) for $44 billion, the official list of investors who participated in the October 2022 deal has finally been revealed. According to recently released documents, first reported by The Washington Post, shareholders include investor Bill Ackman, hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.
The list of shareholders who support Musk’s acquisition was initially filed by Company X in 2023 as part of a lawsuit filed by former employees seeking payment of arbitration costs from their employer. The document was made public on August 20 after the Reporting Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that provides legal resources to journalists, filed a motion to unseal the records on behalf of independent journalist Jacob Silverman.
The roughly 100 stakeholders listed in the document include a number of venture capital firms, including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which recently participated in a $6 billion funding round for Musk’s AI startup xAI. 8VC, led by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, also backed Musk’s acquisition of X and is also an investor in Musk’s tunnel-drilling venture, The Boring Company. Gigafund, another investor in The Boring Company, also invested in X, as did Scott Nolan, a former SpaceX engineer who is now a partner at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm Founders Fund.
Some of the companies on the list aren’t all that surprising: Cryptocurrency exchange Binance, for example, previously disclosed that it had invested $500 million in Musk’s acquisition in 2022. It’s also no surprise that investor Cathie Wood, a longtime Musk fan, was involved in the acquisition through a subsidiary of her Ark Venture fund.
Musk himself is listed on the document under the Elon Musk Revocable Trust, and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has publicly clashed with Musk over his vision for the social media platform, also backed the 2022 purchase under a legal entity called Jack Dorsey Reminder LLC.
Other notable people publicly identified as X shareholders include Bill Ackman, whose Pershing Square Foundation, a private foundation linked to his hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Management, is also on the list. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a former director of Musk’s Tesla, is also an investor in X, as is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, another xAI backer. Sean Combs Capital, a fund linked to rapper Sean Combs, is also named in the private filing.
Was X a good investment?
About 30 entities named in the documents are linked to mutual fund firm Fidelity Investments, which recently revealed that its investment in X had led to losses, revealing in a November portfolio update that its stake in the social media platform X was valued at $5.6 million, down 72% from its value as of October 2022.
Despite introducing the ability to charge for authentication and use of its AI chatbot, Grok, X still relies primarily on advertising for its revenue stream, but Musk’s loosening of content moderation policies continues to unnerve advertisers, with the platform’s ad revenues reportedly falling 24% to $744 million in the first half of 2024 from $982 million in the first half of 2023.
Earlier this month, X sued the Global Responsible Media Coalition, an advertising industry coalition, for encouraging brands to join a boycott of advertising on the platform, affecting X’s revenue. The coalition has since disbanded, saying it did not have the funds to continue operating and fight Musk’s legal claims, while denying the allegations.