Elon Musk’s social media app, X, recently had 95 co-owners, including a Saudi conglomerate, the cryptocurrency firm Binance and entities associated with the rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs and the billionaire Bill Ackman, according to a list its lawyers filed in federal court this week.
The list is the public’s first complete look at who co-owns the app since Musk bought the company (called Twitter at the time) and took it private in 2022.
It’s not clear how current the list is. X’s lawyers originally filed the list with the court in June 2023 and made it public this week.
Lawyers for X sought to keep the list of equity stakeholders private, but a federal judge in California ordered the company to disclose it as part of a lawsuit brought by former Twitter employees who accuse the company of breaching its employment contracts. X filed a redacted list in court last year. Then, after journalist Jacob Silverman petitioned for the list to be public, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco ordered Tuesday that X lawyers file an unredacted version.
It is common in civil lawsuits for corporations to disclose at least some of their ownership details, and the federal court in San Francisco has a rule saying nongovernment parties to a lawsuit must disclose anyone with “a financial interest of any kind.”
Illston ruled that there’s a “strong presumption in favor” of public access to court records and that common exceptions, including for trade secrets, don’t apply.
The list of 95 co-owners is much longer than the list of 18 investors named in a securities filing in May 2022, when Musk was negotiating the purchase. That indicates that some investors from Twitter’s days as a publicly traded company have held on to their shares or that new shareholders joined Musk’s ownership group after May 2022 or both.
At least 27 of the co-owners are different investment vehicles associated with Fidelity Investments, the Boston-based mutual fund company and brokerage. In 2022, X listed only one Fidelity entity as a co-owner. Fidelity didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
And some of the co-owners are people or entities who held shares in Twitter as a public company and who held on to a piece of the company after Musk bought it. That group includes Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter and its former CEO. He didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment sent to his company, Block.
It’s not clear whether some of the 95 co-owners bought shares recently or whether they rolled over Twitter shares two years ago and held on to them.
The disclosure confirms that three current and former executives at Musk’s other businesses — Omead Afshar, who worked in the office of the CEO at Tesla; The Boring Co. executive Steve Davis; and former Tesla Vice President Robin Ren — all got stakes in the social media business. They didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Among the prominent co-owners now are entities associated with Combs, whose stake was reported by TMZ in November, and with Ackman, through his Pershing Square Foundation. Ackman is a hedge fund billionaire who posts frequently on X, including in a campaign against university administrators who he says are antisemitic.
A spokesperson for Ackman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A message sent to Combs’ company, Combs Global, wasn’t immediately returned. Combs faces multiple lawsuits, including one filed last month accusing him of sex trafficking. He has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and hasn’t been charged with a crime. He is a subject of a criminal investigation, NBC News reported last month, three months after his houses were raided in Los Angeles and Miami.
Other co-owners include Kingdom Holding Co., a Saudi conglomerate; IMG, a sports and media agency; a trust associated with Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison; and funds belonging to the venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and 8VC. Those investors didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday.
X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the list.
A handful of the 18 investors listed in the May 2022 securities filing weren’t included in this week’s disclosure. It wasn’t immediately clear why they weren’t named.
Musk and his co-investors paid $44 billion to acquire the company then known as Twitter. Fidelity said this year that it believes the company’s value had fallen about 71% since then.
Musk’s ownership has been tumultuous, both operationally, as the app has become a hub for neo-Nazis and other extremists, and financially, as many large advertisers have shunned the platform as a venue that isn’t safe for mainstream marketing campaigns.
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