Happy spring. I’ve been working and traveling and trying to keep my mind focused on writing rather than posting. For Business Insider, I wrote about the proud jingoism of Palantir and other defense tech companies seeking to “defend the West.” I also looked at some of the insane rhetoric coming from tech elites and why the market rewards it.

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For The Nation, I wrote about the death of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, his grieving parents’ campaign for a deeper investigation into his apparent suicide, and how their cause has been embraced by right-wing media and Musk loyalists.

At NPR, I was interviewed for segments about the Saudi influence on Silicon Valley and billionaires investing in charter cities.

Last month, I went to Arizona for the Tucson Festival of Books, where I appeared on a couple panels that which were taped for CSPAN. You can find them here and here.

In March, I appeared in a German documentary about Trump’s financial corruption. It’s only viewable in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, so a VPN may be needed.

There are some other recent podcast and interview segments out there for the true psycho fans. I’ve been working hard on a reported feature that should be out in the next few weeks. More soon.

Around the time that I was asked to write an article examining Grok’s exploding popularity to create sexualized imagery of children, I saw the above post and decided that I had had enough. My main conclusion, as I wrote for The Nation in an article published today, was that a fascist plutocrat had built a fascist media network and AI chatbot, and I didn’t want to be near that. I deactivated my X account.

I’ve been writing about X and Elon Musk for many years and will continue to. The company — and a dark chapter of its pre-Musk history — was a big part of Gilded Rage, my last book. With the help of some amazing pro bono lawyers, I intervened in a legal case against X to reveal a list of its shareholders. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about X and what it means for media, politics, tech, and culture. I would like to at least temporarily move beyond Musk’s noxious psychic terrain, which has come to define X through Grok and the site’s inducements to consume utter slop as it pushes its users toward the grimmest corners of the right-wing manosphere.

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I am not keen to participate in what is clearly part of a larger fascist ideological and political project, which helped return Donald Trump to office. That project is now focused on spreading an endless torrent of lies to mask Trump’s authoritarianism. I don’t need to see more insta-react videos from washed-up special-forces operators explaining why ICE’s murders are justified.

There is little moral valence, in my view, to quitting an addictive social-media feed, especially when the alternative tends to be another social-media feed furnished by people very much like Elon Musk. (Bluesky, where I have an account, has some unsavory investors, too.) “I’m quitting this app” is a hoary, sentimental genre of writing and posting that I discussed in my 2015 book Terms of Service. There is no ethical consumption under surveillance capitalism. But attention is finite, and I feel mine being poured uselessly onto the floor. I’d like to force myself to spend time in other ways, and however cynical I am, it’s not fun that every viral post attracts a horde of antisemitic goblins. Finally, as a journalist, I think X has mostly exhausted its utility while becoming a professional liability.

I plan to work on longer projects this year — a new book and reported features, including for this Substack, this bizarre platform, also funded by tech fascists, which for now offers a decent perch from which to reach people. Maybe one day I’ll write a similar post about finally quitting this place and moving my newsletter to warmer technopolitical climes. In the meantime, if you have a tip, I can be reached on Signal at jacobsilverman.99. Thanks.

My new book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, has been on store shelves for a month now, along with a CBC limited podcast series called “The Making of Musk.” I am really glad to have both of these works out in the world, and I hope you buy many copies, though libraries are great resources, too.

There have been strong reviews in Kirkus, Bloomberg, the Bulwark, and Publishers Weekly, which named Gilded Rage one of the best nonfiction books of 2025. A couple members of the financial press seemed to hate it, which I welcome. The Financial Times called the book “lively and provocative.” (No need to relate what else they said.)

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You can read excerpts of Gilded Rage in Newsweek, Lithub, and The Guardian. The book also incorporates some reporting that I’ve done on this Substack and for other outlets. I narrated the audiobook.

I’ve been doing many interviews in every media format available. (Soon: Laserdisc.) I had a wonderful conversation with noted cat owner and “Get Him to the Greek” star Paul Krugman:

Paul Krugman

Gilded Rage: Talking With Jacob Silverman

One of the surprising, at least to me, aspects of the Trump regime has been the large role played by Silicon Valley billionaires, who we used to think of as fairly liberal or at least libertarian. So I spoke with Jacob Silverman, whose new book Gilded Rage…

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6 months ago · 1048 likes · 330 comments · Paul Krugman

I’ve talked with the great Paris Marx, Brian Merchant, TrueAnon, KFPA, Politico, The Majority Report, WhoWhatWhy, and many other outlets. My voice has been heard on television and radio both terrestrial and satellite. I’ve been happy to talk with colleagues and readers in Wyoming, DC, San Francisco, and Boston.

I’ve talked a lot about tech fascism, billionaires’ affinity for the Saudi royal government, the whiplash of the last 20 years of tech politics, Republican complicity in Trump’s corruption, what the Covid years wrought, the paranoid billionaire mind, and how a bunch of centrist liberals and would-be libertarians developed a reactionary hatred of the Democratic Party and the left.

I recently published an op-ed in the New York Times about the unprecedented corruption made possible by World Liberty Financial and Trump’s crypto interests. It’s an issue I discuss in the book that has assumed huge importance in Trump’s second administration, in which white collar crime is legal, as long it somehow benefits the president and his family.

You can still follow me on X, Bluesky, and book sites like Amazon and Goodreads. As always, I am vowing to start writing regularly again on this Substack, where everything will continue to be unpaywalled and donations are welcome but not expected. I don’t like to write a lot of takes — I’ve done it too much — so I try to bring more reporting here, which takes time. I do have a few feature ideas and leads to follow. First, I have to clear away some work and promotional duties, but this will be my home base going into 2026.

Thanks for tuning in.

Coles thought so too, asking Wolff, “Did you actually meet the Dalai Lama at Jeffrey Epstein’s?”

“Indeed,” said Wolff.

Asked why the Dalai Lama was there, Wolff said that a lot of people hung out with Epstein to try to wheedle money out of him. And there was something compelling about the upscale salon-like scene: “It was always extraordinary,” said Wolff.

Wolff said that he started spending time at Epstein’s house in 2014, six years after the infamous pedophile was given an extremely favorable plea deal for sex crimes charges because, former U.S. district attorney Alex Acosta once said, “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.” Wolff was working on a potential book about Epstein and was given access to the now-deceased sex offender’s wealthy social milieu. Epstein later became an important source for Wolff’s best-selling books about President Donald Trump.

Any writing about Michael Wolff seems to require the proviso that his reliability has been questioned by assorted enemies and media critics. Wolff is a gossip hound, practicing the art at a very high level, and he hangs out with unsavory politicians and oligarchs who might like the idea of having a famous journalist around — until he publishes a book about them. Wolff gets into marble-floored rooms that many journalists don’t, so his comments are worth considering.

With that throat-clearing aside, let’s consider why His Holiness the Dalai Lama may have been at now-deceased sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s house. People generally hung out with Epstein for two reasons: sex and money. Wolff suggested that, in this case, it was the latter. Did the Dalai Lama, or an organization with which he’s associated, receive a donation from Epstein?

The Dalai Lama’s press office did not respond to an emailed list of questions. I was unable to reach Michael Wolff for comment about the Dalai Lama’s visit to Epstein’s home.

It wouldn’t be the first time the Dalai Lama had received money from a sex trafficker. In 2009, the Tibetan spiritual leader spoke at an event for NXIVM, the abusive sex cult whose leader, Keith Raniere, was convicted in 2019 on seven criminal charges and sentenced to 120 years in prison. During the 2009 appearance, the Dalai Lama gave a speech and placed a ceremonial Tibetan scarf on Reniere’s shoulders. For his efforts, the Dalai Lama reportedly received $1 million. The deal was made by billionaire heiress Sara Bronfman, who, along with her sister Clare, gave Raniere and NXIVM at least $150 million. Sara Bronfman was alleged to be having an affair with the Lama’s personal peace emissary Lama Tenzin Dhonden, who was later removed from his post for corruption.

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Despite evidence that he ran a child sex trafficking operation, the source of Epstein’s wealth has never been sufficiently accounted for. People who spent time around him have said that they didn’t know what he did for a job and that he seemed to do very little actual work. For some reason, billionaires liked to give Jeffrey Epstein huge amounts of money. Les Wexner gave Epstein tens of millions of dollars — he later said that Epstein misappropriated $46 million from him — along with one of the most valuable residential properties in New York City. Leon Black, who has been accused of rape in civil suits, paid Epstein $158 million for “tax advice.”

Whatever Epstein was as a financier — sometimes he was described as a financial bounty hunter, reclaiming assets stranded overseas — he was adept at moving money around the world. And he had help from pliant bankers, as demonstrated by victims’ lawsuits against JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank, which led to nine-figure settlements. Sen. Ron Wyden recently said that the Treasury Department has documents about banks looking the other way for more than $1.5 billion in Epstein-related financial activity, and that Treasury should release the documents. Wyden, who has overseen a long-running investigation into Leon Black’s taxes, also said that Black’s payments to Epstein should be investigated by the IRS.

In short, there’s still so much we don’t know about where Epstein’s money came from and where it went — and to what ends. But following the money trail as far as it leads can tell us something about Epstein’s network, how he operated, and who enabled him. And sometimes a single $50,000 payment can open up the aperture, letting in some light.

In the official 2020 MIT report regarding Epstein’s relationship with the university, two partners from the law firm Goodwin Procter “analyzed all donations received by MIT, both those made directly by Epstein (whether individually or through his charitable foundations) and those made by third parties at Epstein’s alleged behest.” The report found that, during a 15-year period, Epstein donated a combined $850,000 to Seth Lloyd, a physics professor, and to the MIT Media Lab, which was then headed by Joi Ito. Michael Wolff mentioned Joi Ito as one of the prominent guests who attended Epstein’s regular home gatherings.

The report claims that Lloyd, who was placed on administrative leave before being allowed to return to teaching, accepted transfers from Epstein in his personal bank account and tried to conceal the source of the donations. The report similarly describes MIT officials as trying to keep quiet Epstein’s donations to the Media Lab and his visits to campus.

The report doesn’t look at relationships between MIT staff and Epstein that occurred outside the university. While the authors write that they looked into donations that may have come through Epstein proxies, it’s not clear how far that investigation went, or was allowed to go. Former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito received at least $1.2 million from Epstein for his own venture capital firm, which the MIT report mentions in a footnote.

The MIT Media Lab had an uncommonly high profile for a university organization, with an orbiting network of billionaire tech moguls, scientists, writers, government officials, politicians, and TED-talking NGO types. That made the Media Lab’s director, Joi Ito, an important relationship for the prestige-obsessed Epstein. The two seemed to be in close contact, with Ito once “strategizing with [Epstein] as to how he might be able to ‘mollify the bad press’ after a series of articles were published concerning a civil lawsuit brought by Epstein victims,” according to the MIT report. Ito, who sat on the boards of the New York Times and the MacArthur Foundation, repeatedly solicited Epstein for more money for the university. MIT’s investigators claimed that his big-money asks weren’t answered:

Epstein used ostensibly philanthropic donations in order to win favors, borrow academics’ intellectual prestige, or to move money where it wouldn’t normally be allowed to go. The MIT report describes Epstein using Professor Lloyd (with the professor’s participation) to see if he could make donations to the university without setting off alarm bells:

Over the years, MIT has hosted a number of Buddhist and Tibetan initiatives and organizations. Many of them have been led by the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi, a disciple of the Dalai Lama who has worked at MIT since 2002. In 2009, MIT established a “a non-partisan collaborative think-and-do tank” called The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values. One of its top donors is the Prajnopaya Foundation, which in turn is funded partly by the Dalai Lama Trust. The Prajnopaya Foundation, a global humanitarian organization, is separate from but closely associated with the similarly named Prajnopaya Institute, which focuses on education. They share a Massachusetts address and a director: Tenzin Priyadarshi.

In November 2013, Linda Stone, who first introduced Epstein to Ito, sent an email to Ito suggesting that a 501(c)(3) might be used to mask Epstein’s donations, although, she wrote, “there may be disclosure issues.” Ito then took the idea to MIT’s VP of Development, according to the MIT report.

In 2017, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Education Advance donated $50,000 to the Prajnopaya Institute at MIT. The money for that donation came from an entity called “J Epstein Virgin Islands FD Inc,” which that same year gave Education Advance $55,000, according to IRS filings. Education Advance took in an additional $1,500 in 2017, which appears to be the only year it was ever in operation. Its IRS filings report no other donations or dispersal of funds, suggesting that Education Advance might have been purpose-made for the Prajnopaya Institute gift. After 2017, Education Advance never filed another Form 990, leading to its nonprofit status being revoked.

Education Advance was overseen by Svetlana Pozhidaeva, a Russian model who worked for MC2, a modeling agency run by Jean-Luc Brunel, an Epstein accomplice accused of rape and sex trafficking who died in a French prison in 2022. Education Advance was registered to an Epstein-owned Manhattan building. Pozhidaeva, who had been photographed leaving Epstein’s house, also shared a lawyer with him: Darren Indyke, who is now co-executor of Epstein’s estate. Epstein’s Virgin Islands-based foundation, the initial source of the funds, was sometimes called Enhanced Education.

The Prajnopaya Institute transaction isn’t mentioned in the 2020 MIT report, which covers the years “between 2002 and 2017.” The existence of the transaction had been reported a year earlier by the Daily Beast. MIT’s media office did not respond to questions about why the Prajnopaya Institute donation did not appear in its 2020 report on the university’s relationship with Epstein.

The lack of official acknowledgement from MIT is another indicator that Epstein’s money flows remain poorly charted. Some parties might prefer it that way. Epstein also helped muddy the waters by lying and exaggerating about the scope of his charitable giving — a deception that included Epstein making edits to Wikipedia pages about himself, his foundation, and some of his associates.

The Prajnopaya Institute told the Daily Beast in 2019 that it returned the $50,000 donation. The Institute didn’t respond to an email asking how the donation was brokered and if the Dalai Lama or Tenzin Priyadarshi was involved. A separate inquiry to Priyadarshi, sent through his website imonk.org, received no reply.

Priyadarshi has long been associated with the Media Lab and Joi Ito, who described Priyadarshi as his friend. They podcasted together and co-taught an MIT class called Principles of Awareness. Ethics programs that began in the Media Lab later moved to the Dalai Lama Center, where Priyadarshi is CEO. Ito and Priyadarshi have appeared on discussion panels together. Ito, a prolific photographer, has posted photos of Priyadarshi and the Dalai Lama, and he’s cited them in his writing. The Dalai Lama has attended at least three events hosted by the MIT center named after him.

Dr. Babak Babakinejad, an MIT whistleblower and research scientist who first alerted me to the Prajnopaya Foundation donation, offered the following statement:

“The MIT Epstein report is institutionally compromised. MIT has persistently resisted transparency regarding Epstein’s connections to the Media Lab and its associated initiatives, particularly regarding Open Agriculture and its Food Computers. This project is implicated in fraud, environmental misconduct, and retaliation. These are issues I have been actively challenging as part of an ongoing lawsuit.”

Epstein’s interest in MIT was about more than just showering a couple programs he liked with cash. Epstein visited MIT’s campus at least nine times and attended MIT Media Lab events, which could attract wealthy tech and political figures like billionaire Reid Hoffman. Epstein spent time with MIT professors and staffers, some of whom he met through the literary agent John Brockman, who acted as a connector between Epstein and scientists and academics. It’s hard to think that Epstein’s MIT-related contributions during a 15-year period only amounted to $850,000, especially when the donations that are now documented were once obfuscated. As shown here, the Prajnopaya Institute donation means the real amount that Epstein gave to MIT is at least $900,000.

It’s not clear why Epstein, who as far as I can tell never mentioned Buddhism or had any association with Tibetan culture or causes, made a $50,000 donation to a Buddhist organization at MIT. Perhaps someone influential asked him. Perhaps he was once again looking “to see if the line jingles.”

The alarm did go off after all, but it was too late for anyone to care.

I don’t like advice lists, but here I am writing one. Curious.

This isn’t a complete list, and partly because I am a freelancer, I don’t talk about organized labor or unions or many other potentially important things. Most of this derives from 15+ years spent mostly as an independent journalist, a year on staff at one publication, having written for dozens of others, some no longer extant, along with a few books. Now I’m 40 years old, emerging with a solid rolodex and steady assignments but never enough money in the bank and more debt than I’d like to admit. There are no promises here, no guaranteed paths to success (I’m not sure what that looks like anymore). There is only, as the zoomers say, cope.

1. Don’t write about yourself. Unless you have an uncommonly interesting or geopolitically important experience to relate — or perhaps you’ve developed a gorgeous lyricism that makes editors weep — find someone else to write about. Don’t foreground your own reactions to a piece of pop culture or a horrible political event. Write about the people who made it or the people affected by it.

2. Become an expert in something. Find what genuinely interests you — Medicare, the Chinese solar industry, an obscure government agency, the history of labor organizing, or, I don’t know, CRYPTO (ugh) — and become an expert in it. Read, watch, talk to as many people as you can. It’s good to pick up the phone. Go to events, interview people, write articles. Subscribe to trade publications or niche blogs. Keep up. And be willing to call yourself an expert, so that when the time comes — when an editor wants an article about China’s incredible battery industry or about how a niche fintech technology is now powering the biggest financial scandal in presidential history — you’ll be ready to contribute. And in time, editors will recognize you as an expert and keep coming back to you.

3. Have a job. Almost no one I know makes a decent, sustainable living from freelance journalism. If you have a day job in another industry, consider keeping it. If you have a wealthy spouse, consider keeping them. The benefit of journalism as a side project is that you get to pick and choose what you do a little more, hopefully focusing on articles that are more substantial and meaningful.

4. Have comrades. Competition is fleeting and can be soul-eroding. There’s a vast landscape out there of uncovered stories. Befriend your colleagues. Share intel, commiserate, offer help, TALK ABOUT MONEY.

5. Be flexible. Opportunities can come from oblique angles. Consider saying yes to something you might normally not do. At the same time, don’t say yes to something if you feel yourself waffling. Do you really want to work for 3 months on a podcast about the Sykes-Picot agreement? Can you finish that feature about Labubus without pulling your hair out? Stare at a wall for ten minutes and meditate on the answer. Then decide.

6. Always ask for more money. In most cases, the worst that can happen is they’ll say no. If possible, have an agent or representative ask for more money on your behalf. Don’t write for free or on spec. Every publication will plead poverty and point to recent budget cuts and imperious bosses. Ask for more money.

7. This is a wildly unequal industry. That’s why you ask for more money. That’s why you talk to your peers (respectfully) about money, who’s gouging them, and who’s offering a decent pay rate for reported features before the inevitable round of layoffs come down. Develop a certain strategic sense of where the money is and where it isn’t and whether it’s worth the headache of pursuing.

8. Develop relationships with editors you trust. You will follow them from job to job. They will become reliable partners in your work, especially when other, flashier publications invite you to spend weeks pitching and writing, only to kill your piece. You will take your abandoned article to the editor you adore and explain your predicament, and they’ll bring you in from the cold, offer some warm tea, help edit your article into better shape, and pay you one-tenth of what you hoped to get from a glossy magazine. But you will get it published.

9. Think about your privacy and others’. By writing about someone, you’re contributing to a permanent data trail. You might even make them (in)famous. Consider what that means and how it should shape your work, including the kinds of stories you choose. Consider the same for yourself: how much do you want to share online for the potentially para-social masses? And how do you want to be seen by the potential editors, readers, and sources who are lurking in your feed?

10. Be easy to contact. Have a website. Post your email address. Consider a second phone only for work. Use Signal. If you have a different legal name or a pen name that you can use for a little extra protection, that might be good idea. Think about creating an LLC.

11. You have nothing in common with corporate media. With a couple exceptions, people who talk on TV for a living are demons inhabiting a nether-realm of insane luxury and political delusion. If they ask you to come on their show to talk about that viral article for which you’re still waiting on the $700 check and should really start working on the next assignment, you should probably do it anyway.

12. Beware of the scene. Popularity is fleeting and elusive. Don’t chase markers of prestige. Don’t worry who’s reading your articles or who might read your book (they probably won’t). Don’t go to parties or events because you hope that someone will be there. They are probably rude or boring. You will learn to identify the scenesters and climbers — the people who are just happy to be there with one publishing credit in a mainstream publication, the gossip-mongers, and the people who are only there to extract what connections and favors they can on their way to a job at the New York Times. Take the gossip and leave the rest. Congratulate them on their latest (“excited to read your piece!”) and walk over and talk to the people who are actually your friends, or, even better, someone you don’t know.

13. Remember the work. You will meet people who will wash out or give up. It’s a grind. Maybe they’ll have a mental breakdown on the G train or leave for the rehab they so clearly need. They might decide that a few years as a beat reporter or book critic is enough, and eventually they move back home or take a job in corporate comms. This is a valid, even noble path, depending on the vicissitudes of one’s life. But you will remember the work, reading and writing as much as possible, always looking to the next story, the next tip, because freelance journalism is a “what have you done for me lately?” game, and you will be politely forgotten if you don’t continue to do the work. So put away whatever childish things you need, construct your life and days to be nourishing and disciplined, and do the work, write your articles and books, because a lot of your peers won’t make it. And soon enough, we’ll all be gone.

Today, I am revealing the identity of the person who I believe is “Dave Lee,” the one named person associated with Aqua 1 Foundation. Lee’s name was mentioned in an Aqua 1 Foundation press release published on Reuters, and he has an X account with a cartoon avatar from which he’s posted 11 times in total.

I believe it is in the public interest to know who is doing a potential $100 million crypto deal with a crypto firm from which the president of the United States receives 75 percent of all revenue from token sales. Aqua 1 Foundation also claims to be supporting USD1, Trump’s new dollar-pegged stablecoin, meaning that it may be an ongoing partner in the President’s crypto dealings.

As I wrote last week, it’s clear from public blockchain data that the actor posting as Aqua 1 Foundation sent at least $80 million in USDT tokens to World Liberty Financial. The potential remaining $20 million apparently hasn’t been accounted for. According to a legal filing earlier this year, Trump was seeking to sell a portion of his LLC through which he receives WLF revenues to an unnamed buyer. It’s not clear if the deal ever happened, but per new fine print on WLF’s website, Trump’s financial stake in WLF recently declined from 60 percent to 40 percent. Someone in power should investigate!

I have asked World Liberty Financial’s outside PR repeatedly about this deal, including an email yesterday in which I wrote that I had likely identified the person behind Aqua 1 Foundation. They have not answered any questions. I have tweeted at “Dave Lee” on X several times, including letting him know that I had identified him, and he has not replied. Yesterday, I emailed the person I believe is Dave Lee. I also sent him a message on LinkedIn. He then deactivated his LinkedIn account. In short, I’ve given Dave Lee, Aqua 1 Foundation, and World Liberty Financial every possible opportunity to comment or refute my claims. They haven’t, nor have they provided journalists or the public any useful information about what is going on here.

Although Dave Lee is essentially pseudonymous on X and hasn’t posted much, he and his partners left some revealing traces. First, there’s the matter of aqua1.foundation, the website for Aqua 1 Foundation (there’s also aqua0.foundation). The AWS server that hosts the Aqua 1 website also hosts other crypto-related domains, which you can check with this Python script. They include:

• www.aqua1.foundation

• www.aqua0.foundation

• www.qqqai.fund

• www.blockrock.win

• web3port.foundation

• web3port.us

These entities appear interrelated, and Dave Lee has posted on X identifying himself as part of Blockrock. Web3Port Foundation and Web3Port Labs appear to be a group of Hong Kong-based Chinese crypto traders and investors. They are part of a UAE-focused VC crypto alliance and are reportedly investors in Klickl, a UAE-based crypto banking platform. Web3Port also acts as a market maker and was involved in a murky incident in which a WLF-supported company called Movement handed a bunch of its tokens to a Web3Port-linked company that promptly sold them all and cratered the price.

People affiliated with Web3Port have appeared under their real names at public crypto events over the last year in Singapore, Dubai, and Hong Kong. These events have been filmed and documented in digital event invitations and posts on X and LinkedIn.

One of the people who has represented Web3Port at crypto events is named David Jia Hua Li. At times, he has gone by David Li. On September 18, 2024, Li appeared at an event in Singapore called The Last Gold Mine of Web3. He appears 25 seconds into this video that Klickl posted on X. This is David:

On December 12, 2024, David Li appeared at an invitation-only event in Dubai (which someone duly posted about on LinkedIn). He was listed on the invitation as “David,” with a dog avatar.

One of the panelists posted a video [archive] from the event, where “David” can be seen at the 0:47 mark.

On February 21, 2025, David Li appeared in Hong Kong at event called Digital Silk Road: China-UAE Digital Economy Forum & KLK Foundation Launch. In a LinkedIn post, he was referred to as David Li, Acceleration Partner, Web3Port Labs. Crucially, Li was tagged in this and at least one other LinkedIn post, allowing one to easily find his profile. That profile appeared under the name Peter Li, and it’s the one that was deactivated after I sent a direct message asking about Aqua 1 Foundation. In the second LinkedIn post, his tagged name is David Jia Hua Li, which links again to the Peter Li profile.

The Peter Li profile had very little information on it, but it did include mention of a management job at CNPC Beijing, June 2024 to Present. A ContactOut page [archive] — which apparently contains contact and business information scraped from social media sites — offers a fuller resume for David Li. The ContactOut page pulled information from a LinkedIn profile for a David Li — https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-li-3a9917171 — that has since been removed. Notably, the LinkedIn ID of 3a9917171 is the same as that of the Peter Li page.

The ContactOut page helps unlock the Dave Lee mystery, providing more information about David Jia Hua Li’s life and career. He’s identified here as a graduate of NYU. There are several email addresses, one of which I messaged.

Let’s go back to the X profile of Dave Lee, the only person publicly associated with Aqua 1 Foundation. His page lists his location as Sao Paolo, New York, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi. New York is where he went to business school; Hong Kong is where he’s worked in finance; and Abu Dhabi is where Web3Port has focused its efforts. As for Sao Paolo, it appears that David Jia Hua Li grew up in Brazil (he’s posted in Portuguese). An entry in a Brazilian immigration log mentions him “acquiring Chinese nationality.”

That comports with recent reporting in a Chinese-language crypto publication called Chaincatcher, which, citing anonymous sources, describes Aqua 1 Foundation’s Dave Lee as an NYU graduate and the scion of a “Chinese-Brazilian business family.”

By all available evidence, Aqua 1 Foundation’s Dave Lee is the David Li of Web3Port. I welcome any comment or clarification from the parties involved.

How did a 30-year-old Chinese-Brazilian finance professional working for a Chinese state energy company secure $100 million to buy crypto tokens from the President of the United States’ main crypto firm? And what do he and his colleagues expect in return?

Please message me on Signal at jacobsilverman.99 if you know more. I am very grateful for the tips that led me to this story, and I will be reporting further on it.

Update, 7/15/25:

Dave Lee and Aqua 1 Foundation posted on X and emailed me. Dave Lee called my reporting “factually incorrect” but has not said what facts are wrong. He has not directly addressed any of my reporting or answered the questions I’ve raised in my articles and in various messages. He hasn’t said whether he is David Li of Web3Port. He also hasn’t issued any explicit denials, despite repeated prompting to do so.

Lee did essentially confirm that he controls the Web3Port website and the Aqua 1 Foundation website, offering the following explanation to an X user: “The shared IP was simply due to transitional hosting during the early stage. I brought over the CTO and core IT member when I left. Aqua1 has been built independently since day one. No ties to whatsoever other team or entity.” He also seems to have switched Aqua 1’s server while taking the Aqua 0 and QQAI sites offline.

Below I am including Dave Lee’s email, which I received last night in response to a query I sent on July 2, before my first article about Aqua 1 Foundation appeared in The Nation. In another attempt to hold Lee to his claims of transparency, I again asked him some basic questions:

• Are you the David Li from Web3Port?

• Is Web3Port related in any way to Aqua 1 Foundation?

• Where is Aqua 1 Foundation registered as a corporation?

• Where did the money for the $100 million deal with World Liberty Financial come from?

I’ll let you know if I hear back.

[with apologies/credit to Harry Benson]

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Today The Nation published my article about Aqua 1 Foundation, a supposed UAE-based crypto company, buying $100 million worth of $WLFI, a crypto token created by World Liberty Financial, the crypto company closely tied to President Donald Trump and his sons. In short, this previously unknown crypto company was putting tens of millions of dollars in Trump’s pocket. (*According to the published terms of the deal between Trump’s LLC and WLF.)

I couldn’t find any evidence that Aqua 1 Foundation exists. Its sparse website was registered on May 28, 2025 — two weeks after Trump visited the UAE — and its social media and data trail are similarly nonexistent. The only person associated with Aqua 1 is this guy:

He won’t respond to my tweets. Last week, a PR firm representing World Liberty Financial acknowledged receiving my questions (like who is funding this and can you show me any evidence that this is a real company) and promised to get back to me. They did not get back to me.

I have no idea who this is or where this money came from. As I write in my article, according to public blockchain data, someone with the wallet aqua1.eth sent at least $80m worth of Tether’s USDT stablecoins to World Liberty Financial across three separate transactions in June. It could be an Emirati company (though likely a state-backed one), or it could be any billionaire or state actor looking to influence Trump. A more adept blockchain analyst should investigate the transactions, which went through wallets on Bybit and OKX.

It doesn’t matter if you understand crypto or not, if you support it or not. Trump has taken in hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe billions, from crypto deals like this, a level of graft that’s unprecedented in the history of the United States. He’s done it before and he will keep doing it.

As I’ve written repeatedly, Trump is not only the country’s leading crypto entrepreneur. He’s in business with the industry’s sketchiest players, an array of criminals, hucksters, and fraudsters with ties to global cybercrime, money laundering networks, and leading American adversaries like China and Russia. I am no defense hawk, but this seems bad and unsustainable.

Since my article was published, I was alerted to the existence of the Aqua 0 Foundation, which seems to have been created around the same time as the Aqua 1 Foundation.

It’s the same people, whoever they are.

Like Aqua 1 Foundation, Aqua 0 Foundation’s X account seems to have been suspended or deleted.

Anyway, if you’ve made it past the screenshots, perhaps you share some concern about the largest financial scandal in presidential history. Donald Trump has found a magic money machine and will make billions of real and fake dollars while becoming ever more in hock to the rogues’ gallery subsidizing his crypto empire. There is potentially no bottom to the corruption.

Yes, the last decade has given us a sumptuous buffet of Trumpian scandals. He’s a bigoted sundowning psycopath with the office’s traditional affinity for America’s partners in war crimes — Israel and Saudi Arabia. In a “normal country,” the 25th Amendment, impeachment, or prison would have led to his removal from the political scene long ago. But this not a normal country. It’s a reality TV freakshow in which a crypto outlaw can announce he’s buying $100 million worth of the president’s shitcoin and nothing happens. Except the price goes up and the bad guys get to cash out on the backs of hapless MAGA speculators.

With a feckless Democratic minority having already blessed Trump’s behavior by helping pass the GENIUS Act (Trump’s getting into the stablecoin business), there’s little to stop him. Truthing from his Qatari Air Force One, the most compromised of presidents will drag us all into the muck of his corruption.

The very rich have their own folkways and methods of doing business, operating at an Olympian remove from you and me. Many ultra high net worth individuals — also known by the acronym UHNWI — maintain what are called family offices, private businesses that track their money, manage investments, employ the billionaire’s personal staff, and perhaps disperse money to a connected foundation or nonprofit. It’s the nerve center of a billionaire’s empire, with potentially broad reach — the staff employed by a family office might include assistants, investment specialists, political advisors, chefs, chauffeurs, cleaners, and security guards.

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Usually we don’t hear much about how family offices operate, but a handful are well known. Elon Musk’s family office, Excession LLC, is managed by Jared Birchall, Musk’s closest aide who is frequently reported on in connection with his boss’s many companies, attempts to procreate, and political activities. Bill Gates’ family office is called Cascade Investment LLC, and with $70 billion in assets under management, it’s known for generating huge returns for its principal beneficiary, who now is the leading owner of US farmland.

A company called Clue LLC seems to be serving as the family office for web browser pioneer, billionaire venture capitalist, and prominent Donald Trump supporter Marc Andreessen. Clue LLC definitely belongs to Andreessen — corporate registration documents in California, Louisiana, and Delaware either mention him or firms and corporate agents he’s used before. It also employs people who have worked for Andreessen’s foundation. Clue LLC’s existence hasn’t been publicly reported.

Clue LLC seems a little different than a conventional family office. To start, Clue LLC has a public-facing website at www.cluellc.com. The site is a barebones placeholder, featuring stock photos of beautiful oceans, mountains, and minimalist architecture. “Welcome to Clue LLC,” reads a large headline, below which is a promise that the company “is committed to the highest level of services.”

There’s also a phone number, an office address, and a 2021 copyright notice. An About page, again featuring stock nature photography, offers a vague description of a firm offering discreet asset management services.

The address on cluellc.com is associated with the Palo Alto office of Frank, Rimerman, an accounting firm used by Andreessen. According to a data broker service, the Clue phone number is registered to Laura Arrillaga, Marc Andreessen’s wife. The daughter of a billionaire property developer, Arillaga-Andreessen heads the Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation. In an online biography, she describes Marc Andreessen as her “trophy husband.”

I called the phone number and left a message after it went straight to voicemail.

On LinkedIn, about a dozen people list themselves as present or past employees of Clue LLC. They include personal assistants, chefs, a gallerist (the Andreessens have a large art collection), a chief of staff, and an estate manager. They seem to have responsibilities extending across Andreessen’s properties in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City. I reached out to some of them, but they either did not respond or declined to speak on the record.

Clue LLC’s life seemed to begin on February 8, 2005, when it was registered as ML Services, LLC in Delaware by a CPA with a Silicon Valley address. Two months later, ML Services LLC was registered in California as well. On October 18, 2012, ML Services LLC re-registered itself in California as Clue, LLC. The authorized signature came from Anne F. Macdonald, a partner at Frank, Rimerman. Five days later, someone registered cluellc.com, though according to archived versions on the Wayback Machine, the site seems to have been blank until 2021.

In 2015, Clue LLC was delinquent in maintaining its filings with the California Secretary of State. In 2016, its registration was forfeited. The following year, Clue LLC successfully applied for its registration to be revived and was restored as a going concern.

In 2020, ML Services LLC in Delaware changed its name to Meadow Loan Servicing LLC.

As of April 2025, Clue LLC appears to be current with its California business filings. Documents filed with the Secretary of State in 2023 and 2025 describe the type of business as “employees and payroll.” The designated section for listing a chief executive officer is left blank.

On January 27, 2025, a week after the presidential inauguration, Marc Andreessen registered Clue LLC in Louisiana. Rather than a lawyer or CPA, his own name is listed as the registered agent and officer. The latter has the same address for the Frank, Rimerman office in Palo Alto. But in the registered agent section, there’s an address for a lake house in Baton Rouge. According to public records, a Louisiana baseball coach and his family may live in that house. I reached out to him on Facebook and X to ask why a billionaire’s family office seems to be registered to the nice-but-not-billionaire-nice home of a private hitting coach and baseball scout in Louisiana. I did not receive a reply before publication.

So that’s three corporate registrations across three states over 20 years, with shifting names, all connected to Marc Andreessen, with one of them lapsing for a couple years, plus a strange public-facing website promising “confidentiality” in its operations. What does it all add up to? These may simply be the inscrutable personal financial machinations of an influential Trump donor who insists he’s merely another member of the professional managerial class. Perhaps this attempt at reading the tea leaves of Andreessen’s corporate registrations is only a pinhole glimpse into how a billionaire manages his affairs. Andreessen, after all, sits on numerous corporate boards and, through his Andreessen Horowitz firm, has a large startup investment portfolio that includes Substack, the platform I’m using to publish this article. Clue LLC may be yet another company in that vast portfolio, but it seems like an important one, closely maintained and never publicly discussed.

If you happen to know more, please get in touch. I am glad to speak on background, and I protect the confidentiality of sources.

Update, 4/6/25: The Clue LLC website has been taken offline.

Among his 2024 campaign policy proposals, President Trump promised to build 10 “Freedom Cities” — built-from-scratch developments on federal land (though Greenland might soon be an option) based on individual freedom, low regulation, low taxes, and unfettered entrepreneurialism. These neo-homesteads would be places where ambitious tech startups and big corporations could thrive and new residents would get “baby bonuses” for spawning future patriotic workers. Announcing a contest to solicit Freedom City proposals in March 2023, Trump said that these new cities offer a chance to “reopen the frontier, reignite American imagination, and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people, all hardworking families, a new shot at home ownership and in fact, the American Dream.”

There would even be flying cars, the ultimate retro-futuristic symbol of technological innovation, whose failure to launch Peter Thiel and other libertarian venture capitalists have been mourning for years. But mostly there would be data centers, nuclear power, biotech and anti-aging startups, cryptocurrencies, AI development, fusion power experiments, and, according to Trump, “towering monuments to our true American heroes.”

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For the tech financiers and right-wing entrepreneurs looking to “exit” from democracy — from the rule of law, consumer protection regulations, financial enforcement, and anything that might slow their vision of unchecked technological development — the Freedom Cities concept has been enticing. A number of startups and nonprofits, some backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in investment capital, have spent years trying to create charter cities, floating polities (seasteading), or tiny corporate fiefdoms inspired by Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State movement. In my forthcoming book, “Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley,” I write about the Network State, charter cities, and the project known as California Forever in Solano County, CA. All of these efforts in some way look to expand on the neoliberal tradition of special economic zones and create what are essentially tech-forward company towns or corporate city-states (in some cases, they’re veritable dictatorships). And now, the promoters of this ideological project seem to be developing the political relationships — facilitated by some very well-connected lawyers — to merge their vision with Trump’s Freedom Cities concept.

Wired recently ran a good article looking at how charter cities proponents are forming interest groups, writing potential legislation, and lobbying the Trump administration. The article looks at the Freedom Cities Coalition, which is funded by NeWay Capital LLC, which in turn is part of Prospera, the charter-city venture currently battling the Honduran government over its claims to sovereignty. The Freedom Cities Coalition touts three possible policy approaches that it claims would, in Trump-ian fashion, unleash the flood of American prosperity that has been damned behind onerous regulations: “By creating zones of regulatory clarity and economic dynamism, these specially designated areas strip away decades of bureaucratic buildup while maintaining essential protections, allowing entrepreneurs and builders to move at the speed of human ingenuity rather than the pace of paperwork.”

The other group Wired mentions is the Frontier Foundation, a 501c4 affiliated with the Charter Cities Institute, a 501c3 that’s officially registered as the Center for Innovative Governance Research, and which has received funding from right-wing donors like the Charles Koch Foundation. The Frontier Foundation has been distributing policy memos and having conversations with government officials, according to Wired.

What’s interesting about these groups is how nominally libertarian, market-oriented city projects are making moves to tap government connections, shape legislation, and receive potential subsidies or access to federal land. Pure libertarianism, when put into practice, tends to resemble corporatism, with the attendant networks of transactional politics and favor-trading. Taking a closer look at these organizations — and the flurry of proper nouns orbiting them — one can get a sense of how the charter city movement is insinuating itself into the MAGA power structure and policy apparatus.

The Charter Cities Institute’s public filings list its address as 1717 K Street NW, 900 Washington, DC 20006. That happens to be the address of a virtual office space used by the law firm Schaerr Jaffe, which has represented Elon Musk in some of his free-speech litigation, including his lawsuit against Disney on behalf of actor Gina Carano. Mark Paoletta, the current general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, was a partner at Schaerr Jaffe. A prolific and fierce defender of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Paoletta’s firm received $300,000 in funding from right-wing patronage king Leonard Leo.

On its website, the Frontier Foundation lists an address of 300 Independence Avenue, SE, Washington, DC 20003. That is the same address as the Conservative Partnership Institute, a 501c3, founded in 2017 and led by former Congressman Jim DeMint and former Trump chief-of-staff Mark Meadows, which has become a major player in the MAGA movement. CPI has been an “incubator and activist hub” for a number of groups, from Russell Vought’s Center for Renewing America to Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, which are investigating Democratic officials and public-sector employees; monitoring “election integrity”; and filing lawsuits against wokeness wherever it may rear itself. (America First Legal Foundation paid the aforementioned Schaerr Jaffe $314,738 for legal services in 2023.)

Despite the shared address, the Frontier Foundation has no relationship with CPI, according to Frontier Foundation President Nick Allen. “No involvement, I just used the same law firm as them and they have that for the mailing address,” Allen wrote in response to a text message query. “I’m located in New York” — Allen is involved with Sovereign House, a right-wing tech hangout in lower Manhattan — while 501c4s like his tend to be formed in DC. “I leave that stuff up to reputable firms,” he wrote.

If the Frontier Foundation isn’t involved with CPI, it is still sitting cheek-by-jowl with the most important policy, lobbying, and activist shop in the MAGA governance structure. They share lawyers, as Allen acknowledged. William Klimon, who incorporated the Frontier Foundation in crypto-friendly Wyoming, is part of the Compass Legal Group, which has done work for many CPI-related organizations. Compass Legal Group is owned in part by Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer who was on the phone call in which Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state to find him 11,780 more votes. Mitchell has led the Election Integrity Network, a CPI-incubated organization that promotes conspiracies about election fraud and the 2020 “big lie” and has tried to use “flawed” AI software to help purge state voter rolls. In reports from Compass and CPI, the former is described as a “spinoff” of the latter. “CPI also continued to support Compass Professional and Compass Legal Group, who in turn helped conservative start-up organizations to run effectively and stay focused on their missions,” CPI wrote in its 2022 annual report.

At their core, charter cities are supposed to be about individual liberty and human flourishing. But seizing sovereignty is a messy business, requiring aggressive lawfare, politicking, and a lot of money. The road to this particular techno-utopia runs through the all too appropriately named Independence Avenue.

It turns out you can just do things. You can wake up and change your life. You can start exercising, change your job, move, get married, get divorced, found a company, restore that motorcycle you’ve always dreamed about. Don’t wait for the perfect time. Don’t ask for permission. You can just do things. You can take over the government.

In recent years, “you can just do things” emerged as a self-help-tinged meme in Silicon Valley — an almost earnest call for people to do something, to act without fear or hesitation. Implied in “you can just do things” was that life is short, and people are hobbled by inaction, but anyone can conjure a certain will to power, an ability to break out and change the course of one’s life. On X, people have recently used “you can just do things” to celebrate a guy who “made 10k+/month sending potatoes in the mail” and Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 decision to live in San Francisco over Berkeley.

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Exuberant and a little silly, as a lifestyle mantra and meme, it’s not bad. It reflected a period, at the tail end of the ZIRP era, when tech actually made very little substantive or enduring beyond new forms of fraud, digital tchotchkes, and speculative markets. The call from industry leaders like Marc Andreessen that “it’s time to build” stood in dramatic contrast from what tech was actually doing: financial engineering, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, lobbying its way toward greater political influence, and washing money for foreign dictatorships through failed startup investments. As society suffered through the pandemic and stagnation, some people invoked “you can just do things” as a prompt to work on themselves.

In the context of tech’s political economy, “you can just do things” took on a darker cast, especially as Elon Musk, David Sacks, Andreessen, and other right-wing tech reactionaries emerged as pivotal figures in the 2024 presidential campaign. Like its predecessor “move fast and break things,” the phrase reflected an impatient entitlement among tech elites to assume the mantle of power that they believed was theirs by right. In the fetid MAGA swamp, “you can just do things” wasn’t a spirited call for personal change. It was an authoritarian call for the seizure of power and total impunity.

You can see this attitude being enacted in how DOGE has swept through government agencies, sometimes with armed state agents in tow to help force their way past recalcitrant bureaucrats, and its willingness to task 19-year-old coders with the resumes of cyber-criminals to root through and potentially destroy decades-old infrastructure.

You can see it in Trump’s long-standing policy, imbued in him by Roy Cohn, to never apologize, never explain, and always attack the messenger. It’s become a useful descriptor to frame his rambling, impulsive rule by decree.

“Someone told him you can just do things,” wrote Jameson Lopp, a software engineer and prominent crypto industry figure, over a chart showing that Trump had issued more executive orders than any other president at this point in his term.

With its imperious finitude, the executive order is an apt tool for the “you can just do things” era of political governance. But it’s not the end point of this ideological project. We are watching the Trump administration destroy the rule of law — pardoning J6 rioters and financial criminals, repealing consumer-protection regulations, refusing to enforce corruption laws, placing industry executives in government posts where they can capitalize on conflicts of interests, taking payoffs from shady actors like Justin Sun, and, most significantly, allowing Elon Musk and DOGE to perform an administrative coup through which the world’s richest person has subverted the core systems and functions of the federal government. These opening salvos in what promises to be a years-long effort to erode government capacity, privatize services, and empower America’s oligarchs at the expense of the public — they, too, are products of people who believe, with sociopathic disregard for the consequences, that “you can just do things.”

For all of its criminality (and the soft electoral coup that brought it to power), the George W. Bush administration worked within the system it inherited, shoring up executive privilege, empowering the imperial presidency, and launching a globe-spanning campaign of kidnapping, torture, and assassination without challenging the fundamental assumption of American governance: that serious, well-educated elites were at least trying to work within the country’s democratic tradition. The global war on terror, for example, was justified by secret law and policy memos concocted by ghoulish functionaries like John Yoo, who wrote a lengthy memorandum about why particular torture techniques should be authorized. Yoo, of course, was never held accountable for his role in justifying torture because his work was sanctioned at the highest levels and broadly fit under accepted political norms. Indeed, whatever offenses he may have committed, whatever corrupt legal theories he might have advanced, were easily metabolized by an American political system that has become defined by elite impunity. And for his role in upholding this pantomime of legal rectitude, Yoo was rewarded, becoming a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school.

Despite whatever corporatist-libertarian fantasies Grover Norquist may have tried to ventriloquize into being, Bush didn’t succeed in privatizing social security, or bother trying to eliminate the Department of Education. But Trump might, because he simply doesn’t give a shit. Trump, Musk, and the DOGE cadre have broken the kayfabe that dictates the mores — the precious “norms” — of American political life. They don’t care what is legal or popular. They will just do what they want. They will break systems and deport undesirables while their apparatchiks, the dead-eyed edgelord successors to John Yoo’s white-shoed lawfare practitioners, offer dissembling arguments to judges whose “demands for answers” are already being ignored.

Soon, they will dispense with even that formality and stop arguing their cases before federal judges whose authority they don’t respect. One way or another, the judiciary will be sidelined. Chief Justice John Roberts, whose court granted Trump the almost limitless immunity that has helped bring us to this point of constitutional crisis, can complain all he wants about Trump’s disrespect toward federal judges. How many divisions does John Roberts have? And who cares about centuries of pious legal tradition, when you can just do things?

On November 25, 2024, Justin Sun, the Tron founder whose blockchain is a linchpin in the money-laundering networks for global cybercrime, bought $30 million worth of $WLFI tokens, the governance token from the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto company. Sun announced himself as the largest investor in WLF.

Sun’s contribution was celebrated by WLF co-founder Alex and Zach Witkoff, whose father is Steve Witkoff, the real-estate mogul serving as Trump’s Middle East diplomatic envoy.

Dad also offered his support:

On January 19, 2025, Sun announced he had bought $45 million worth of $WLFI tokens.

The $WLFI tokens are useless except as a potential influence vehicle for President Trump and his inner circle. Right now you can't move the $WLFI token off the company’s platform. You can't sell or trade it. It’s not listed on exchanges. Buying it is essentially a donation to Donald Trump, which is why not many tokens sold before Sun jumped aboard. World Liberty Financial co-founder Zak Folkman has said that Sun’s participation helped jumpstart the project. “[Sun] saw that regardless of the outcome, this project is a monumental move forward for the entire crypto community,” said Folkman at a recent conference. The company eventually sold $590 million worth of tokens.

On February 27, 2025, the SEC paused its fraud case against Sun.

On March 13, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family had held talks with Binance, in which Trump would pardon Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao and invest in Binance’s US division. Zhao spent 4 months in federal prison as part of a plea deal over his company’s violation of money laundering laws. Binance agreed to pay $4.3 billion — the largest fine in U.S. corporate history. Binance was sued by the SEC — a case that was recently “put on hold” by Trump’s SEC.

Binance's approach, according to the Journal, was modeled on Sun's obvious quid pro quo:

According to Bloomberg, it was Steve Witkoff who met with Zhao in Abu Dhabi in December to discuss a possible Binance deal.

It doesn't get more explicit or brazen than this. The president received a $75 million payment for a political favor, and we all saw it happen. It worked so well that the deal is now considered a proof-of-concept for others seeking influence and favors to get into Trump’s good graces, including the world’s most corrupt cryptocurrency exchange — a criminal organization that received severe penalties under the last administration.

Given the immunity granted by the Supreme Court to the president and the administration's announcement that it wouldn't enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, this deal might be considered essentially legal. There is simply no penalty or sanction — not even a hint of judicial procedure — when Trump breaks the law anymore. The inspectors general are gone, and the opposition party, with no majority in either house of Congress, has limited investigatory powers. Trump is free to indulge his kleptocratic appetites. Who will stop him?

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[A brief editorial note: About 10 years ago, I began researching the Year of the Spy and some famous Reagan-era espionage cases. This post draws from that research. See also my previously published article about the NSA traitor Ronald Pelton.]

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Among the cadre of DOGE engineers now rooting through the guts of the administrative state, few have attracted more curiosity than Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old coder who interned for three months for Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain implant company. Coristine has a brief but colorful history that includes being fired from Path Networks, a cybersecurity company, for giving company documents to a competitor. He apparently palled around with a criminal hacking group called The Com and, according to a Telegram account associated with him, had solicited hacking services online. In 2021, he founded a company called Tesla.Sexy LLC that, according to Wired, “controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains. One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market.”

A lot about DOGE remains unknown – like who’s officially in charge – but Coristine has email addresses at USAID and the Department of Homeland Security and was recently seen inside the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the State Department. Across the federal government, he seems to have the run of the place.

There’s one aspect of Coristine’s background that has escaped public notice: his grandfather, Valery Martynov, was a KGB spy who played an intriguing role in a sprawling 1980s espionage drama.

In 1980, KGB officer Valery Fedorovich Martynov was sent to the US to serve undercover at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC. He was a Line X officer, part of a technical espionage division. Martynov had a wife and two young children, and they enjoyed traveling to cities on the eastern seaboard and enjoying life in what was one of the KGB’s most desirable postings. While the Soviet Union may have been tottering economically, the spy war was in full swing, and the greater DC area was filled with undercover operatives and the counterintelligence officers hunting them. Both sides were trying to ferret out, recruit, or compromise the other’s officers, and sometimes they were devastatingly successful.

In April 1982, the FBI recruited Martynov as an agent. He stayed in place and began feeding Soviet secrets to his FBI handlers. The FBI also recruited another KGB agent stationed at the DC rezidentura, Sergei Motorin. But KGB counterintelligence officer Victor Cherkashin, who was stationed at the DC rezidentura, had found his own sources in US intelligence – incredibly good ones – in the form of CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen. Ames and Hanssen would help the KGB unmask a number of moles and traitors in its midst, leading to their executions. One of them was Valery Martynov.

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As he recounted in his memoir Spy Handler, Victor Cherkashin was deeply upset when he learned that Martynov, who he liked and considered a decent man, had betrayed his people. The spy business had a desultory character, and a real human cost, that seemed to weigh on Cherkashin. He described the cat-and-mouse game between him and his American enemies as “thieves stealing from thieves.”

But Cherkashin was also a professional. He realized that he would have to find an excuse to have Martynov recalled back to Moscow without tipping him off. It would involve using Martynov to help solve an even bigger problem plaguing the DC rezidentura.

In August 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB officer formerly stationed in Washington, DC, was on an operation in Rome when he slipped away to the American embassy and announced his intention to defect. Yurchenko was a major prize — the highest ranking defector in KGB history — and was soon spirited to the United States, where he was installed in a Virginia safe-house that, it was hoped, would be beyond the prying eyes of Soviet agents posted in the capital region.

Yurchenko fell under the joint management of the FBI and CIA – which meant that Aldrich Ames, who had already begun spying for Cherkashin, knew everything about Yurchenko’s defection. Apparently concerned that his own treachery might be exposed, Ames made a point of staying close to Yurchenko during his defection. But if Yurchenko recognized him as a Soviet agent, he would be immediately exposed. Taking a calculated risk, Ames gave Yurchenko just such an opportunity. Riding in a car together soon after Yurchenko's defection, Ames passed a note to the Soviet defector, asking if there was any sensitive information he wanted to reveal only to the CIA Director. Ames was giving Yurchenko an option to reveal, say, a mole at the heart of the CIA. But Yurchenko said he had no such message to pass along. Ames' secret appeared safe.

Yurchenko was a mercurial character, and his true ambitions were difficult to pin down. Although he rose to be a colonel, he had a checkered KGB career. Oleg Kalugin, former head of KGB counterintelligence, called Yurchenko "unqualified and unsuitable," a "sloppy, unreliable officer" with "empty, evasive, pale blue eyes" and a poor command of Russian. In the mid-seventies, one of Kalugin's superiors asked him to send Yurchenko to Washington DC. Yurchenko had somehow curried favor with a senior officer, and the officer was now leaning on Kalugin to give his friend Yurchenko a highly desired assignment. Kalugin reluctantly complied but he later considered Yurchenko to be "an unmitigated disaster."

As a KGB officer, Yurchenko spent about eight years in the US capital, and his time there was mostly distinguished by his shoddy professionalism. He slept around, including with the wife of a Soviet diplomat and with an American woman who may have been an FBI informant. In 1976, while Yurchenko was serving as head of security at the DC rezidentura, a former CIA officer named Edwin G. Moore threw a package over the wall of the Soviet embassy. Yurchenko and Dmitri Yakushin, the KGB rezident who Moore had already made several attempts to contact at his home, sent a cable to KGB Center in Moscow discussing the situation. Yuri Andropov, the KGB chairman, cabled back that the incident was likely an FBI provocation and that they shouldn't respond to the volunteer. Worried that the package might contain a bomb, Yurchenko handed it over to the DC police.

It turned out that Moore was a genuine traitor hoping to cash in on the 22 years he had spent in the CIA's research division. He was promptly arrested, and when the FBI searched his home, they found hundreds of pages of CIA-related documents and photographs, including a typewritten note that offered access to CIA secrets for $10 million. (The package that Moore tossed over the embassy wall had included a request for $200,000.) Moore, who had a heart attack while in custody, was found guilty, sentenced to 15 years in prison, and paroled three years later.

Yurchenko — and Yakushin — had whiffed on collecting a potential windfall of US secrets. For Yurchenko's KGB colleagues, Victor Cherkashin wrote, "the incident became notorious as a glaring example of unprofessionalism." Kalugin called it "an indescribably stupid error." It didn't much affect Yurchenko's career, as his connections helped him rise to senior intelligence posts, where he gained access to highly secret information about Soviet agents in North America and other clandestine operations abroad.

When Yurchenko decided to defect in 1985, it was for reasons beyond dissatisfaction with the sclerotic Soviet system. He was also an inveterate hypochondriac who was convinced that he was dying of stomach cancer. More than that, Yurchenko was lovesick. He pined not for his wife and family but for his former lover, Valentina Yereskovskaya, the wife of a Soviet intelligence officer who at the time was posted to Montreal. Yurchenko was determined to reunite with Yereskovskaya before he died. And though the erstwhile KGB-man had begun to talk, he was jittery and unsettled. Some of the US officials working with him worried that he might reconsider his defection, so in September 1985, they made an unorthodox decision: Yurchenko and a handful of minders would make a clandestine trip to Canada, where he would confront his former lover and ask her to join him in the United States.

The trip was risky and unnecessary. What if it was some kind of setup? What if Yurchenko bolted? What if one of Yurchenko's former KGB colleagues spotted him? These were well-founded fears, but the disaster arrived in another form entirely. When his romantic rival was out, Yurchenko, aided by his American handlers, knocked on his lover's door. Yurchenko explained his purpose for being there, but Yereskovskaya quickly rejected him. He was a traitor and why would she, a loyal Soviet citizen, betray her husband and her people to run off with him into the arms of the main enemy?

Yurchenko was devastated. His emotional state worsened when he learned that news of his defection had been reported in the American and Canadian press. It seemed that CIA Director William Casey's office, perhaps with the blessing of others in the Reagan administration, had made the decision to brag to the media about their important new catch. Growing depressed and suspicious, Yurchenko and his minders soon flew back to the US. Yurchenko slunk back to the safe-house in Oakton, Virginia, where his debriefings continued.

Yurchenko had already revealed some important tips, including that a former NSA employee had walked into the D.C. embassy and offered information. He remembered meeting the man and that he had red hair, but he couldn't remember his name. He might be named Mr. Long, Yurchenko said, but he wasn't sure.

In mid-October, when Yurchenko's mood seemed to be darkening in the wake of his failed romantic reunion, his handlers took him on a trip of the American southwest, including to the Grand Canyon. An FBI agent flew out to meet Yurchenko and his entourage, presenting the former Soviet colonel with a "mug book" of present and former NSA employees. This time, Yurchenko spotted the face of the man he remembered from five years earlier: it was Ronald Pelton. But as the CIA's Milt Bearden later wrote, it seemed that identifying Pelton did little to lift Yurchenko's mood. In fact, he may have been sent deeper into depression by the realization that he might have to testify against Pelton and others in court.

Yurchenko soon received another bit of disheartening news: he didn't have stomach cancer. Not only was he not going to die, Yurchenko would have to live with what he had done for a long time.

On November 2, 1985, two months after his disappointing trip to Canada, Yurchenko went to dinner in a Georgetown restaurant with a CIA handler. At one point, Yurchenko asked the agent what would happen if he tried to leave. "Will you shoot me?" The CIA officer said that that's not how his government treated defectors. Yurchenko rose from the table to go to the bathroom. "If I don't come back, it's not your fault," he said, puzzling the agent. And like that, the prized defector walked out and disappeared.

Yurchenko next appeared at the Soviet embassy, where, in a wild press conference, he claimed that he had been drugged and kidnapped by American agents. The United States had a policy of allowing defectors who changed their minds to return home, so during an uneasy meeting involving Yurchenko and a handful of Soviet and American officials, the former asylum-seeker affirmed his desire to return home.

In Victor Cherkashin's telling, Yurchenko's initial defection to the United States was legitimate and took the KGB by surprise. But when he decided to try to re-defect, the KGB leadership determined to make the most of the opportunity. They could have brought Yurchenko home and promptly executed him for treason, but the Soviets were already dealing with a number of recent defections; they didn't need to add another traitor to the list. Aldrich Ames was keeping his KGB handlers informed about everything Yurchenko was doing, so the KGB had a keen sense of who had and hadn't been compromised. (Because Cherkashin had strictly limited the number of people who knew about Ames, to the point of traveling to Moscow to update his superiors in person, his prized agent's identity was unknown to Yurchenko.)

KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov could see the advantage in playing up Yurchenko's story of being kidnapped and drugged and his subsequent escape — after all, such tales had played out before, on both sides. "Yurchenko's defection may not have been an elaborate operation to protect the KGB's top agent" — that is, Aldrich Ames — "but his redefection became exactly that," Cherkashin later wrote. "His arrest would have given the game away." And even if the story retained an air of unreality, the sense of confusion it engendered was to the KGB's benefit: "The [CIA] had either been completely taken in by a brilliant Soviet intelligence officer, or allowed one of its top Soviet defectors to slip out of its hands." Either way, the Americans were embarrassed, left wondering what might have been.

That’s why the KGB decided to welcome Vitaly Yurchenko back to the Soviet Union. And this was where Valery Martynov came in handy. Cherkashin told the unsuspecting Martynov that he would be a member of the KGB honor guard escorting Yurchenko back home to a hero's welcome. On November 6, Martynov boarded the plane to Moscow with Yurchenko — which confused FBI officials, who wondered why the agent they had given the cryptonym GENTILE was part of this mission. Then they wondered why he never came back. It would take the Americans a year to find out what had happened to him.

As soon as he disembarked in Moscow, Martynov was arrested. His wife, Natalya Martynova, later said that she was allowed to see him four times in prison. After eventually pleading guilty, Valery Martynov was executed on May 28, 1987. His widow was informed nine days later.

For Cherkashin, who testified at Martynov's trial, "it was one of the events in my career I most questioned." As he recounted in Spy Handler, Cherkashin was loyal to his country and to the KGB, but he didn't always approve of its methods and he clashed with KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov. "I was only doing my job, but the moral dilemma weighed heavily," Cherkashin later wrote. "As far as I was concerned, officers who turned traitor should be fired and deprived of their pensions. That's enough. There's no need for execution."

Aldrich Ames was eventually unmasked as a Soviet spy and sentenced to life in prison. Robert Hanssen died a convicted traitor in federal prison. Back in the Soviet Union, Yurchenko was awarded a medal, while the Soviet government touted the success of its supposed double-defector plot. Yurchenko, fifty years old at the time, served out the remainder of his KGB career and retired in Russia, where he remains today.

In 1994, Natalya Martynova, still mourning her husband, spoke bitterly of her family’s experience in an interview with the Washington Post. She said that, after Ames’ arrest earlier that year, she had contacted the U.S. embassy, requesting assistance. “If he was really working for them, I think some kind of help would be fair,” Martynova told the paper’s Fred Hiatt. “Of course, maybe it was all concocted here, and he was not working for the Americans. I am sure I will never know the truth... . The main thing is that I want my children to be somehow protected.”

On August 21, 1995, Natalya Martynova arrived with her two children in the United States, according to a Facebook post by her son Alexander, Coristine’s uncle. Natalya Martynova died in 2020 and is buried in New York. Alexander became a Virginia police officer who sometimes posts comments on blogs about his historically famous father. “Now he has to face my father along with other people he had betrayed,” Alexander wrote when Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied for the Soviets, died in 2023.

Martynova’s daughter Anna became a financial professional who married Charles Coristine, the proprietor of LesserEvil, a snack company. Among their children is a 19-year-old young man named Edward Coristine, who currently wields an unknown amount of power and authority over the inner-workings of our federal government.

I’m nearing the home stretch on my next book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, which Bloomsbury will publish next year. It culminates in the Nov. 5 election, so I am writing a bit toward the news and will be on a sprint through November. The book is part of an ongoing effort to report on the rise of right wing politics in tech over the last 10 years and to reckon with this period of rising authoritarianism and some tech elites’ gleeful embrace of technofascism. I hope I’ll come out the other side with a book that people can enjoy and learn something about the broader, sometimes subterranean forces of money, power, political influence (foreign and domestic), lawfare, and favor-trading that help define the tech industry — and most big industries, for that matter. And there’ll be a great deal in there about the cultural resentments that have driven a new generation of geeks, programmers, and VCs to believe that their highest aspiration should be to build autonomous weapons for the US government’s next forever war.

I’m doing some freelancing again, so here are three pieces recently published, the first of which is an abridged examination of the cultural, political, and economic forces that have driven Silicon Valley’s reactionary turn. The second is about the rise of Polymarket, betting on the news, a short history of prediction markets, and the infiltration of gambling into more facets of life. The third is my rough taxonomy of the X shareholder list, breaking down the VC funds, shell companies, Swiss trusts, nonprofit foundations, family offices, and other obscure financial entities that own a piece of Elon Musk’s beloved everything app.

Thanks for reading. Links below. I’ll have more soon, including more writing on this Substack.

Silicon Valley’s Selfish Embrace of Trump
Driven by personal grievances and a misguided sense of their own exceptionalism, tech titans are swerving right and amplifying reactionary MAGA politics.
The New Republic

From Trump Convictions to Assassination Attempts: How Prediction Markets Have Turned American Politics Into a Casino
Why can’t anything be a prop bet?
Vanity Fair

All That Twitters
A Rough Taxonomy of the X Shareholder List
The Baffler

I thought Jeans’ story was good — perfectly within the realm of acceptable journalistic inquiry and careful not to make any unsubstantiated conclusions or leaps to conspiracy. Of course, the story would infuriate Lonsdale in any case, but journalistically, it passed the smell test. The children of two prominent sanctioned Russian businessmen, Vadim Moshkovich and Peter Aven, work for a major VC firm that’s investing heavily in the defense industry. That’s worth looking into, especially as Silicon Valley moves into sensitive government work and receives money from illiberal regimes and shady billionaires all over the world.

Still, sticking to the evidence, to what can be proved, is fundamental, especially with this line of investigation. “There is no indication that either of the sanctioned fathers have any financial relationship with 8VC,” wrote Jeans. Neither son, it appeared, had worked on military-related deals, though one was working on an unannounced startup. (While not mentioned in the Forbes article, a daughter of Moshkovich, one of the sanctioned oligarchs, also worked at 8VC as a “fellow.” She is now employed at a payments platform in which 8VC is an investor.)

Given the crude mechanics of social-media virality and the horrible incentives at play, it was inevitable that this story would be spread far and wide as “Russian Oligarchs Fund Silicon Valley VC Firm” — one that’s close to Musk, Thiel, and Trump, no less. Unfortunately for the BlueAnon warriors on X, there’s just no way that one can say that’s true, not without a documented financial link or a scintilla of evidence besides “his kids work there.” There is something of interest here, but it calls for the kind of deeper investigation that lazy OSINT accounts and engagement farmers aren’t inclined to do.

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When a day later, the federal court in the Northern District of California unsealed the X shareholder list, revealing the presence of 8VC among 95 legal entities owning a piece of X, the two stories collided. Now, the viral story became that Elon Musk bought Twitter with the direct financial help of two Russian oligarchs who are close to Putin. It wasn’t true, but it quickly spread, helped along by an EU official, pro-Ukraine accounts, and accounts once linked to Anonymous, the hacktivist group. It also seemed to spread widely among Dutch-language accounts.

As I wrote over the weekend, there’s a lot that’s worthy of concern and deeper investigation in the X shareholders list, and there’s still a lot we don’t know. I am combing the list and searching for information about the names listed. Again, this is one of the core benefits of the list: we now have the official names of legal entities, which potentially appear in databases and public filings around the world. So far, there are many familiar and previously reported names, but no sign of Russian financing. If we are going oligarch hunting — and why not — we can easily find billionaires from dictatorships like Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia.

And there are American oligarchs, like the founders of Andreessen Horowitz, whose multi-billion-dollar venture funds receive huge amounts of cash from Saudi Arabia, providing yet another Saudi financing vehicle for Musk and X. As I’ve tried to emphasize (and will have more on in my next book), the Saudi-Twitter/X connection is particularly complex and disturbing. The ascendant tech reactionaries see dictatorships like Saudi Arabia as good partners for business. “Saudi has a founder,” Ben Horowitz said at a 2023 conference. “You don’t call him a founder. You call him his royal highness.”

As important as Saudi Arabia is, there was a reason why I chose the below photo to headline the article. It’s a photo of Elon Musk, a bunch of Qataris (on whom he’s financially dependent), and the creepy specter of Jared Kushner, who’s pocketed billions in funding from Saudi Arabia. This isn’t just about one or two oligarchs. It’s about how American tech oligarchs, with Musk at the top of the shaky pyramid, have made financial and political alliances with dictatorships, illiberal regimes, and authoritarian billionaires all over the world. That, I hope, is one of the lessons of this shareholder list being unsealed.

And if there is eventually a substantiated link between Russian businessmen and Musk — or between 8VC and the sanctioned oligarchs reported on by Forbes — I will be glad to share it. I’m still looking.

[MARCH 2026 UPDATE: This post continues to get periodic bursts of virality on Substack. A lot has happened since this list was revealed, including the merger of X and xAI, followed by xAI and SpaceX. I also have considered the implications of this list in posts on this website and in my book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.]

This week, Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California ruled in favor of a motion to intervene that I filed in a civil case called Anoke v. Twitter in order to unseal a list of X’s shareholders. X’s lawyers filed the list under seal last year in one of the many civil lawsuits resulting from Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter and his mass firing of thousands of employees. After Judge Illston’s ruling, the list soon appeared on the court docket (apparently it’s just a matter of a clerk clicking to change permissions on a limited-access filing) and was reported on first by the Washington Post and then in many other publications.

I’ll get to the contents of the list below, but please allow for a little throat-clearing and context-setting.

I was able to get this document thanks to the generous help and smart lawyering of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), a storied legal organization devoted to pro bono First Amendment work. As an independent journalist, I don’t have access to a lot of resources, so it was a blessing to have RCFP take me on. If you’re in a position to donate to them, please consider doing so. If you’re a journalist looking to get a document unsealed or if you have a First Amendment concern, reach out to them.

The case in which we intervened, Anoke v. Twitter, is just one of many X-related civil suits wending their way through the courts — from the four fired executives suing for $128 million to lower level employees who didn’t receive promised severance or claim that they were forced to break laws to fulfill Musk’s mercurial edicts (turn Twitter HQ into an employee hotel, mount a giant blazing X on the roof without permits, etc). In a previous post, I wrote about a list of names subpoenaed in one of these cases, Arnold v. X Corp, which helped reveal who was on Musk’s Twitter transition team and which Tesla engineers he drafted for his crash assessment of Twitter’s code base. (RCFP also filed on my behalf to unseal a shareholder list filed under seal in another civil case, McMillian v. Twitter.)

Not only does Musk owe a lot of money to his creditors, but he’s knee-deep in litigation that one might argue would never have been necessary had he abided by existing legal agreements, contracts, and labor law. Yes, it can save money in the short-term to stiff your landlord and cloud provider, or to forego state law-mandated severance payments. But it creates a lot of billable hours for lawyers and expensive potential settlements, along with the threat of regulatory enforcement. (As for reputational damage, Musk doesn’t seem to care.)

Musk, who decries lawfare, has aggressively pursued his own brand of it — from financing Gina Carano’s lawsuit against Disney to suing the National Labor Relations Board when it began an enforcement process against SpaceX for firing eight engineers who signed a letter criticizing Musk’s sexism. And there’s much more. “Musk and his companies have filed at least 23 lawsuits in federal courts alone since July of 2023,” according to Fortune.

With so many lawsuits before him, it’s almost inevitable that X’s lawyers would have to file sensitive company information with a court. Litigants have asked for a shareholder disclosure list to see if the judge has any conflict of interest and to see which entities might be impacted by an adverse ruling against X. Whenever possible, they seek to filed this information under seal to prevent its dissemination.

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The list X filed with the court mentions 95 names and legal entities. Some of them are familiar names for Musk-watchers: Andreessen Horowitz, 8VC, Jack Dorsey, Ross Gerber, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Sequoia, et al. There are 26 entries related to Fidelity, the mutual fund colossus. There’s Larry Ellison, the Oracle founder and one of the richest people in the world, along with Sean Combs Capital (yup). There’s Vy Capital, the UAE-based venture capital firm, and something called Q Tetris Holdings LLC, whose directors seem to be part of the Qatari government. Binance, the global crypto giant which recently paid a $4.3 billion fine to the US government for facilitating money laundering by terrorist groups and sanctioned entities, is listed an X investor. (Binance’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to money laundering violations and is finishing up a short stint in federal prison.)

There are two entries for Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and another for his Kingdom Holding Company, which was the largest outside shareholder of Twitter when it was a public company. Prince Alwaleed briefly opposed Musk’s takeover — prompting some gentle sparring on Twitter — but he soon came around. Given Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman’s years-long crackdown against dissent and powerful businessmen and political rivals — which included imprisoning and torturing hundreds of prominent Saudis, including Prince Alwaleed, in Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel — it’s likely that MBS controls those shares.

I’ve written about Saudi Arabia’s relationship with Twitter and its use of spies inside Twitter HQ to dox and imprison dissidents, and I’ll have more in my forthcoming book, GILDED RAGE, which Bloomsbury will publish next year. The question of the Saudi government’s ongoing relationship with X and Musk is essential, especially with Saudi security services still regularly doxing online dissidents — or merely everyday people with few online followers who post the slightest critique — and then imprisoning, torturing, and killing them. There are yet more ongoing lawsuits against Twitter for failing to stop the Saudi spy ring operating inside Twitter and serving up its most vulnerable users to a brutal dictatorship. McKinsey, the consulting firm, is a defendant in one of these cases for its role in producing for the Saudi government a list of prominent Saudis on Twitter — which essentially became a list of targets for regime enforcers.

Some people have asked me why this list matters, or why I care, or have claimed that we already know all of this information (we don’t). I am tired of arguing with people who seem to be operating in bad faith or simply to obstruct further inquiry. I’ve described in several posts why it’s important to know who the volatile owner of a major platform for public debate, political discourse, and government surveillance and information operations is working with — who he owes, who he listens to, and who might influence what happens on X.

While the list doesn’t include ownership amounts, it is valuable because these are the official legal names of the entities who own a piece of X. That’s a great starting point for journalists, researchers, regulators, activists, and anyone else who wants to know what’s going on behind the scenes of this important company. What are some of these obscure overseas companies and trusts? What’s Shahidi Tactic Group LLC? How does Andrea Stroppa, a young Italian cybersecurity professional who talks to Musk regularly on X and claims to have helped addressed the site’s issues with child exploitation, own a piece of the company? Why didn’t Musk’s close associates like David Sacks and Antonio Gracias not pitch in money?

I plan to keep digging and hope other people do, too. Reach out if you’d like to chat or if you’re familiar with any of the entities listed below.

X Shareholder List, as of 6/9/23

8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P.

ADREM X LLC

ADREM Y LLC

Afshar Partners, LP

Andrea Stroppa

Andreessen Horowitz LSV Fund III, L.P.

Anthem Ventures, LLC

ARK Venture Private Holdings LLC

BAMCO, Inc.

Bandera Fund LLC

Baron Opportunity Fund

Baron Partners Fund

Binance Capital Management Co., Ltd

Brookfield Project X L.P.

CCM 2020 Investments LLC

Cheng and Chen Family Trust

CNK Fund IV, L.P.

Danilo Kawasaki

Dayton Family Enterprises, LLC

Dayton Family Investments, LLC

DFJ GROWTH IV, L.P.

DFJ GROWTH IV PARALLEL FUND, LLC

DFJ GROWTH X-I, L.P.

Eden Relationship Capital L.P.

Elon Musk as Trustee of the Elon Musk Revocable Trust dated July 22, 2003

FIAM Target Date Blue Chip Growth Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Institutional Asset Management Trust Company as Trustee

Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Management Trust Company, as Trustee

Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Institutional Trust By its manager Fidelity Investments Canada ULC

Fidelity Canadian Growth Company Fund by its manager Fidelity Investments Canada ULC

Fidelity Central Investment Portfolios LLC: Fidelity U.S. Equity Central Fund - Communication Services Sub

Fidelity Contrafund: Fidelity Advisor New Insights Fund - Sub A

Fidelity Contrafund: Fidelity Advisor New Insights Fund - Sub B

Fidelity Contrafund: Fidelity Contrafund

Fidelity Contrafund: Fidelity Contrafund K6

Fidelity Contrafund: Fidelity Series Opportunistic Insights Fund

Fidelity Contrafund Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Management Trust Company, as Trustee

Fidelity Destiny Portfolios: Fidelity Advisor Diversified Stock Fund

Fidelity Global Growth and Value Investment Trust - Sub A By its manager Fidelity Investments Canada ULC:

Fidelity Global Innovators Investment Trust by its manager Fidelity Investments Canada ULC

Fidelity Growth Company Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Management Trust Company, as Trustee

Fidelity Insights Investment Trust By its manager Fidelity Investments Canada ULC

Fidelity Mt. Vernon Street Trust: Fidelity Growth Company Fund

Fidelity Mt. Vernon Street Trust : Fidelity Growth Company K6 Fund

Fidelity Mt. Vernon Street Trust: Fidelity Series Growth Company Fund

Fidelity OTC Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Management Trust Company, as Trustee

Fidelity Puritan Trust: Fidelity Puritan Fund - Equity Sub B

Fidelity Puritan Trust: Puritan K6 Fund - Equity Subportfolio

Fidelity Securities Fund: Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund

Fidelity Securities Fund: Fidelity Blue Chip Growth K6 Fund

Fidelity Securities Fund: Fidelity OTC K6 Portfolio

Fidelity Securities Fund: Fidelity OTC Portfolio

Fidelity Select Portfolios : Select Communication Services Portfolio

G64 Ventures LLC

Gerber Kawasaki Inc.

GFNCI LLC

Gigafund 0.21, LP

Glacier Ventures LLC

Go Mav, LLC

HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud

HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud

IMG US, LLC

Jack Dorsey Remainder LLC

Jack Dorsey Tr Ua 12/08/2010 Jack Dorsey Revocable Trust

Kingdom Holding Company

Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust

Linda Ye and Robin Ren Family Foundation

Litani Ventures

Luchi Fiduciaria SR POS. 365

Manhattan Venture Partners X LLC

Mirae Asset Innovation X ONE, LLC

Mirae Asset Project X Fund I, LP

Olivier Janssens

Q Tetris Holding LLC

Ross Gerber

Santo Lira LLC

SC CDA1 LLC

SCGE Fund, L.P.

SCGGF III – U.S./India Management, L.P.

SCHF (M) PV, L.P.

Scott Nolan

SC US/E Expansion Fund I Management, L.P.

Sean Combs Capital, LLC

Sequent (Schweiz) AG as Trustee of the Debala Trust

Sequioa Capital Fund, L.P.

Series N Dis, a series of Atreides Special Circumstances Fund, LLC

Shahidi Tactic Group, LLC

Steve Davis

T. One Holdings LLC

The Pershing Square Foundation

TM33 Partner Holdings LLC

Tresser Blvd 402 LLC

UnipolSai S.P.A.

Variable Insurance Products Fund II: VIP Contrafund Portfolio - Subportfolio A

VYC25 Limited

X Holdings I Investment, LLC

On July 3, I published a piece here about my legal effort to unseal a list of X’s shareholders. People should know who owns an important site for public discourse and whether its free-speech fundamentalist majority shareholder is doing business with censorious dictatorships. Represented by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), I filed a motion to intervene and unseal a list of X’s shareholders that had been previously filed under seal in one of the many civil lawsuits stemming from Elon Musk’s chaotic private takeover of Twitter. We then filed a nearly identical motion in another civil lawsuit involving Twitter/X/Musk.

I am glad to share that Judge Susan Illston of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California has granted our motion in Anoke v. Twitter. As you can see in the screenshot above — and read in the complete order [PDF] — the judge was not persuaded by the arguments from X’s lawyers and found that the disclosure is in the public interest. Now, X has until September 4, 2024, to file the “supplemental corporate disclosure statement” — i.e. the full list of company shareholders. It could also appeal.

I am grateful to the talented, principled lawyers at RCFP for their pro bono representation. And thank you to the source who pointed me in this direction. I hope that the list will be useful to reporters, activists, researchers, regulators, and politicians interested in questions of corporate accountability and the influence of foreign dictatorships in Silicon Valley.

It’s normal for journalists to reach out to subjects of their reporting, especially public figures, to ask questions or request an interview or simply to say, I’m going to be writing about your sizeable political donations, which have taken a distinct right-wing turn this cycle, which is of interest to the public. Sometimes these queries can lead to nothing being published, even after a great deal of research and writing (to a journalist’s frustration). But this is the rote grunt work of reporting: email the person you’re looking into and say that you have some questions — questions that they may not like, but that should be within the realm of journalistic interest. This is simply how the rudiments of reporting work.

In fact, pretty much everything that happened journalistically in these episodes was so routine and by the book that the subsequent outrage generated — almost exclusively by millionaire and billionaire tech executives and VCs on X — was deeply revealing of how little today’s tech elites understand journalism and the journalists who practice it, and how devoted they seem to maintaining an ignorance hemmed in by ideological blinders.

On August 15, venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale — Peter Thiel disciple, Palantir co-founder, scourge of the homeless, China hawk defense tech investor, once banned from Stanford’s campus, etc — wrote a long post on X complaining about a piece that appeared in In These Times and Rolling Stone investigating how Lonsdale’s Cicero Institute — and Lonsdale himself — helped “make homelessness a crime” by pushing anti-camping ordinances in numerous states and filing a Leonard Leo-sponsored amicus brief in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the consequential Supreme Court case that has helped cement bans on camping (or even sleeping in public with a blanket). Lonsdale didn’t appreciate the article:

Chipping away at public homeless services, the right for homeless people to exist in public, and the widely accepted “housing first” policy that puts people in stable, permanent housing right away — that’s a badge of honor for Lonsdale. And critical reporters, experts, and observers might disagree. Fair enough. This is a typical, chip-on-his-shoulder response from a very rich guy with rising political influence.

But then Lonsdale had another grievance to air out. The rest of the post — about 885 words, thanks to the character bloat afford to blue checks — is devoted to castigating a “nativist Forbes reporter looking to paint our two Russian colleagues at [Lonsdale’s venture capital firm] 8VC as a ‘scandal.’” Lonsdale, whose VC firm is devoted to military technology investments, uses of the rest of the post to explain that he hates terrorists and Vladimir Putin, his colleagues are talented and loyal, and his firm is devoted to working with the best people from all over to strengthen America’s military prowess. Yes, one of his firm’s principals, he notes, has a father on a list of sanctioned Russian oligarchs — which might have been part of the Forbes inquiry (Lonsdale doesn’t say). “I didn’t hire his father though,” Lonsdale wrote. “I hired him.”

He ends by saying he won’t be discussing this issue with the media. Again, no article has been published on the topic, so far as I can tell. (I’ll update the post if that changes.) But Lonsdale seemed to believe that this kind of outraged soapboxing might pre-empt any article — or perhaps discourage reporters from digging deeper. In all likelihood, it will have the opposite effect.

Media intimidation seemed to be at least part of the calculus for billionaire venture capitalist Ben Horowitz when, the same night Lonsdale issued his jeremiad, Horowitz went to war against rival VC Michael Moritz and the media outlet he owns, The San Francisco Standard. Emily Shugerman, a freelance journalist, had written a standard journalistic query to Horowitz about an article she was working on looking at Horowitz’s decision to embrace Trump and the role of his wife, Felicia, another prominent Silicon Valley figure.

“Sir Michael Moritz is now having his fake disinformation ‘newspaper’ fabricate hit pieces on his business rival, me,” Horowitz wrote in a 448-word post, which he opened with a Kendrick Lamar lyric. “And, he has chosen to attack my wife, Felicia.” He also implied that Shugerman’s questions were racist (Felicia Horowitz is Black).

Horowitz was kind enough to copy and paste (?) Shugerman’s query email at the end of his X post:

Again, this is a completely normal inquiry about a subject of public interest — the shifting politics of members of the power elite. Some PR pros might suggest that their wealthy clients engage with journalists more constructively — or at least be a little more discrete in their attempt to bully a publication’s owner into spiking a story. But this is not how tech elites, who chafe at the slightest negative coverage, the mere suggestion of not being sufficiently appreciated, operate today. They hate the media — witness their neurotic obsession with Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz — and aren’t interested in tolerating its place in Democratic society. They’d rather destroy it.

Horowitz’s battle cry was echoed by dozens of his friends and colleagues on X, who saw another shameful attempt by the mainstream media to go after an industry leader for his politics. In the typical paranoid formulation of today’s X-addicted tech elites, what was a basic political story became a “hit piece” dreamed up by Moritz, himself a billionaire who, according to the Standard’s top editor, has never interfered in editorial decisions. It either did not matter or did not occur to Horowitz & co. that The San Francisco Standard is probably just another bauble in Moritz’s curio — a mere line item for a multi-billionaire with vast civic and political ambitions. Moritz might be a ripe target for political criticism, but the notion that he’s giving editorial assignments to freelance journalists via The Standard is ridiculous.

Perhaps I’m not well traveled enough, but I’ve never heard another journalist use the word “hit piece” with any seriousness. It’s an internet term used to describe a critical article someone doesn’t like. Certainly there are bad reporters, bad incentives, and corruption in some parts of media. But if you think that journalists making $60k per year are sitting around dreaming up a “hit piece” on powerful people — the very sort who we’re compelled, by the ethics of our profession, to report on — then, to quote San Francisco Standard executive editor Jon Steinberg, “your conspiracy theory is wack.”

Horowitz followed up his rant with more derision against Moritz, the media, and a freelance journalist he knew nothing about. He reposted supportive messages from similarly outraged millionaire executives.

The next day, on Aug. 16, the San Francisco Standard published Emily Shugerman’s article under the headline “How billionaires Ben and Felicia Horowitz made a MAGA U-turn.” It’s a good article that should be completely uncontroversial except for how it tweaks the egos of its subjects and asks an important, fundamental question: How did the politics and charitable giving of a billionaire liberal power couple transform in just a few years?

The article finds that the couple’s changing politics have been well noted by their friends and business partners. Felicia Horowitz has scrubbed her social media of references to the many liberal and Black causes and politicians she supported. Her X banner reads “Exiting the Matrix” — a likely reference, as Shugerman notes, to the right-wing meme about “waking up” from a controlled society. Shugerman tracks some other signs of the kind of reactionary swerve that has affect through tech and business elites since 2020: resentment against Covid-19 protocols; a retreat into a heavily gated mansion; resentment of Black Lives Matter protests; deleting social media posts and articles about liberal politics, including an essay on the couple’s trans son; redirecting their money toward MAGA organizations. They even spent time on Clubhouse, a kind of pandemic-era online hangout for techies who resented Silicon Valley’s liberal culture.

“They’ve had this mentality and this experience that they’re under siege for a long time,” one startup founder told Shugerman. “It’s been painful for me to basically watch them go crazy.”

The only mistake The San Francisco Standard made was in its photo illustration, which put MAGA hats on a picture of the couple. While it was labeled a photo illustration, the collage looked like the hats were made to seem real. It was an unforced error in an otherwise reasonably reported article.

Together, the Lonsdale and Horowitz stories show how powerful people in tech see themselves and how they think they’re entitled to be treated. They also show a remedial understanding of how media — which is largely produced by precarious employees and underpaid freelancers — works today. As a class, tech elites show almost no media literacy, discernment, or fixed standards for what makes good journalism.

This is most apparent in the case of Elon Musk, who will re-post any viral meme that appeals to his snap-twitch bigotries. The man with a veritable repository of real-time events and global intelligence at his disposal displays minimal capacity for critical thinking, much less googling to see if something is true. As a consequence, he spreads lies and hatred constantly. And like his peers, he takes any critique — even of the obviously turgid Trump/Musk Spaces event — as an unjustified personal attack.

Lately Musk has been preaching the virtues of “citizen media,” a category that was valorized and then mostly dispensed with 10 years ago, after the initial social-media utopia gave way to a morass of disinformation, viral mediocrity, and ketamine-addled billionaires manipulating platform dynamics. In truth, while the public and amateur social-media sleuths play important roles in uncovering and spreading worthwhile information, journalists and media outlets still produce much of what counts as “journalism” and what influences politics and public discourse. When Musk bloviates about a new outrageous example of the woke mind virus, he is usually citing a story that, while now distorted, originated in a mainstream outlet. Far more than citizen journalists or Elon Musk or Grok AI, it’s actually the censorious, woke Washington Post and New York Times who help investigate wrongdoing and put new information in front of the public.

I’m not sure why Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire — another convert to Trumpism — thought that World War III was starting a few weeks ago, but I think we dodged that one. And the supposed financial market collapse righted itself within days, if not hours. Most people didn’t even notice it, because most people don’t own stocks and aren’t plugged into the paranoid blackpilled fever-swamp where tech elites have found a warm welcome for every one of their absurd conspiracies. But this is where the people who increasingly control more of our society and our politics spend their time. It’s heady and excites their passions. It gives meaning to their roving resentments. And it’s a very grim place for anyone who hopes for a brighter political future.

I’ll have more soon on Vance’s relationship with Peter Thiel, their anti-democratic politics, and Thiel’s ideological capture of the Silicon Valley right.