Stop Spreading Dumb Lies About the X Shareholder List

The X shareholder list has nothing to do with Russian oligarchs, but that doesn't mean its contents aren't troubling.

Last week, just before a federal judge approved our motion to unseal a list of X’s shareholders, Forbes’ David Jeans published a story [archive link] about the children of two sanctioned Russian oligarchs who work at 8VC, the venture capital firm headed by Joe Lonsdale, a Palantir co-founder and member of Peter Thiel’s network. It’s the same story that Lonsdale was publicly freaking out about on X before its publication, which I ended up discussing in a post here:

Paranoid Tech Elites Completely Misunderstand the Media

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.

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.