We Will Soon Know Who Owns X

A judge has ordered Elon Musk's social-media company to publicly file a complete list of its shareholders.

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.