Musk's Twitter deal backed by secretive Dubai-based firm - Bloomberg
According to Bloomberg, Elon Musk's Twitter deal has received $700 million from a not-so-well-known firm called Vy Capital.
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Elon Musk (Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images)
A Bloomberg report reveals that not only big names such as Sequoia Capital and Larry Ellison support Elon Musk's Twitter bid, but also a Dubai-based not-so-well-known investment firm.
Vy Capital, a global technology investment firm that does not have a developed website or contact information, has assets worth more than $5 billion and backed the Twitter bid with $700 million, making it the third-largest outside equity investor in the deal.
#ElonMusk has threatened to walk away from his $44 billion buyout deal for #Twitter Inc if the social media company fails to provide data on spam and fake accounts. pic.twitter.com/NVq1aSGNhi
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) June 7, 2022
Not much is known about the company's founder, Alexander Tamas except that he once worked with billionaire Yuri Milner. Top venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz described him as "Milner's human supercomputer." He also worked at Goldman Sachs and was one of Arma Partners' founding members.
Tamas had invested in other companies owned by Musk, such as SpaceX, Neuralink, and Boring. According to Bloomberg reports, some of Vy's public assets included holdings in Activision Blizzard and Shopify, though those positions closed by 2018, as per regulatory filings.
On April 21, Tamas' Twitter account liked a tweet by Musk that said Twitter should "authenticate all real humans" and kicked off the recent bot dispute that has snagged the takeover bid.
Also, in a 2019 interview, Tamas echoed Musk's sentiments on free speech, "What I think is misguided is the idea that our social media platforms should govern what we can and cannot see," noting that allowing private firms to become arbiters of free speech would be "dangerous."