Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

jbsliverer, Thank you for the welcome nudge. On misinformation, yes, i had grown weary of repeating the three of misinformation, disinformation and lies and virtually in the last week or so (mainly since the goddamn election, i think) had sloppily settled into the wrong one. You're right, it is definitely disinformation by those who are telling lies to the U.S. and the world. And the ignorance, should clarify too, i meant to only apply to those who don't take the time to stay on top of things. With the mountain of disinformation (thanks again) piled on us, who with a family and struggling to get by really could take the time to filter the junk, so to most i mean no disrespect, it's just that millions of voters are single issue voters and just don't understand the bigger picture. And for sure there is little ignorance on the part of those who are poisoning the political and social discourse so badly, except from the view it is ignorant of them to be fucking the place up as they are. Is it ignorant to fuel our world with disinformation? I think so. It certainly is fucking wrong. But wrong seems to have lost much meaning in the US these days.

On Musk and X, again thanks. Media for some reason, slackness, laziness, whatever always refer to
Musk as the owner of X and i have been sloppy on that account too. I thank you for prompting me to:

Elon Musk was just forced to reveal who really owns X. Here’s the list

BY Eleanor Pringle
August 22, 2024 at 10:00 PM GMT+10


Bill Ackman, Elon Musk and Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud are connecting with the ownership of X, formerly Twitter.
Left to right: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg - Getty Images, Chesnot - Getty Images, Chesnot - Getty Images

Bill Ackman and Sean “Diddy” Combs are among the list of owners of Elon Musk’s X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

The platform has been forced to disclose its investors as part of a lawsuit brought by former employees, who are seeking payment of arbitration fees incurred following Musk’s purchase of the site.

Previously, X has argued that its investors were confidential as a matter of “routine practice and policy,” but this week, a federal judge in California ruled to unseal the list of the site’s owners.

Among the nearly 100 owners of the social media giant are some familiar names, both from the world of investment and within the X universe.

Previously, high-profile investors like Fidelity have been connected with X, most notably because the investment vehicle’s filings implied a 72% drop in the company’s value since Musk took it over.

However, the latest filing reveals the investment behemoth’s backing of the platform, with almost 30 separate Fidelity-linked entities holding stakes in the brand.

This week’s unsealed documents also lay bare the lesser-known stakeholders in the company.

The list seen by Fortune reveals the Pershing Square Foundation owns a stake in X. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because of its link to Pershing Square Holdings, founded by billionaire investor Bill Ackman 20 years ago.

Although the foundation of the same name is led by an independent senior leadership team, Ackman and his wife, Neri Oxman, are co-trustees.

Ackman is a vocal user of X and frequently uses the platform to address other high-profile individuals and entities. He has used it to debate Shark Tank star Mark Cuban and raise questions about the leadership of his alma mater, Harvard University.

Elsewhere on the list of owners is Oracle founder Larry Ellison. The stake in X comes via the Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust, the principal business of which, per an SEC report filed in 2008 and seen by Fortune, is to “hold the assets and estate of Mr. Ellison.”

The interests of the trust and Oracle bear no relation to each other, the SEC filing adds.

Unlike Ackman, Ellison is not an avid user of the site. Despite having more than 130,000 followers, Ellison has posted twice—once in 2012 and once in 2023.

Another notable name on the list is Sean Combs Capital.

While SEC filings show no matches for the company, the business has previously been linked to the American rapper Diddy—previously known as Puff Daddy—who has launched a number of businesses under his birth name.

These have included the Sean Combs Foundation, Combs Investments, and more recently the umbrella brand for his holdings, Combs Global.

Musk has also managed to attract some royal attention for his endeavor, with HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud also featured on the list.

The Saudi prince has a net worth just shy of $19 billion, per Forbes, and also has holdings in the likes of luxury hotels the Four Seasons and the Savoy, as well as other technology firms like ride-sharing company Lyft.

It also seems that despite his criticism of Musk’s leadership, Jack Dorsey still owns shares in the platform he founded via the Jack Dorsey Remainder LLC.

The Twitter cofounder previously backed the Tesla CEO in his takeover of the company but walked back his support earlier this year, telling a member on rival social media platform Bluesky, “It all went south.”

Doubling down on investments

Among the less eminent names are some organizations that not only hold stakes in X as a business but have also seen senior leaders pitch in.

Take the likes of Danilo Kawasaki and Ross Gerber.

According to the filing, the pair are named as individual investors in X but also have a stake in the business they lead, the wealth and investment management firm Gerber Kawasaki.

Elsewhere on the list are the Silicon Valley VCs one might expect: 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia.

The list, of course, also features Musk himself. Via the Elon Musk Revocable Trust, the SpaceX founder is also listed.

Musk purchased the site for $44 billion in 2022, though the filing did not make clear the proportion of his investment versus that of others. Since then, the business has been beleaguered by departing advertisers, mass layoffs, and criticism of Musk’s strategy.

X did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.

The full list

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 InstitutionalAsset Management Trust Company as Trustee
Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Management TrustCompany, as Trustee
Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Institutional Trust By its manager Fidelity InvestmentsCanada ULC
Fidelity Canadian Growth Company Fund by its manager Fidelity InvestmentsCanada 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
Fidelity Global Innovators Investment Trust by its manager Fidelity InvestmentsCanada ULC
Fidelity Growth Company Commingled Pool By: Fidelity Management TrustCompany, as Trustee
Fidelity Insights Investment Trust By its manager Fidelity Investments CanadaULC
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
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

https://fortune.com/2024/08/22/elon-musk-x-twitter-owner-list/

To your South African mention, yep, it would be interesting to know
how many of those did have connections with apartheid South Africa.

AI Overview
Groups of former employees from Silicon Valley tech startups are called "mafias" because they support each other's new
businesses with money, advice, and hiring. The term has been used since at least the 1950s, when the "Traitorous
Eight" group of disgruntled Shockley Semiconductor employees started Fairchild Semiconductor.

The three South Africans and a close friend who ran the PayPal Mafia

Shaun Jacobs • 28 October 2024



Mafias dominate Silicon Valley today, with a Facebook Mafia, OpenAI Mafia, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Mafia emerging in the past decade.

While these mafias have rapidly grown in prominence, they all owe their existence to the godfather of tech mafias – the PayPal Mafia.

The PayPal Mafia was the training ground for many of Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, with its members creating companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Yelp.

The mafia has regained its notoriety in recent years, with many of its members becoming heavily involved in developing generative artificial intelligence and US politics.

What is not widely known about the PayPal Mafia is that three South Africans played a major role in its formation and growth under the so-called ‘Don’ of the mafia, Peter Thiel.

The three South Africans – Elon Musk, Roelof Botha, and David Sacks – share a common background, all coming from the tip of Africa.

Thiel also spent some time in the country before becoming a renowned tech investor. Most of his few years in Africa were spent in modern-day Namibia at a school in Swakopmund.

These three would effectively run the company, rising to become C-suite executives. Musk had a brief stint as CEO, while Botha and Sacks occupied their positions as CFO and COO well after Musk was booted from Paypal.

PayPal was founded by Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Fieldlink and later renamed Confinity. The company originally offered just a money-transfer service.

Musk became involved in 1999 when his company, X.com, merged with Confinity. The South African-born entrepreneur was extremely bullish about the future of digital wallets and payments.

However, the wheels soon began to fall off at the company. Musk wanted to keep the name X.com while a majority of the employees preferred PayPal.

Musk’s management style became increasingly intense, resulting in a small group of employees persuading the board to oust him as CEO and bring back Peter Thiel.

Botha was brought along for the ride by Musk. He joined X.com before it merged with Confinity and soon rose to become its CFO. He was not a fan of Musk’s management style.

“I think it would have killed the company if Elon had stayed on as CEO for six more months,” Botha said. “The mistakes Elon was making at the time were amplifying the risk of the business.”

X.com was renamed PayPal in June 2001 and was listed on the Nasdaq in 2002. Shortly after, eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion.

The original PayPal employees had difficulty adjusting to eBay’s more traditional corporate culture, and within four years, all but 12 of the first 50 employees had left.

As these former PayPal employees left the company and became successful tech entrepreneurs and investors in their own right, the PayPal Mafia moniker emerged.

In 2007, Fortune published a photo of thirteen former PayPal employees in gangster attire, creating the ‘PayPal Mafia’. Botha, Sacks, and Thiel were among them, but Musk was absent.

These ex-employees created companies such as LinkedIn, YouTube, Yammer, Yelp, Tesla, and SpaceX. Many were also early investors in Facebook, Instagram, Square, and Reddit.

These three South Africans were instrumental in PayPal’s rise and Silicon Valley’s emergence as the world’s tech hub. Here’s where they came from and where they are now.

Elon Musk


Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk

Elon Musk is probably the most famous member of the PayPal mafia. He has become a lightning rod for political controversy alongside his incredible entrepreneurial feats.

He is best-known for revolutionising electric cars with Tesla and his ambitious mission to get humans to Mars with SpaceX.

Born in Pretoria on 28 June 1971, Musk has garnered a reputation for his intense management style – which resulted in his ouster from PayPal.

Musk went to Bryanston High School before moving to Pretoria Boys towards the end of his school career. He briefly attended the University of Pretoria before moving to Canada, gaining citizenship through his Candian-born mother, Maye.

Musk later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and received bachelor’s degrees in economics and physics.

He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford University but dropped out after two days and, with his brother Kimbal, co-founded the online city guide software company Zip2.

The startup was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. That same year Musk co-founded X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal.

When eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, Musk used $100 million of the money he made from the sale to found SpaceX in 2002.

He would soon become an early investor in Tesla in 2004, becoming chairman. He later became the product architect and, in 2008, the CEO.

These two companies make up the bulk of Musk’s net worth and are behind him becoming the world’s richest man, as at the time of writing, worth $269.8 billion.

Roelof Botha

https://dailyinvestor.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Roelof-Botha.jpg

Roelof Botha is the grandson of the late minister of foreign affairs, Roelof Frederik “Pik” Botha.

His father, a renowned economist, ensured Botha flourished academically at Hoërskool Jan van Riebeeck but also that he never spoke English at home.

Set on attending an English university, Botha attended the University of Cape Town and graduated with a BSC in Actuarial Science, Economics, and Statistics.

The young Botha landed a job as a business analyst at consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in Johannesburg and worked there for a few years.

At the time, Botha said he was reading about what was happening in Silicon Valley and was set on challenging himself against the world’s best and riding the wave of the internet.

After two years at McKinsey, Botha enrolled at Stanford University for an MBA and finished top of his class. Job offers flooded in after that.

One immediately stood out. After rejecting two offers, Botha was introduced to Elon Musk by a mutual friend, after which the X.com founder convinced him to join the fledgling startup.

Botha rose to become PayPal’s CFO, and once he left, he said that Musk had not provided the board with a full picture of the company’s problems.

At 29, during the Dot-com Bubble, Botha oversaw the financial operations of a billion-dollar company and led it through its IPO in February 2000.

Botha received an offer to stay on at PayPal, but Sequoia’s Michael Mortiz offered him a chance to enter the venture capital world.

He has been immensely successful as an early-stage venture capitalist, growing Sequoia’s assets under management and his own wealth.

He led the firm’s early investments in YouTube, Instagram, and Square – netting the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

Botha now leads Sequoia Capital and sits on the boards of MongoDB, Evernote, Bird, Ethos, Natera, Square, Unity, and Xoom.

David Sacks



David Sacks spent considerably less time growing up in South Africa than Musk or Botha, moving from Cape Town to Tennessee when he was five.

Unlike Musk and Botha, Sacks also never had a great desire to become involved in the tech world. He simply did not want to work in a profession like his father, an endocrinologist.

Sacks attended Memphis University School in Memphis, Tennessee. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in economics from Stanford University in 1994 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School in 1998.

While Musk headhunted Botha, Sacks went to work with Thiel at Confinity in 1999 and became the company’s first product leader and then its COO.

Sacks built and ran many of the company’s key teams, including product management and design, sales and marketing, business development, international, customer service, fraud operations, and HR.

He pivoted the product from beaming money on Palm Pilots to emailing money on the web and introduced the business model that would make PayPal a billion-dollar business.

Like Musk, Sacks used the money from the listing of PayPal on the Nasdaq, and its sale to eBay to launch his own companies.

In 2008, he founded enterprise collaboration company Yammer, which was one of the first software startups to apply consumer growth tactics to enterprise software.

Yammer’s viral approach made it one of the fastest-growing software startups in history, exceeding eight million enterprise users in just four years. As Founder/CEO of Yammer, Sacks grew the company to roughly $60 million in sales and 500 employees.

In July 2012, Microsoft acquired Yammer for $1.2 billion. Using this money, he co-founded Craft Ventures, a venture capitalist firm, in 2017.

As a partner at Craft, Sacks has invested in over 20 unicorns, including Affirm, AirBnB, ClickUp, Eventbrite, Facebook, Houzz, Lyft, OpenDoor, Palantir, Postmates, Reddit, Slack, SpaceX, Twitter, Uber, and Wish.

https://dailyinvestor.com/technology/67479/the-three-south-africans-and-a-close-friend-who-ran-the-paypal-mafia/

Cheers.