Media & entertainment tech

5 Things To Know About Vy Capital, The Secretive Firm Helping Elon Musk Buy Twitter

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One of the main backers of Elon Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter is an under-the-radar investment firm based in Dubai that has amassed $5 billion in assets, according to Bloomberg reporting.

The firm, Vy Capital, has committed $700 million to help Musk finance his proposed $44 billion takeover of social network Twitter, which remains far from a done deal as the company and Tesla founder continue to quibble over issues surrounding bots and fake accounts and a fair price for the deal.

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If it goes through, the deal would once again make Twitter a private company. It would be one of the largest leveraged buyouts in history.

Bloomberg tapped filings and other sources to try to paint a clearer picture of Vy Capital, which is the third-largest outside investor in the Twitter deal. Here are five things to know about the firm:

1) Vy’s founder is Alexander Tamas. The secretive investor previously worked closely with Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner, according to Bloomberg. Before that, he apparently worked on technology deals for Goldman Sachs in London. Tamas founded Vy in 2013 with Mateusz Szeszkowski, a former Goldman colleague.

2) Tamas led investments in Airbnb, Facebook (now Meta) and Twitter while at Milner’s investment firm, DST Global.

3) Vy has backed several other Musk ventures. The firm was a lead investor in the $675 million Series C for Musk’s tunnel-digging venture, The Boring Co. in April, per Crunchbase. It also last year led the $205 million Series C investment for Neuralink, Musk’s startup working on a computer-brain interface.

4) Vy’s assets under management have more than doubled since 2020, to $5 billion, according to sources and filings reviewed by Bloomberg. The company reportedly has about $1 billion ready to deploy. Non-Musk companies the firm has backed in the past year, according to Crunchbase, include insuretech startup Counterpart and fintech company Upgrade.

5) The firm maintains a minimal public and digital presence and seems to have only a couple dozen employees, who are spread out around the world, Bloomberg reported.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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