Ali al-Ahmed didn’t think that Elon Musk was responsible for the decline and fall of Twitter. Musk was another face representing an old regime. And its sins began well before Musk bumbled into Twitter HQ, in October 2022, carrying a porcelain sink. (In an attempt at humour, Musk posted a video of himself arriving at the Twitter offices carrying a sink with the caption “Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!”)
Ahmed was a Saudi journalist and analyst living in the Washington DC area. He was a founder of the Institute for Gulf Affairs (formerly the Saudi Institute), a Saudi-focused thinktank with an emphasis on human rights reporting, and was the kind of expert – passionate, principled, always glad to hop on the phone – that journalists loved having in their digital Rolodex.
For Ahmed, who over the years had many family members imprisoned by the Saudi royal family, the pursuit of human rights was a solemn task. But he also had a kind of garrulousness – breaking into asides about his children or the talking gadget he’d invented to remind them to wash their hands – that reminded one of the deeper human stakes. “Twitter is no different from Boeing or those military companies,” Ahmed told me. “They care about making money. Twitter and Facebook are not champions or models for human rights. These people are nothing but money-grubbers.” Twitter had banned Ahmed’s Arabic-language Twitter account, which had 36,000 followers (although he was allowed to keep his English-language account).
I first spoke to Ahmed in 2021, when reporting on the Saudi government’s use of Twitter to unmask and arrest people posting critically about the regime. For Saudi authorities, Twitter was an asset in every sense. The billionaire Saudi businessman Prince Alwaleed bin Talal was Twitter’s largest outside shareholder, and the site had become a key tool in the government’s apparatus of surveillance and control.
Ahmed believed his Twitter account had been compromised. He worried that spies had access to it, which would endanger dissident Saudis with whom he exchanged private messages. This wasn’t an idle concern. One of his contacts was Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, an aid worker who, in 2018, was abducted by Saudi security forces for running a satirical Twitter account that parodied members of the government. Abdulrahman, who was then 37, was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Saudi Arabia is carrying out more repression than ever, said Abdulrahman’s sister Areej al-Sadhan, who lived in the US when we spoke in 2021. In the first three years after her brother was arrested, her family had received only two brief phone calls from him. Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, had zero tolerance for dissent or mockery. Areej has not heard from her brother for years. In a 2023 court filing, she said that she wasn’t sure if her brother was alive.
Despite his attempt to portray himself as a modernising reformer, Prince Mohammed could appear every bit as repressive as past Saudi rulers, turning the country into a surveillance state where arbitrary arrests and disappearances were routine. As the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi demonstrated, the Saudi state pursued vigorous methods of transnational repression, allegedly sending hit squads after enemies abroad.
Prince Mohammed used his country’s bottomless reserves of oil and capital to flood Silicon Valley, politics, sports leagues and other power centres with cash and influence. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel’s investment vehicle, Founders Fund, were among the most notable recipients of Saudi money, but they were just two among hundreds. In 2016, Uber received an astonishing $3.5bn from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). Blackstone’s infrastructure fund got $20bn. By autumn 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported, Saudi Arabia had become “the largest single funding source for US startups”.
The Saudi-Silicon Valley relationship represented a convergence of shared interests. Saudi Arabia, like other Gulf dictatorships, wanted to wash its money, diversify its investments, deepen influence with its most powerful ally, extend soft power and counter its image as a repressive state responsible for a devastating war in Yemen. Silicon Valley offered all of that, along with access to cutting-edge technology and a business elite coming into its own.
“They’re surveillance states. They’re police states,” said Nader Hashemi, a professor of Middle East and Islamic politics at Georgetown University. “They want to use the latest technology in order to continue to remain in power and surveil their populations. So they have another interest in trying to sort of be the beneficiaries of hi-tech developments, hoping that that will help them internally with their own political rule.”
The Saudi government had vast assets held in the names of senior members of the royal family. Through his Kingdom Holding Company, Prince Alwaleed had interests in businesses like Lyft and Snapchat. And until Elon Musk came along, he was Twitter’s largest outside shareholder. As Saudi Arabia became the pre-eminent source of Silicon Valley capital, Alwaleed emerged as the country’s most recognisable mogul, taking the role of leading shareholder in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. By 2015, the prince owned an estimated 5.2% of Twitter. In November 2017, Alwaleed was arrested and confined to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh as part of a sweeping “anti-corruption” purge that forced numerous wealthy Saudis and members of the royal family to sign over their assets to Prince Mohammed. That may well have included Alwaleed’s Twitter shares.
“Since late 2017 or January of 2018, Prince Mohammed has exercised control over more Twitter stock than is owned by Twitter’s founder,” according to a civil complaint filed against Twitter and the consulting firm McKinsey by Omar Abdulaziz, a film director and Saudi exile. Abdulaziz said that the consultancy helped finger him as a prominent online dissident, leading to his Twitter account being hacked. (In 2020, Canadian authorities warned Abdulaziz that he was a target of a Saudi kill team.) According to Abdulaziz’s original complaint, “Because of the tremendous wealth of key figures in [the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia], major corporations have enabled, collaborated with, and turned a blind eye to [its] efforts to suppress, torture, falsely imprison, terrorise and murder dissenters both within Saudi Arabia and around the world.” Twitter had given the Saudi government a reach well beyond its borders.
At the outset, Twitter had seemed like “a great equaliser”, said Ahmed. With no independent media in Saudi Arabia and most political expression forbidden, Twitter and other social media seemed initially a place for people to speak more frankly, especially when they could be pseudonymous. “That did not last,” he told me.
By the second Obama administration, Saudi Twitter had become a place for the kingdom’s rulers to propagandise, track dissident thought and identify victims for Prince Mohammed’s personal team of enforcers. Many Saudis knew better than to post on Twitter under their real names. But the Saudi government was able to unmask pseudonymous accounts and trace their owners, who were then arrested. For a long time, dissident Saudis wondered how exactly government security forces had unmasked their friends and family members, and whether there were any countermeasures they could take. They assumed the Saudi government had access to the finest western security contractors and advanced spyware software. They didn’t yet know that Prince Mohammed and his henchmen had something better: a spy ring inside Twitter itself.
In June 2014, a Saudi official named Bader Al Asaker took a tour of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Asaker was the secretary-general of Prince Mohammed’s personal charity, the Misk Foundation, and head of the crown prince’s private office. One of the people who arranged the tour was a Twitter employee named Ahmad Abouammo. According to US prosecutors, Asaker was grooming Abouammo, who worked on media partnerships in the Middle East, to spy for him. In the months to come, Abouammo would receive more than $100,000 in cash and gifts as he gathered information – including email addresses, phone numbers and private messages – relating to Saudi dissidents, journalists and other accounts of note.
Abouammo got a new job at Amazon the following year, but the Saudi regime found a worthy replacement in Ali Alzabarah, a Twitter engineer whose position and technical skills gave him access to more user data than Abouammo. Soon enough, Alzabarah became an even more productive spy for Asaker and the Saudi regime, tracking dissidents across borders and providing IP addresses that could reveal people’s locations.
In December 2015, an FBI agent visited the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco to tell them that they had a Saudi espionage problem. The FBI asked that Twitter refrain from taking immediate action but, reportedly suspicious about the intentions of government security agencies, which are known to pressure tech companies for private user information, Twitter decided to suspend Alzabarah.
According to a federal indictment against Alzabarah, the engineer turned spy frantically called Asaker, who, along with the Saudi consul general of Los Angeles, helped spirit Alzabarah away to Saudi Arabia. After finding refuge there, Alzabarah was named CEO of the Misk Foundation. Almost a decade later, Alzabarah was still on X – where his account was locked for privacy – and on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Abouammo was arrested in November 2019 and indicted. A jury found him guilty on six criminal charges related to his spying. In December 2022, a judge sentenced him to three and a half years in federal prison.
Twitter – and now X, as it was rebranded after Musk’s takeover – has never accounted publicly for the Saudi spy ring, nor has it discussed how it plans to keep foreign agents off its payroll.
If Saudi’s ruling class had doubts about Musk’s takeover of Twitter, they were short-lived. After initially criticising the brash Musk, Prince Alwaleed, now free from five-star confinement, supported his takeover effort, announcing he would roll his $1.89bn worth of shares (presumably controlled by Prince Mohammed) into the new venture. Asaker continued to use the site to propagandise to his more than 2.3 million followers.
Despite Musk swooping into Twitter HQ with a promise to liberate users from the shackles of Silicon Valley technocrats, the user experience got worse.
Meanwhile, Musk seemed openly transactional in his dealings with foreign governments. Whatever universal principles he claimed to hold appeared secondary, in practice, to his business concerns and his personal whims. This free-speech absolutist said nothing about Saudi Arabia’s abuse of his platform. Perhaps he was simply unaware.
The company that once called itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party”, was now chasing viability via personal data collection and surveillance advertising. It did not protect its users from data breaches and it made devil’s bargains with foreign governments. As Ali al-Ahmed said, it was a typical US corporation. Except that this one had charged itself with a higher purpose and, in bumbling into foreign markets under autocratic governments where its product basically invited local people to break the law, it set up its users for trouble.
For Ahmed, the conviction of one Saudi spy, Abouammo, without any larger reckoning over the kingdom’s role at Twitter and in Silicon Valley, was a failure. As possibly the only known victim of the spy ring living in the US, Ahmed had offered to testify at Abouammo’s sentencing. After a video chat with representatives of the Department of Justice, he never heard back. “It was very clear that they were just trying to close this matter,” said Ahmed. “Imagine if this guy was doing it for the Iranians. Oh my God. He would get 20 [years].”
He emphasised that, in a lawsuit regarding the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Biden administration had recognised Prince Mohammed as having sovereign immunity. The US government also intervened in a lawsuit against Prince Mohammed filed by Saad Aljabri, a former spy chief who had defected to the US. “I really think it was a betrayal of justice here,” said Ahmed. “It’s part of this foreign influence and the corruption that’s also now in the court system.”
Twitter’s relationship with the Saudi government revealed how the company really operated. It wasn’t just a place for silly memes or catty media discourse or an attention-obsessed billionaire to cultivate his flock. It was an informational battleground, a crucial node in the broader media ecosystem, and formed part of the connective tissue between Silicon Valley and Gulf dictatorships. It revealed the company’s politics as riddled with the same kind of false populism and political opportunism embraced by Musk, Trump and Maga radicals. Twitter’s willingness to overlook horrific behaviour by a major investor wasn’t unique. It’s the default for most large corporations, the equivalent of a western oil giant paying bribes to operate in a foreign country. But the tech industry had long tried to paint itself as a bearer of progress, where technological innovation was synonymous with human flourishing. Twitter’s Saudi scandal showed that this wasn’t true at all.
It’s possible that there were other spies working at Twitter, just as there were likely foreign agents working throughout Silicon Valley. Economic espionage is an old story. But using tech companies’ surveillance-based business model to repress dissent at home and practice transnational repression abroad was a grimly novel phenomenon. It was common for tech companies operating in foreign markets – often with minimal local staff – to face political pressures. In many cases, the result was that formerly idealistic tech firms would make compromises over censorship if it meant having access to tens of millions of users in Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, India or China. The cybersecurity specialist known by the mononym Mudge, who consulted for Twitter, testified before Congress that India and China had agents working inside Twitter who had broad access to user data.
A month after Mudge testified, Elon Musk completed his harried acquisition of Twitter. The $44bn purchase price required him to take on a lot of debt and to solicit support from friends and allies from Hawaii to San Francisco to Riyadh. By buying Twitter, Musk inherited the Saudi spy scandal and the still-unresolved litigation associated with it. He inherited a major shareholder who had committed espionage against their own asset. Yet there was still a lot we didn’t know about Twitter, Saudi Arabia and Musk.
I wanted to know more about who helped Musk take Twitter private and who now owned a piece of X. Who was this powerful, volatile billionaire potentially beholden to?
It wasn’t something that Musk wanted to talk about. The company had done away with its PR department. In the public imagination, Musk was X – he owned it, he was its most popular user, he set its policies, he intervened personally when one of his favourite accounts encountered issues. He owed nothing to the media. He was enjoying its death throes.
When Musk acquired Twitter, he fired thousands of people and, with his blithe disregard for the tenets of employment law, provoked numerous lawsuits. By early 2024, these lawsuits – by ex-employees who said they didn’t receive severance, were coerced into quitting, or were encouraged to break the law in order to implement Musk’s edicts – were winding their way through the courts. In some suits, the plaintiffs wanted X to submit a list of its shareholders to answer questions about accountability. Who were Musk’s partners? Who might be materially affected by a lawsuit against X? Did the judge own shares in Tesla or another Musk company?
This was a legitimate concern. In 2023, a liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters, produced a report that accused the site of allowing antisemitic posts next to advertising, and Musk sued them for allegedly manipulating data in an attempt to “destroy” the platform. The suit was filed in a north Texas district where one of the judges turned out to be a Tesla shareholder. US district judge Reed O’Connor owned as much as $50,000 in Tesla stock when he took on Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters. Judge O’Connor made a series of rulings in favour of Musk, and the case’s accumulating legal fees led to Media Matters laying off staff. In November 2024, X added a provision to its terms of service stating that all legal disputes would be settled in Judge O’Connor’s Northern District of Texas. (O’Connor ruled that his Tesla stock “is not relevant to the case”, but he recused himself from X’s case against the World Federation of Advertisers.)
These kinds of shareholder document requests are common, and a corporate defendant may request to submit the information under seal, making it unavailable to the public (and potentially even the plaintiffs). In one of the cases I followed, Anoke v Twitter, one of the many civil lawsuits resulting from Musk’s chaotic takeover of the company and his mass firings of employees, X submitted a list of shareholders under seal.
Wanting to file a motion to have the list unsealed, I reached out to Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), a first amendment organisation that offered pro bono services to journalists. Born out of the Nixon administration’s attempted censorship of the Pentagon Papers, RCFP had a distinguished history of first amendment litigation. They agreed to represent me.
Together we found a few cases where it might be possible to unseal X’s shareholders list. The cases varied in their particulars, and some seemed more promising than others. But the public-interest claim was straightforward. The RCFP attorneys deployed precedent-laden arguments about X as a public square, media ownership and foreign influence and national security concerns. They contacted the many high-powered lawyers X was employing to fight these cases to formally let them know we would be filing motions to unseal. And by early July, they had completed the necessary filings. In July 2024, we officially filed a motion in the Northern District of California asking a federal judge to unseal a disclosure list of X’s shareholders in Anoke v Twitter.
And then I waited.
It had cost about $46.5bn for Elon Musk to acquire Twitter. The money was cobbled together from $20bn in Musk’s assets, $13bn in loans from big banks (which soon found that they couldn’t move them off their books), $6bn in loans to Musk himself, and more than $7bn in commitments from investors who would be shareholders of the new private enterprise.
In a financial statement submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in May 2022, Musk listed a number of his planned Twitter co-investors and their equity stakes, so we had some idea of who was helping him buy the company. Saudi Prince Alwaleed, Twitter’s largest outside shareholder, had initially been publicly critical of Musk’s offer and then – the reasons for the shift are unclear – announced that he supported Musk and would happily roll his shares into the new entity. Other reporting helped fill in some of the sources of money.
But gaps remained. And once Twitter went private in October 2022 and Musk set about cutting back the divisions of the company that offended him, there was no official list of its shareholders, or the legal names of the trusts, funds, LLCs and other corporate entities holding their shares. Musk called himself a “free-speech absolutist”, but his business dealings tended to be filtered through the usual veil of corporate secrecy, legal threats, nondisclosure agreements, encrypted chats and fleets of powerful attorneys that protect very powerful people. He denounced “lawfare” – the aggressive use of lawsuits to punish one’s enemies – while widely practising it. He banned journalists from X when they displeased him and he ordered the reinstatement of the accounts of Nazis, white supremacists and a QAnon-adjacent influencer named Dom Lucre who’d once posted a screenshot from a video of a child being sexually abused. (He claimed he was drawing attention to the issue of child abuse.)
On 20 August 2024, Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California ruled in favour of our motion in Anoke v Twitter.
Hours after the ruling, the filing containing the list of X’s shareholders appeared on the online court docket, visible to anyone logged into the public court system. I’m still not exactly sure what happened, but apparently it’s a matter of a clerk clicking to change permissions on a limited-access filing, so it’s possible that someone at the court prematurely made the list available. The error, if it was one, was soon noticed by reporters at the Washington Post, who wrote an article about the list’s contents.
Soon, the list was everywhere, published in hundreds of media outlets, becoming grist for debate, memes, misinformation, and – I hoped – researchers, regulators, and journalists looking into a powerful tech company openly in the tank for the Republican candidate for president.
The list, which set out the legal names of about 95 entities owning a piece of X (but not the size of their holdings), began to fill in the picture of whom Musk depended on for cash and the networks he moved in. It was a window into a political and economic formation with increasing purchase on our world.
It all started, of course, with Elon Musk. He was the majority owner of X through a trust he controlled. He was followed by Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter CEO and major shareholder who helped deliver the company to Musk. Then there was a host of other tech and finance figures, including many venture capitalists, friends of Musk who were consistent investors in his various enterprises. Some of these firms had close relationships with authoritarian governments, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who were direct investors in X. Andreessen Horowitz received hundreds of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia to invest on their behalf in US tech startups and was in talks with the kingdom about creating a $40bn AI investment fund.
Venture capital firms served as Laundromats for a class of kleptocrats, princelings and other global elites, who could funnel their fortunes into one of the US’s most celebrated industries. Silicon Valley venture capitalists and their foreign investors often shared a general disregard for democratic governance. In the Saudi crown prince, they saw a counterpart who demonstrated the same benevolent authoritarian style that they enacted in their business lives – but on an even grander scale, with unchallenged power. Venture capitalists published chatty manifestos about their technological aspirations; Prince Mohammed offered his own consultant-approved economic development plan known as Vision 2030. The two sides had much in common.
“Saudi has a founder,” Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz said at a 2023 tech conference featuring Saudi government representatives. (In tech mythology, a “founder” has elite status.) “You don’t call him a founder. You call him his royal highness.”
Saudi Arabia’s ailing king and ambitious crown prince were hardly “founders” of a state that, in its current form, had been inaugurated in 1932. But the rhetoric was not just flattery. It resonated in tech circles where an increasing number of people believed that the US would be better off under a dictatorial CEO figure, not an elected president. If Trump were re-elected, Musk had the potential to become that kind of figure.
When Musk acquired Twitter, there were rumblings that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) might investigate the deal. “I call on CFIUS to immediately conduct a review of the recent changes in Twitter’s ownership and governance,” Senator Chris Murphy wrote to Treasury secretary Janet Yellen. “It is essential to our national security that public officials and citizens alike can continue to rely on this platform to be a neutral platform, free of foreign influence.” In his letter, Murphy specifically cited concerns about the Saudi government using its investment “to silence government critics and human rights activists, or to further state-sponsored disinformation campaigns”. According to the Washington Post, the investigation never happened.
X did not respond to a request for comment. A Twitter spokesperson said in 2021 that it acted swiftly in 2015 when it learned there were malicious actors accessing Twitter user data. The company also said it was committed to “protecting the public conversation” from abuse by state actors.
This is an edited extract from Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley published in audiobook and hardback by Bloomsbury Continuum. To support the Guardian, order a copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
