san francisco Elon Musk’s takeover bid for Twitter is supported by a bevy of well-known investors and well-known Silicon Valley giants. One of the less prominent comrades-in-arms is a German technology investor who is hardly known in this country.
Dubai-based investment firm Vy Capital has pledged $700 million to fund Musk’s bid for Twitter, making it the third-largest outside investor in the potential deal, which also includes Oracle founder and billionaire Larry Ellison and Sequoia Capital want to join. This emerges from mandatory notifications to the stock exchange supervisory authority.
Little is publicly known about Vy’s funding sources or the types of investments the firm is making. The company’s website consists of a single page without an address and contact details. The assets under management collected by the German founder Alexander Tamas add up to more than five billion dollars, official documents show and reports from people familiar with the matter.
So now Vy is getting involved in Musk’s planned takeover of Twitter, which already seems to have a place in the history books, even if it doesn’t materialize because of the bogus account dispute. Vy’s capital commitment for the $44 billion transaction exceeds that of Brookfield Asset Management and Qatar.
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Tamas has contacts to well-known investors. Before founding Vy, he worked closely with Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner. He also apparently has business relationships with Musk. According to data from Pitchbook, Vy has already invested in Musk’s Boring Company.
Tamas has also poured money into the Tesla boss’ rocket company SpaceX and brain machine maker Neuralink. According to LinkedIn, Benjamin Birchall, a son of Musk’s right-hand man Jared Birchall, is currently completing an analyst internship at Vy.
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A Tamas representative declined to comment. On a recent visit to the company’s Dubai office, there was only one assistant, who said the rest of the staff were mobile. Including Tamas, there are about ten in the emirate, according to LinkedIn, about 25 people work for the company worldwide.
A 2020 document from blank check firm Vy Global Growth said Vy has more than $2 billion in assets under management. That has more than doubled since then. It’s made up of a few funds with about $1 billion in available cash, according to people familiar with the company’s operations. The donors include large American foundations, it is said.
A Twitter account for Tamas has been around since March 2009. The profile picture is the same as his LinkedIn profile, the banner adorns Lego “Star Wars” Stormtroopers. The account liked an April 21 tweet from Musk calling on the social media platform to authenticate “all real people” as part of the dispute over the number of bogus accounts.
After working on technology deals for Goldman Sachs Group in London, Tamas joined Milner’s investment firm DST Global as a partner in 2008, where he made lucrative bets on companies like Airbnb and Facebook, as well as an early investment in Twitter. In 2012, DST acquired a 4 percent stake in the Berlin online fashion house Zalando with Tamas on board. Until 2011 he was also Managing Director at the Russian Mail.ru Group.
Prior to Goldman, he was a founding member of Arma Partners, a firm providing technology financing advice to firms and investors.
“Human Supercomputer”
Tamas and his former Goldman colleague Mateusz Szeszkowski founded Vy in 2013 with a vision to “invest in and own some of the world’s leading companies for decades,” according to an official document.
He now co-manages the fund with John Hering, founder of cloud software company Lookout, but who doesn’t mention Vy on his LinkedIn profile. Tamas and Hering hold the largest stakes in Vy Global Growth, according to a statement from Spac. Another investor is Javier Olivan, who will become Meta’s chief operating officer this fall.
The company’s assets included stakes in Canadian e-commerce platform Shopify, audience tracker Comscore, online lender Lending Club and games maker Activision Blizzard. It appears that by 2018 these holdings were wound up. The company has also invested in private technology companies such as Blockchain.com and Reddit.
His expertise and investing skills led venture capitalists Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen to dub him “Milner’s human supercomputer.” The Emir of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, appointed Tamas to an advisory board for the digital economy.
Free Speech Advocate
Tamas continues to be a German citizen and currently resides in Europe. When in Dubai, he runs Vy partly from a palatial mansion in Al Barari, a secluded luxury-apartment suburb, the people said. The company also has an office in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In addition to his investing activities, Tamas founded the data research company Synaptic and supports research on artificial intelligence at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. He also seems to share Musk’s interest in free speech.
“What I think is wrong is the idea that our social media platforms should dictate what we can and can’t see,” Tamas said in a 2019 interview with the Berggruen Institute. It is dangerous when private companies determine what is acceptable as free speech and what is not.
More: Musk’s new funding for Twitter acquisition appears to be on hold