Did Alaskans buy Twitter? Maybe a smidge, records show

The Juneau offices of the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. are seen Monday, June 6, 2022, in Juneau, Alaska. (Photo by James Brooks/Alaska Beacon)

Last week, a federal judge ordered the release of a list of investors who helped pay for Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter, now known as X, in 2022.

On the list is an investment fund partially owned by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp.

The new list, published by the Washington Post , includes Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and obscure investment funds, a Saudi prince, the former founder of Twitter, and an Italian financial services company.

Further down the roster is the Sequoia Capital Fund , a venture capital investment fund based in California. That fund spent at least $800 million to finance Musk’s purchase, according to publicly available information.

This month, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. published a new list of its private equity holdings.

Among the investments on that list is a $9 million investment in the Sequoia Capital Fund, dating to 2022.

That’s a miniscule fraction of the total fund, worth more than $17 billion , but it shows a link between Alaska’s state trust fund and a Twitter investor.

Other states have similar investments. UTIMCO, the multibillion-dollar investment fund operated by the University of Texas, put $100 million into Sequoia Capital in 2022, the same year as Alaska’s investment.

Twitter’s value has shrunk significantly since Musk’s purchase , due in large part to the flight of advertisers and users who are reluctant to have ads or posts next to white supremacist or bot-written material. Musk’s orders to reduce moderation on the social media site have made such material more common.

Private equity investments by the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. are almost entirely opaque and are listed in public reports only by the amount invested and the name of the fund.

Private equity fund managers, rather than the corporation, direct where the fund’s money goes, and individual investments tend to be commingled, making it difficult to say which dollar went to which project.

Paulyn Swanson, the APFC’s communications director, said by email that she “can confirm our (private equity) investments at the Fund level but not the underlying holdings. As a limited partner, we are not involved in the decisions to buy or sell securities within the funds.”

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