Did Alaskans buy Twitter? Records suggest maybe a little • Alaska Beacon

Last week, a federal judge ordered the release of a list of investors who helped finance Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter (now X) in 2022.

The list includes a mutual fund that is partially owned by Alaska Permanent Fund Corp.

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

Further down the list is the Sequoia Capital Funda venture capital fund based in California. This fund invested at least 800 million dollars to finance Musk's purchase, as publicly available information shows.

This month, the Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. a new list its private equity investments.

Investments on this list include a $9 million investment in the Sequoia Capital Fund maturing in 2022.

This is a tiny fraction of the total fund, worth more than 17 billion dollarsbut it shows a connection between the Alaska State Trust Fund and a Twitter investor.

Other states have similar investments. UTIMCO, the University of Texas’s multi-billion dollar investment fund, invested $100 million in Sequoia Capital in 2022, the same year as Alaska's investment.

Twitter's value has plummeted since Musk's purchase, largely due to an exodus of advertisers and users reluctant to place ads or posts next to racist or bot-written material. Musk's order to reduce moderation on the social media site has led to such material becoming more common.

Alaska Permanent Fund Corp.'s private equity investments are almost completely opaque and are listed in public reports only with the amount invested and the name of the fund.

Private equity fund managers, not the company, determine where the fund's money goes. In addition, individual investments are often mixed, making it difficult to tell which dollar went to which project.

Paulyn Swanson, communications director for APFC, said by email that she could “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.”