Judge rules Elon Musk's X Holdings must disclose full ownership structure

In a ruling earlier this week, a federal judge in California decided to make public X Holdings' detailed corporate disclosure statement, a move that will effectively unveil the list of shareholders of X's parent company (formerly Twitter) and X.ai, the artificial Odaily startup founded by Elon Musk in 2023. In 2022, Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion, took the company private, and fired about three-quarters of its employees. Last year, a group of former Twitter employees sued X for arbitration fees arising from disputes with their former employers. Jacob Silverman, a freelance journalist, intervened in the case with the help of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to make the disclosures public. Although lawyers for Musk and X argued that "according to normal practice and policy, X Holdings will not publish or disclose information about its owners/shareholders and treat such information as confidential," the judge was not swayed by any alleged need for confidentiality. At the time Musk bought X Holdings, it was reported that several investors included Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey (who transferred more than $1 billion worth of Twitter stock to the company), Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Silicon Valley venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Sequoia Capital. But Musk never disclosed a full breakdown of investors or the company's structure. X Holdings now has until September 4 to file documents with the court. (Fortune)