Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is rumored to be Elon Musk’s pick for Twitter’s CEO

Information reaching Kossyderrickent has it that Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, is rumored to be Elon Musk’s pick for Twitter’s CEO.

When Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter acquisition was finalized last Thursday, a few key questions remained. Chief among them: whether a group of 19 investors would follow through on the $7.1 billion equity commitment they made to the Tesla chief in May–back before tech stocks plummeted. A piece of that puzzle was revealed Monday when Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia announced in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that he’d made good on his $1.9 billion commitment, making him the social media company’s second largest shareholder after Musk.

On Friday, the Saudi royal tweeted “Dear friend “Chief Twit” @elonmusk Together all the way @Twitter,” with the image of a statement from the prince’s publicly-traded investing firm, Kingdom Holding, and his private office declaring that the prince was rolling over his 34.948 million shares of Twitter–worth $54.20 per share based on Musk’s offer–which made him the second largest shareholder in the company. Together Alwaleed and Kingdom Holding now own approximately 4% of Twitter. (Alwaleed owns 95% of Kingdom Holding, the SEC filing says.)

That made him one of two investors who chimed in about co-investing with Musk. The Qatar Investment Fund announced in an SEC filing that it had committed a previously agreed upon $375 million. These Middle Eastern investments have sparked national security concerns for a number of government officials, including Senator Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) who called for a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (aka CFIUS) in a tweet Monday.

For years, Alwaleed–a nephew of the Saudi king–was one of the most high-profile Saudi investors in U.S. stocks. In 1991 he purchased $590 million of Citigroup (then called Citicorp) preferred shares–at a time when Citi was under pressure from regulators to expand its capital base. That investment grew to be worth more than $9.5 billion by 2007. He picked up stakes in companies like HP, Apple and Kodak and more along the way, and climbed to the upper ranks of Forbes’ list of the World’s Billionaires. In November 2017, the Saudi government detained Alwaleed and about 200 others in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh on unspecified corruption charges. Forbes removed Alwaleed from the billionaire ranks in March 2018 due to a lack of clarity about which assets he still owns; Forbes did the same for others who’d been listed as Saudi billionaires.

But the Middle Eastern money is a good sign for Musk, with 32% of the original $7.1 billion equity commitment coming from Alwaleed and the Qatari fund. Seventeen other signers of the May letter, including Oracle’s Larry Ellison, plus venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, were not required to make SEC filings because they did not hold Twitter shares prior to signing the document.

Then on May 13, the same day Musk’s tweet about his $44 billion takeover of the social media company being on hold sent shares spiraling 9.7%, Alwaleed bought $20 million of Twitter stock, only to sell the same shares for a comically small $1.7 million trading loss the following Wednesday. If Alwaleed had buyer’s regret or wanted to register his displeasure with Musk’s moves at the time, he seems to have come around for good. A spokesperson for Alwaleed did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Back in April, when he was still seeking to block Musk’s takeover, Alwaleed tweeted, “I don’t believe the proposed offer by @elonmusk ($54.20) comes close to the intrinsic value of @Twitter given its growth prospects.” Apparently, Alwaleed still believes that-and is hoping for a big investment return.

These two tweets followed another in which Musk pledged that all policy changes at Twitter, “going forward,” would not be undertaken before taking one of these unscientific, easily rigged polls.

This seems to have been in reference to a new policy at Twitter, announced midday Sunday, banning all outgoing links to other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, and the Trump-backed Truth Social.

Or, maybe it’s in response to widespread outrage over Musk’s suspension of a group of journalists’s accounts which he said, spuriously, were doxxing his real-time location and posting “assassination coordinates” for him and his family. That assertion seemed to be related to journalists’ coverage of Musk’s earlier suspension of the @ElonJet account, which posted publicly available data about the wherabouts of his private jet.

Whatever the reason for his poll asking if he should step down as head of Twitter, Musk indicated as soon as he took charge at the company that this was likely a temporary arrangement until he hired a permanent CEO — after all, the man already has a lot of his plate with running Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. And any announcement about him stepping back at Twitter is all but guaranteed to drive up Tesla’s stock price — though it would have helped more if he’d done so before selling 22 million shares last week?

That the presidential in-laws were able to emerge from Jared’s historically bad decision to buy 666 was extremely surprising for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that his previous partner had reportedly once said that 666 Fifth “would be worth a lot more if it was just dirt.” Also, there was the fact that the Kushners had spent years attempting to drum up a bailout without success, reportedly being rebuffed by everyone from the richest man in France to the South Korea’s sovereign wealth fund. What, exactly, did Brookfield see in the place?

The Twitter CEO, who attended the final alongside former US presidential advisor and Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, posted a video from the stands moments before kick-off showing the impressive pyrotechnic display that followed the closing ceremony. 

Twitter users poked at Musk for revealing his whereabouts just days after he temporarily suspended the accounts of several journalists for ‘doxxing’ him.

The Twitter owner on Thursday banned journalists from CNN, Washington Post, New York Times and other outlets after they reported on his decision to block an account charting his private jet use – though the accounts were immediately restored on Friday evening.

Musk had said the journalists doxxed him by revealing his private information; the journalists insisted that they had not published his address or location.

Several Twitter users quipped that Musk was ‘self-doxxing’, questioning why he decided to suspend accounts for revealing his private information and whereabouts before going on to do so himself just days later.

‘Is this real-time continuous doxxing?’ one person said, while another chipped in: ‘You should suspend yourself for revealing your location.’

But others pointed out that each individual has the right to share their own location on social media.

The Twitter owner has been a vocal follower of the World Cup in recent weeks, frequently tweeting about games, results and interacting with other social media users.

Tens of thousands of football fans wearing French and Argentinian colours gathered at Doha’s Lusail stadium on Sunday for the showdown between Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi, both stars of Doha-owned Paris St Germain.

The throngs overcrowded Doha’s metro with Qatar Rail delaying access to the stations as a modest closing ceremony kicked off inside the stadium with dancers celebrating ‘A Night to Remember’. Thirty minutes before kick off, the stadium appeared three-quarters full.

The crowd watched Qatar’s air force planes flying over Lusail as the Gulf state also celebrated its national day, with thousands of police forces, including anti-riot units armed with water canons, securing the area.

Thousands also gathered outside the stadium to watch the game on giant screens: ‘We have no tickets. We are here for the national day and because the players might come out after the finish. We wanted to just see them,’ said Shafeek Mydheea, a tourist from Dubai standing in front of two rows of riot police outside Lusail metro station.

Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup, which has been marred by controversy, was part of a carefully built strategy by the tiny but rich state to bolster its global influence.

The tournament has put its human rights record in the spotlight – including conditions for foreign workers who built those stadiums and conservative laws which ban homosexuality, restrict political expression and curb alcohol sales.

In May, a coalition of rights groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International called on FIFA and Qatar to establish a compensation fund at least equivalent to the $440 million World Cup prize money for workers who have suffered abuses or died in Qatar. Neither FIFA nor Qatar agreed to establish the fund.

Qatari authorities say the decade-long criticism of their country has been unfair and misinformed, pointing to labour law reforms enacted since 2018 and accusing some critics of racism and double standards.

‘We’ve endeavoured for this tournament to be an accelerant to improve the conditions on labour reforms because the situation previously was not acceptable despite the best intentions,’ said Hassan Al Thawadi, Secretary General of the Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy, Qatar’s World Cup organiser, in an interview broadcast on Sky News.

The prevailing theory at the time was that the deal may have had something to do with Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, which was one of Brookfield’s biggest investors, and Jared Kushner’s work in the White House (as you may recall, Donald Trump tasked Jared Kushner with bringing peace to the Middle East). While Brookfield steadfastly insisted that Qatar knew nothing about a deal to bail out the then president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, not everyone—congressional Democrats in particular—believed that the arrangement was entirely above board. And apparently, they still don’t.