Elon Musk Twitter Inc. bid, threatened by the Billionaire’s threat to walk away, has upended many Silicon Valley giants and big names. There are notable exceptions. Top of the list is a Dubai-based firm owned by the secretive founder, Alexander Tamas, whose assets have grown to more than $5 billion. Vy Capital which has a website of only one page with no address or contact details have committed $700 million to fund Musk’s bid for Twitter Inc., making them the third-highest equity investor after Sequoia Capital and Billionaire Larry Ellison.
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It is noteworthy that Vy Capital which has little public information on its source of funds and nature of investments takes exposure in one of the largest leveraged buyouts deals in the history- the deal of Twitter goes through despite concerns raised by Musk about the fake accounts. Vy Capital’s equity commitment in the $44 billion deal has topped the offer made by Qatar and Brookfield Asset Management. It has also backed crypto exchange ERisX and companies like Musk Boring Co, according to information by PitchBook Data.
Tamas has a reputation for connecting with big named investors. Before he set up Vy Capital, he worked closely with Yuri Milner, a Russian Israeli billionaire, and now he appears to build links with Musk. He has also invested in Musk’s rocket company SpaceX and brain-machine maker Neuralink Corp.
According to LinkedIn, Vy Capital has 25 employees. A recent visit to the firm’s office in Dubai saw only a single assistant who informed that ten employees, including Tamas, work remotely.
According to a document of 2020 from Vy Global Growth, Vy has more than $2 billion of assets, which has now doubled. According to people aware of its operations, it consists of a limited number of funds that have $1 billion to deploy. According to people who asked not to be identified, it is backed by large American endowments because the details are confidential.
Tamas’s connections are not obscure as his personality; he had worked on tech deals for Goldman Sachs in London and later joined Milners Firm DST Global in 2008 as a partner, where he led lucrative deals that included companies like Facebook before it became Meta, Airbnb Inc., and early investment in Twitter.
He was one of the founders of Arma Partners before his association with Goldman Sachs and provided corporate finance advice to investors and companies in the tech industry.
In 2013, Tamas and Mateusz Szeszkowski, his former Goldman Sachs colleague, set up Vy Capital with a vision to invest in some of the leading global companies and own them for decades.
Apart from his investment activities, Tamas founded Synaptic, a data science company, and supported research on Artificial intelligence at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He shares Musk’s idea of promoting free speech.
