By Senad Karaahmetovic
Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid for Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) has attracted an investor close to a Russian tycoon, Bloomberg News reports.
Vy Capital, a Dubai-based investment firm that manages over $5 billion in assets whose single-page website shows no address nor contact details, has committed $700 million to help Tesla's (NASDAQ:TSLA) Musk finance his takeover of Twitter.
The investment makes Vy Capital the third biggest outside backer involved in the deal, alongside Sequoia Capital and Larry Ellison.
The firm was founded by Alexander Tamas, a German national who was previously linked with Russian-Israeli tycoon Yuri Milner. If the deal with Twitter goes through, Vy Capital will have financed one of the largest ever leveraged acquisitions, marking a remarkable achievement for a firm with a very small number of public records that display its funding sources.
Vy Capital also invested in Musk’s Boring Company and digital asset exchange ErisX, according to PitchBook. Moreover, the firm’s founder Tamas also backed Musk’s spacecraft engineering company SpaceX and neurotechnology company Neuralink, suggesting that the investor has been deepening his relationship with Musk.
In 2020, a document from the blank-check company Vy Global Growth showed that Vy Capital manages over $2 billion in assets, with that number more than doubling since.