From Elliott Management-backed (Paul Singer) Washington Free Beacon, February 21:
Omidyar money behind organizations pushing corporate boycott of Twitter
The left-wing billionaire and media donor Pierre Omidyar is behind the dark-money group that has kept its donors secret for nearly a year and is leading a corporate boycott campaign against Twitter owner Elon Musk.
Omidyar, the eBay founder and financial backer of the Intercept and ProPublica, donated $509,500 to Accountable Tech in 2021 and 2022, according to a recently updated list of grants disclosed by Omidyar's foundation. Omidyar also gave $2 million to at least six other organizations that targeted Musk, criticizing him in letters and op-eds as "uniquely ill-suited for the job of running a social media platform" and warning that he would turn Twitter into a "free-for-all of hate and harassment."
The news reveals one of the primary forces behind the anti-Musk campaign. Accountable Tech has been dodging questions about its donors for months. Over the past year, Accountable Tech and other groups bankrolled by Omidyar organized campaigns to pressure corporations to boycott Twitter and issued statements and op-eds denouncing Musk and calling for government investigations into the billionaire. "I wonder who funds them," wrote Musk in May, in response to a Washington Free Beacon report about the organization's secretiveness.
A spokeswoman for the Omidyar Network confirmed the funding but told the Free Beacon that the foundation didn't order the Twitter boycott campaign. "We routinely support organizations that share our vision for a responsible technology system, but do not direct their day-to-day activities," said spokeswoman Beth Kanter....
January 2017 "My next book won’t be the non-fiction Silicon Valley exposé we desperately need (but here’s what it will be)"
Similarly, when Mark Ames showed me a document proving that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar had funded opposition groups in Ukraine right before the Maidan revolution, I assumed Omidyar – the Pez dispenser guy! – must have been duped by his friends in the State Department. Tech founders simply didn’t go around instigating military coups.
Perhaps I saw the first glimmer of the real story when I dug out the White House visitor logs and saw how many times Omidyar’s name appeared, and who he met. Or when I noticed the growing line of tech billionaires leading to the Oval Office, the Kremlin and various Saudi royal palaces....
November 2014 At the Intersection of Money and Power: "Pierre Omidyar’s man in India is named to Modi’s cabinet" (EBAY; AMZN; WMT)
And a bunch of links regarding The Intercept
October 2013 Columbia Journalism Review: The extraordinary promise of the new Greenwald-Omidyar venture
August 2014 Possible Problems in the New New Journalism: "Growing pains at the Omidyar/Greenwald venture"
October 2014 "Matt Taibbi Disappears From Omidyar’s First Look Media"
And many more.
