Mike Butcher, Editor, Pathfounders.com

Pieter Levels (@levelsio) has a habit of confidently misreading data and treating anecdotes as evidence 🧵👇 This is what happens when you train your AI and your following base with skewed world views, dodgy studies and huge biases: they amplify your crooked narrative.

Crypto’s unfinished business. While BlueYard has always been a generalist venture firm, we launched in 2016 with a thesis whose first pillar was the decentralization of markets. By the time we raised our third crypto fund in 2024, that had sharpened into a view of crypto as a coordination machine for capital and compute. We think today is one of the most exciting times to build in crypto, and we remain excited to back sharp teams working at the intersection of open infrastructure and markets. If you’re building there, show us what earlier attempts got right, what changed, and why this one can work now. That’s the conversation we want to have and we’d like to meet you. blueyard.medium.com/cryptos-…

Elon Musk has complied after all and provided a list of X Holding Corp shareholders who helped the billionaire buy Twitter. And who do you think turned out to be the investors of the X platform? That's right, Petr Aven and Vadim Moshkovich. Now it is absolutely obvious where Musk got such love for Russia and where the roots of “filters” due to anti-Russian publications grow from. Let me remind you who Aven and Moshkovich are. Petr Aven is a Russian billionaire, founder of Alfa Group, which is one of the main wallets for Putin. This man is controlled by the Kremlin as much as possible, for example, in 2018 he traveled to Washington with his colleague Fridman to lobby on behalf of the Russian government to lift international sanctions on Russia. Aven is one of Putin's oldest friends. In general, without Peter's interference, Putin would be in jail rather than becoming president. After all, Aven covered for Vladimir Putin in 1992, when he organized the illegal trade in export licenses. Aven promptly approved him as an authorized representative of the Ministry of Foreign Economic Affairs with the right of foreign economic activity, thus saving the future dictator from prison. Aven also attended a meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022 to mark the start of the invasion of Ukraine. He did not express any protest, started the special military operation and silently supported Putin. By the way, he along with Friedman is trying to get sanctions lifted, just yesterday he received another rejection in this matter. Twitter is represented in the purchase by 8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P., a company in which his son Denis works. Vadim Moshkovich is a sub-sanctioned Russian agrarian billionaire who was a member of the “Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation”. In other words, he was officially part of Putin's closest circle. Moshkovich owns Russia's largest agricultural holding Rusagro. Naturally, he also attended the meeting with Putin on February 24, 2022 and, like Aven, did not express any protest against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Twitter is represented in the purchase by 8VC Opportunities Fund II, L.P., a company in which his son Jack (Eugene) works. Also an interesting personality is Al-Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, who both personally and through his Kingdom Holding Company is represented in the list of investors as many as three times. This man continues his investment business in Russia and does not publicly support Hamas in the war against Israel. He regularly works with Rosneft, Lukoil and Gazprom on investments in Russia. Knowing all of this, how can there even be a discussion about Elon Musk's bias? Everyone was thinking how is it possible that Twitter (X)'s stock is plummeting, advertisers are breaking contracts, and no one is doing anything about it. I mean, that's a direct loss to investors. But what everyone overlooked was the fact that investors didn't care about profits, they needed a platform to promote their narratives, such as: supporting Putin and Russia; lobbying to freeze the war in Ukraine; taking the Ukrainian agenda out of the top news; the righteousness of Hamas, etc. It is now obvious that all the changes to Twitter that are ruining this beautiful platform are a consequence of Elon Musk's collaboration with people like Moshkovich and Aven. #ElonMusk #RussiaUkraineWar #RussialsATerroristState