DOJ Criminal Inquiry Needed ASAP: How Russian and Israeli Oligarchs Bail Out Silicon Valley Fraudsters, Delian Edition
Taking seriously fraudsters and their effect on the space market and our national security
Welcome new readers! Please poke through my archives. Search as deeply as you’d like. I love getting email. And for the Silicon Valley whistleblowers I’m always happy to direct you to law enforcement. Thank you to those who have already come forward.
Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov — the Bulgarian-born fraudster behind Varda Space — is a reader of this Substack. Welcome Delian! I do hope you stop committing fraud and take seriously the criticism that others in the industry have as concerns your cavalier approach to safety and the truth. I highly recommend our Australian readers contact their authorities to block Delian from bring his spacecraft back to Earth as both the Air Force and FAA have done.
My friend Arthur Bloom has done yeoman’s work on Delian’s connections to drug money and I commend that piece to your attention, note especially how the CEO of Eaze pled guilty to bank fraud.
Delian also worked at Square, which is under investigation for money laundering and whose CTO “Crazy Bob” Lee was stabbed to death. His mentor, Keith Rabois, pictured above, worked at Square too — that is until he was involved in offering jobs for sex. Rabois was fired from Square and went to go work at Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund.
In this piece we will discussion why Delian seems to be worried about fraud and his connections with Russian oligarch interests. “Delian obsesses over SBF and Elizabeth Holmes because they represent his greatest fear: a charismatic founder creates a tremendously complicated and inspiring technology, raises an obscene amount of money from high-profile investors, and in the end is remembered only as a fraud,” notes Joe Morrison of Umbra.
I tend to agree.
We’ve already called for a criminal investigation into Delian and into Founders Fund, especially as concerns their ties to foreign intelligence and the malinvestment they’ve done into things like Neuralink (whose founder Elon Musk is under investigation by the FBI) or OpenDoor (which was sanctioned by the FTC).
Delian’s problem is more acute and may imperil America’s access to space. Not that Delian cares. This clip shows Delian doesn't really care about leaving debris. He thinks it will all "just burn up in the atmosphere totally fine."
We have to be careful about space debris and Kesslerization — that is the denial of space might well imperil our own satellite constellations and therefore our national security.
In fact there’s been a discussion that Vladimir Putin wants just such an objective and whether or not Elon, who has had conversations with Putin and connections to the Russian mob, has taken requisite care to make sure that SpaceX satellites don’t harm Americans or our access to space.
How careful is Delian? Not very. He’s compared his spacecraft to a mid-sized car and admitted that he’s testing things on the fly.
We also have an indication that Delian appears to have committed security fraud when he invested in a security without being an accredited investor.
This is a securities violation.
But looking a little closer we might ask if, maybe, just maybe investing in Eaze was a way of paying Delian down the line? Maybe the real purpose was to enrich the foreign ops along the way?
Eaze is a marijuana startup that was bailed out by the Russian-Israeli oligarch Roman Abramovich. Here’s Vice:
One of the biggest backers of the legal US cannabis industry was Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, leaked documents have revealed.
Records show Abramovich invested $130 million and provided $194 million in loans to US weed firms between 2016 and 2018, when US states were increasingly shifting from illegal to legal markets.
…
But Curaleaf was not the only cannabis business Abramovich got behind. He funded most of the $54 million for Jordan to start another cannabis venture fund called Measure 8 in 2017. He had shareholdings in Eaze, a California-based weed delivery service; Flowhub, which makes software for weed dispensaries; CBD brand Green Gorilla; Tilt Holdings which focuses on cannabis vapes; and the now defunct Greenrush Media, which produced the video platform Toke TV. A spokesperson for Tilt Holdings said the executives involved in the Abramovich investment were no longer working there, while Eaze said it was never aware Abramovich owned Cetus Investments.
Why would Abramovich, with his close ties to Putin, have favored investing millions into marijuana?
Well there’s a long history of Russians supporting the drug trade in America to fund their ops and to poison the American population.
It seems highly unlikely that Delian — given his finances — would have kept all his shares after investing in the initial round. Did he sell secondaries? Who bought those secondaries? Was it Abramovich? Did Delian cash out to a Russian oligarch?
We know the Russians like to get involved in the space economy and that the SEC has gotten involved.
The SEC should look into these questions immediately, especially as Delian’s effect on the space economy warps the market. The parallels between Delian contorting the space market and former Illumina chairman John Thompson’s efforts to distort genomics are worth further study. This is how foreign influence operations work.
And where was Founders Fund in doing its vaunted due diligence of Delian? They weren’t. In other cases we know that their due diligence of Musk and Neuralink was altogether nonexistent. This sort of behavior isn’t acceptable anymore, especially when Musk is facing federal grand juries.
Could the impending Varda scandal be because of the unusually close personal relationship between Rabois and Delian? Nepotism needs to go and regulators need to guard against it.
This isn’t a normal way to get your career going.
I mean just watch this bizarre clip about how Rabois noticed his short shorts at the office.
Yikes.
Does Jacob Helberg, Rabois’s very pro-Israel husband, know?
No matter. We’ll turn to Jacob Helberg soon…
Slight update: The Israeli collusion with Silicon Valley is totally under explored.
My friend Arthur Bloom notes the following:
Roman Abramovich became an Israeli citizen in 2018, after the Brits got sick of him. The nexus here between Hollywood, drug money, Russian oligarchs and the settler enterprise is very tight.
Abramovich bought a property in Tel Aviv from Gal Gadot's husband. He seems to have bailed out the Eaze fraud, which implicates Founders Fund. This is the sort of thing the GOP is implicitly supporting by their unwillingness to clarify American interests in regards to Israel.
Glad you are going after Helberg, his Twitter account is almost as obnoxious as his husband's