The Joe Lonsdale Hustle Needs To Be Shut Down By The Feds

It's time for us to take out the Tech Trash...

Joe Lonsdale: criminal

When we consider the career of alleged venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale we’re left with a lot of questions.

The first and most obvious question is who is Joe Lonsdale, but what is he?

For all his braying about “meritocracy” his hiring practices reflect anything but that.

Forbes broke that Lonsdale had two kids of Russian oligarchs working for him. I know that the son of a Saudi oil minister was an employee and that Lonsdale deliberately hired that young man in order to get Saudi cash. (The Saudis themselves told me about it.)

That has seemingly become Lonsdale’s modus operandi. Bribe the children of the power with jobs for their kids. Governor Greg Abbott’s daughter and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s son have worked for Lonsdale, who has, in turn, donated to both politicians.

Lonsdale isn’t an investor but a front. His is a political influence shop, not a technology investment one.

And while I had hoped to recruit Lonsdale as I had Thiel it’s becoming clear that his access to capital needs to be turned off altogether, especially as it endangers the health and safety of Americans.

Just where Lonsdale’s money comes from has always been a subject of some intrigue.

In a Twitter post trying to get ahead of the Forbes story Lonsdale says he “detests Putin” but the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’s Spencer Woodman says that Lonsdale manages money from Putin’s former deputy chief of staff and former chairman of the board of director of Russian Railways Kirill Androsov.

Woodman writes of how Lonsdale covered up the foreign money.

Between 2017 and 2019, 8VC, a prominent venture capital fund, generated a series of K-1s listing a Singapore-based shell entity as the investor. Led by Twitter co-founder Joe Lonsdale, 8VC has invested in contractors for the U.S. government, including intelligence software firm Palantir. It also invested in a company called Esper, which makes software to help government agencies craft regulations.

(In fact, Lonsdale did not cofound Twitter but I checked the rest of that paragraph and it’s all true.)

Lonsdale, along with David Sacks, was also involved in Elon Musk’s Hyperloop project which was paid for with money looted from the Russian Direct Investment Fund.

Sacks, Musk and Lonsdale all strenuously opposed a high speech rail project in California. Could it have been because they were compensated by oil producing states? I leave you to wonder.

For what it’s worth I’ve heard that a lot of his UAE money is, in fact, Russian money held there by the Emiratis. Until December of last year when the UAE and Russia deep states worked together to crack down on money laundering and criminal mafias.

Lonsdale has been complicit in this looting of Russian assets, writing to fraudster Chamath Palihapitiya — I wrote about him here — about how he’s helping to get money out. “Many know they can be killed if they speak up / the smarter play is to make it easy for them to flee with what wealth they can, versus punishing their families as if they’re in charge of Putin.”

Elsewhere Lonsdale has described Putin as a “very bad guy” and “terrible” but he doesn't seem to have taken seriously the claims that some of his funds and employees are intimately connected with Putin.

Research Lauren Balik points to Lonsdale’s Chinese criminal money funnel which is also getting shut down.

What’s really been happening is that the Russian and Chinese deep states are cracking down on the criminal laundering of their state assets by rogue (or hitherto permitted) actors.

One of the places lots of foreigners have parked cash is in real estate and venture capital. Cracking down on that money laundering has been a focus of the Biden government and really explains why so many of the venture capitalist world has moved against Biden.

Lonsdale’s crusade against the homeless should be understood in this context.

If there lots of homeless people around that’ll drive down the rents that real estate can command — and make it far less likely that foreign criminals will launder money into Austin where Lonsdale has made his home.

The Rolling Stone covered Lonsdale’s crusade against the homeless in more detail but it’s worth pointing out that some of the policies he’s pushing include more funding for private prisons.

Lonsdale’s old associate — the human trafficker Matt Michelsen — stands to benefit from these policies. He, too, is closely connected to Russian mobsters and to Governor Abbott who reportedly flies on Michelsen’s plane.

Michelsen and Lonsdale have also dabbled in healthcare fraud. We’ve covered how Michelsen had a sham covid testing company — Curative — that was shut down by the FDA.

For his part Lonsdale massively backed a company called uBiome, starting in 2012. I recall Lonsdale pitching uBiome to friends of mine at the time. They asked me if the company was real, I said it wasn’t, the friends invested anyway — and then the FBI raided the business and its two founders became fugitives from Justice.

It turns out that both founders were committing a rather simple fraud of cheating the taxpayer millions of dollars in medical reimbursements. Supposedly they are living in Germany, claiming, with all chutzpah, that they are persecuted Jews. When I asked Joe about it he refused to go into details.

Well, it turns out that when it looked like Lonsdale might himself get into criminal territory he retained Gibson Dunn to help shield himself from liability.

Lonsdale made millions in fees from the funds he invested in uBiome.

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Given that Lonsdale is running Musk’s Super PAC we might also ask if he does the same level of diligence on the donations he’s receiving.

DeSantis called Joe Lonsdale to talk about how to help Elon's Twitter acquisition.

In the coming days I’ll be releasing my conversations with Joe Lonsdale and explaining why he’s uniquely a problem.

I’ll be chatting with journalists to see if they’ll be responsible enough to cover that fraud. If not, I’ll publish it here.

It’s time for us to take out the tech trash. A Saudi friend of mine who also knows Joe Lonsdale put it more elegantly than I could when talking about Lonsdale.

“What an idiot double standard dishonest person!” he said. Lonsdale is a “psychopath” and running a “clown show.”

“He just paid a lot of money to keep the media away,” my friend said.

And he’s right. I know of journalistic projects Lonsdale was able to get killed at the Journal. (Rupert Murdoch is an investor.)

Of course other journalistic outlets rely on Lonsdale as a source. Let’s see how responsible these publications are when it’s becoming more and more apparent that Lonsdale’s engaged in criminal money laundering on behalf of foreign governments.