Pay Attention: JP Morgan Is Buying 10% of Twitter
Well, that was fast. JP Morgan has acquired a significant amount of Twitter shares through secondary markets and is in talks with Twitter for a direct investment, the WSJ says.Meanwhile Michael Arrington at TechCrunch says Twitter isn’t interested in a direct investment but JP Morgan already owns 10% of Twitter through secondary offerings at a $4.5 billion valuation, buying most of the stock from Evan Williams, who sold $100 million, with the rest going to early investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital.
Most interesting is that Arrington says super angel investor Chris Sacca (an early Twitter investor/advisor) has raised a secretive $1 billion (!) fund to buy secondary shares, most of which was contributed by JP Morgan and that this fund, not JP Morgan itself, bought the Twitter stake. The fund, which would now be the second largest Twitter shareholder after Ev Williams, still has $700 million to burn and is competing with DST, trying to put money in other late-stage companies like (you guessed it) Facebook, Zynga and Groupon.
Developing…
