The first thing we'll do is set up some shell companies.
A shell company is different from a normal company in that it typically lacks active business operations, employees, or significant assets. Its primary purpose is to hold assets or manage financial transactions, often serving to obscure the ownership or origin of assets. While shell companies can be used for legitimate purposes, they are also commonly employed to hide the transfer of illicit funds or to evade paying taxes.
Example: Russian shell companies funneled $10 million to conservative content creators
When employees of the Russian state media outlet RT funneled nearly $10 million to right-wing content creators, they transferred the money to the US-based influencers via shell companies.
Russians paid Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, and Tim Pool around $400k per month (including $100k upfront). Starting around November 2023, these self-purported patriots produced nearly 2,000 videos that were distributed to TikTok, Instagram, X, and YouTube. Over 16 million views were attained on YouTube alone. The content produced by these people included Russian talking points designed to amplify political divisions in the United States around policy issues like immigration and inflation.
With our shell companies ready, we'll transfer in our illicit funds, creating difficult-to-trace chains of ownership. Then, with our shell companies funded, we'll start investing in startup funding rounds.
Usually, a funding round is when investors come together and decide to give a bunch of money (usually between $250k to several million) to some people who present a compelling case for why their product will eventually become a profitable publicly-traded company.
These startup founders are often young and motivated by the allure of a successful exit ((A successful exit is when you cash out your initial shares for many multiples of what they were originally worth. For example, if you started your company with $500k in seed capital, a successful exit might look like cashing out your share of the company for $5M (a 10x exit) a few years later after your company raises additional funding or goes public.)). The investment strategy here is that you get in on a company that will grow to (hopefully) millions of users in less than five years, have an IPO, then cash out at several multiples of your initial investment.
In our case, though, the goal is not merely a profitable exit but a subtle manipulation of political discourse.
By injecting money into tech startups—particularly social media companies—we gain influence over what narratives are amplified.
Perhaps changes are made so that content shown to users is more likely to include certain divisive topics or even divisive people—like when the guy who ruined Twitter forced changes to its curation algorithm so that his own posts were more prominent.
Or maybe we'll paint ourselves as a neutral party, like when Meta declared itself a neutral platform that shouldn't succumb to governments pressuring them to moderate content that frames societal issues in misleading ways.
Or maybe we'll be like Substack, and decide that as a technology company our obligations are in generating growth and revenue—even if that growth and revenue depends on, say, white supremacists using our platform.
Over time, the companies we invest in will continue to grow because of the millions of dollars we (and other venture capitalists) inject into them. This is like feeding two birds with one scone: competitors that waste their time with trivialities like ethics and moderation will fail to reach the same levels of audience capture our companies will enjoy, and our funding will enable our companies to grow and reach new audiences more quickly. It's win-win—unless, of course, you're one of those weirdos expecting a global technology platform to take misinformation and disinformation more seriously.
Eventually our investments will give us an opportunity to cash out. Either a company we've invested in has an Initial Public Offering (IPO)—in which case we receive shares of stock proportional to our equity ownership that we can exchange for clean money right away—or we sell our equity stake to another venture capital firm that wants to buy us out. Regardless of how we extract ourselves, our objective is complete: not only did we hide move money through the startup technology sector, generating new, clean money—often times at multiples of our original investment—we also manufactured and amplified political division online!
With any luck, the exacerbated feelings of disillusion that our hard work has bestowed upon the public conscience will give rise to politicians who also support our patriotic duty to generate exponential profits—all at the expense of revenue-killers like a commitment to truth and ethics in public information stewardship.