Kremlin Cash Behind Yuri Milner’s Twitter and Facebook Investments

> The additional Kremlin state ties seem only an additional technicality

The line between investing for potentially-corrupt interests and acting at the behest of a geopolitical competitor is night and day. DST didn't just hand cash over to companies. They conducted extensive diligence and sat on Boards.

Maybe that wasn't good phrasing. I'm trying to say that I never saw the division between those corrupt interests and the nation state they belonged to. I always felt they were acting in their national interests.

What will be interesting here is how fast it falls off HN.

Given Milner's background, I would think this is has been an "open secret" in Silicon Valley investment circles. Is that the case?

Quick, investigate pg for Russia collusion LOL.

But seriously, let's put these reactions in perspective. Supposs the same was revealed the other way, about a US company having ties to the US government investing in Russian technology. We wouldn't bat an eye. This hysteria about Russian collusion makes us waste our energy and attention which is necessary to pay attention to the real issues (which I list below.)

I am not surprised that a Russian billionaire has ties to Putin, or invested in US companies. His company has since sold his stake and moved on, and nothing scary happened.

Compared to what the USA does on a regular basis, Russia is a pretty good actor when it comes to external dealings.

What's much more worrying is internal Russia policies. I personally know some people who started VKontakte (the Russian facebooj). They all sold their stake or were later pressured to do so by the Russian government after refusing to cooperate with the equivalent of the FBI's NSL + gag orders. and of course the Mail.ru conglomerate wanted to take it over. Not easy to maitain a business in Russia.

(Note: the US has just as much spying and NSL+gag orders but far, far greater freedom of speech and property protections so we don't feel it as much.)

But outside? Look US firms regularly make investments in companies around the world. The actual influence comes not from investment but from things like:

The CIA approaching VK founder and developers hoping to install backdoors in Telegram

Microsoft Windows new versions phoning home or cooperating with the CIA. There is a reason many nations including Russia have built and are now promoting ther own operating systems instead of Windows.

It's just so sloppy to talk about "ties" to something. The hysteria cheapens the impact ahen something real happens. Like backdoors and hacking.

I don't really get the hysteria.

I work for an American company in San Francisco that has Tencent (practically an arm of the Chinese government) as a major investor. The number of times our CEO came in and told me that we need to implement features that benefit our geopolitical competitor is exactly zero.

What precisely do all the commenters that are panicking here think happens at companies where the investors are people who became rich with the help of the governments of Russia and China?