X Challenge to Unveiling of Musk Investors Dismissed as Moot

X Corp.'s quest to shield the identities of its parent entity’s shareholders in a worker dispute is moot because the information is already public, a federal appeals court said.

The district judge overseeing a dispute between X and former Twitter employees who lost their jobs after Elon Musk took over the social media platform in 2022 unsealed the list of X Holdings Corp. investors after a journalist intervened in the suit. X challenged that reveal, but there’s no live controversy left to resolve, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said in a Monday order.

The court can’t provide an effective remedy because “the information in X Corp.’s corporate disclosure statement has already been published widely across the internet and has been public on both the district court and Ninth Circuit dockets for months,” the unsigned order dismissing the appeal said.

Independent journalist Jacob Silverman secured the unveiling of the shareholders’ identities—including previously disclosed investors such as Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and new names such as billionaire Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation—in 2024. Silverman intervened in a worker lawsuit involving arbitration costs before Judge Susan Illston of the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

X faces multiple actions over its alleged failure pay former Twitter workers promised severance and give them adequate notice before a mass layoff. Other lawsuits challenge the purported race, age, sex, and disability bias at play in who X let go. The company says it could face millions of dollars in arbitration costs on top of any severance it’s ordered to pay and is also involved in several other fights over who must foot the bill for those proceedings.

X’s appeal doesn’t qualify for an exception to mootness. A party in the company’s position “could usually receive review by seeking a stay pending appeal of a district court’s order to unseal,” and inability to secure that relief doesn’t make the case one that’s capable of repetition yet evading review, the order said. “Given our dismissal of the appeal as moot, we vacate the order of the district court.”

Judges Sidney R. Thomas, Kenneth Kiyul Lee, and Roslyn O. Silver made up the panel. Silver sat by designation from the US District Court for the District of Arizona.

Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP represents X and Musk. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and Jassy Vick Carolan LLP represent Silverman.

The case is Anoke v. Twitter Inc., 9th Cir., No. 24-5936, 8/4/25.