Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX CEO, closed a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. In the regulatory filing, Musk noted that the social media company is to reach out to an Austin, Texas-based family office about acquisition talks, Reuters reported. Called Excession, this office manages Musk’s private wealth and is helping him put together the Twitter deal. 

Inside Excession, Musk’s mysterious family office 

Musk’s finances are handled by a small family office much shrouded in mystery. It includes Jared Birchall, a former Morgan Stanley banker, with whom Musk shares a long working relationship. 

As per regulatory filings and court documents, Birchall has advised Musk in the past about his Wall Street dealings. The banker was born in 1974, and Musk hired him from Morgan Stanley in 2016, to work in the family office. 

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As per the Texas comptroller of public accounts, business records list Birchall as the manager of Musk’s family office. These records are as recent as 2021, but Birchall’s duties extend beyond that. 

He is also the CEO of Neuralink, Musk’s brain chip venture, and is on the board of directors for Boring Company, Musk’s business that is working on an underground hyperloop. Birchall is also a board member of Musk’s private philanthropic foundation. 

Birchall graduated from Brigham Young University and began as a financial analyst at Goldman Sachs, New York, in 1999. Then, he was at Merrill Lynch in Los Angeles until 2010, and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) records show Birchall displayed “conduct resulting in management’s loss of confidence”, including “sending correspondence to a client without management approval”. 

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A month after leaving, Birchall joined Morgan Stanley as a wealth manager. 

Notably, family offices are not regulated and therefore not required to disclose their assets or number of employees.

Beyond wealth management 

Birchall doesn’t just stick to finance. In 2018, he hired a private investigator to look into a British diver, who’d criticized Musk’s proposed usage of a SpaceX mini-submarine to save a boys’ soccer team from being trapped in a cave in Thailand. 

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Musk had called the diver “pedo” and was sued for defamation, which the entrepreneur won. However, during the trial, it emerged that Birchall going by James Brickhouse had hired the private detective. Court documents showed Birchall admit at the time that he had the “instinct to protect Musk”.