The Musk Whisperer

Investor Shaun Maguire has become a crucial but controversial part of Sequoia Capital, thanks to his staunch pro-Israel stance and his relationship with one of the world’s richest people.

On Oct. 17, several executives in tech contacted Sequoia Capital managing partner Roelof Botha, all making the same simple demand: Fire Shaun Maguire.

Maguire, a 38-year-old partner at Sequoia, had spent the past 10 days posting fierce defenses of Israel on X (the social media platform he had helped steer Sequoia money into). He often wrote multiple times a day in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks, offering his own analysis of the war’s grim events. “Just so you understand why Israelis have been so vigilant in the past…it was living with knowledge that there were barbarians at the gates,” he wrote on the day of the Hamas raids.

Then, on Oct. 17, he was among the earliest on X to cast doubt on a New York Times article about a blast at a Gaza Strip hospital. On the Times website, the piece appeared with a banner headline saying the explosion came from an Israeli strike, citing sources in the Hamas government. (The Israelis, in turn, blamed it on an accidental rocket launch from the Palestinian group Islamic Jihad.) On X, Maguire took issue with the Times for relying on Hamas sources for the headline and labeled the paper’s coverage “shameful.”