The secret winner in Twitter share offer

When Twitter goes public in coming weeks, one of the biggest winners will be a 47-year-old financier who guards his secrecy so zealously that he employs a person to take down his Wikipedia entry and scrub his picture from the internet.

Over the past two years, Suhail Rizvi, founder of New York private equity firm Rizvi Traverse Management, has quietly amassed a stake of more than 15 per cent in the microblogging phenomenon for himself and his investors at a cost of more than US$1 billion, according to three people with knowledge of his investments.

While Rizvi was known to be an investor in Twitter, the extent of his involvement had not previously been reported.

Twitter made its listing registration documents public late on Thursday, setting the stage for the most closely watched initial public offering since Facebook's in 2012. Rizvi Traverse is listed as one of the institutional shareholders with at least a 5 per cent ownership stake, but no further details were disclosed.

The shares Rizvi bought were distributed among investors through multiple vehicles, sources said, and the size of his personal stake was not known.

People with direct knowledge of his investment activities said Rizvi, backed by Chris Sacca, a former Google executive and Twitter investor, was instrumental in attracting large private investors to the microblogging site, serving as matchmaker between the company's founders and global financiers.

Rizvi declined to comment for this article. Sacca, a longtime friend, gave him an entry into technology investing in 2011, when Twitter was still struggling to make money. From there, Rizvi scored stakes in some of the most sought-after internet startups, from Facebook before it went public to Square and Flipboard.