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Nigel Farage’s Reform UK claims to represent a people’s revolt against the political elite. But documents reviewed by Byline Times, alongside corporate and regulatory filings in London and the United States, reveal that the party’s own Treasurer was recently invested with the same Silicon Valley donor bloc – including Elon Musk – that powered Donald Trump’s return.
The relationship highlights how the party’s finances have been linked to the fortunes of America’s pro-Trump elite, as Reform mirrors their pro-fossil fuel agenda and attacks on Net Zero.
Reform UK’s Treasurer and property billionaire Nick Candy, is now the single biggest donor to the party, having given a total of £1 million. But until January 2024, Candy was also limited-partner investor in ACME Capital – a California venture fund specialising in early-stage technology companies. Its star portfolio contains SpaceX, the most valuable private startup in the world. SpaceX’s eponymous founder and owner is Elon Musk, by far the biggest funder of Trump’s return to power – who is now also funding the criminal defence of far-right convicted fraudster Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who calls himself ‘Tommy Robinson’.
Musk’s is not the only company linked to ACME Capital in Trump’s donor network. Other major ventures which were kickstarted with support from ACME include Uber, Airbnb, Robinhood and OpenGov – companies whose founders and executives have collectively poured millions of dollars into Trump’s super PACs, inaugural committees and Republican politicians.
Byline Times can reveal that Nick Candy’s investment in this Silicon Valley venture fund, from which he exited in 2024, was made through an offshore entity based in Guernsey.
As Reform UK pledges to scrap Britain’s net zero targets and “unlock” new oil and gas drilling, its policies mirror the fossil fuel revival now unfolding under Trump’s second-term agenda – an agenda financed by the same tech billionaires linked to Candy.
Nick Candy’s Silicon Valley Connection
When Candy poured money into the venture firm ACME Capital, he wasn’t simply buying into start-ups. He was buying into Silicon Valley’s most powerful new political constituency – what would soon become a billion-dollar network helping bankroll Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Candy Ventures Ltd was first set up by Nick Candy in 2015. By the end of 2023, the firm had a gross book value of £145 million and a net value of £60 million, with 17 portfolio companies. However, the total ‘mark-to-market’ value of its investments was reportedly around £350 million. Today, its website says that it has funded some 25 companies in total. One of the companies listed as part of the Candy Ventures portfolio on its website is ACME Capital.
ACME Capital’s story begins in Silicon Valley’s boom years, when its predecessor Sherpa Capital made some of the most lucrative early bets of the 2010s. In 2011, Sherpa’s co-founders invested in Uber, helping turn a fledgling ride-share startup into a global disruptor. Around the same time, Sherpa took early stakes in Airbnb, then a scrappy home-letting platform, and Robinhood, a commission-free trading app pitched as “finance for the people.” By mid-decade, the firm had added SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, to its late-stage portfolio – a mark of its growing clout among elite venture investors – and joined the 2015 funding round for OpenGov, a civic-data company promising transparency in public finance.
When Sherpa’s operations re-emerged as ACME Capital in 2018, those holdings formed the backbone of its first funds. It is not clear when or how much Nick Candy first invested in ACME Capital. In 2020, Candy Ventures first listed ACME Capital on its website, with the description “investing in breakthrough technologies including Cue, Airbnb and Uber.” That was the year outgoing president Donald Trump launched the 6 January insurrection on Capitol Hill in an effort to foil the election of Joe Biden to the presidency.
Over the next years, these high-profile bets reached liquidity: Uber’s IPO in 2019, Airbnb’s in 2020, Robinhood’s in 2021, and OpenGov in 2024, turning Sherpa-era paper wealth into hard returns for ACME’s partners.
In 2022, ACME Capital announced it had raised more than US $300 million in new vehicles, bringing its total capital commitments to about US $1.5 billion.
Nick Candy’s stake in the Silicon Valley venture fund was held as part of the Candy Ventures portfolio through an offshore company called Tenzing Albert Ltd – a Guernsey-registered entity formerly known as Candy Ventures Albert Ltd, which operates from the same Mayfair address as Candy Ventures.
While there is no suggestion that Candy’s use of a Guernsey entity breaks the law, the arrangement highlights how the property billionaire – now treasurer of Reform UK – benefits from the offshore financial system. Guernsey’s offshore status allows investors to route funds through so-called tax-neutral jurisdictions offering corporate secrecy and limited disclosure. Such structures are commonplace among ultra-wealthy investors, but for a senior officer of a political party that claims to stand up for ordinary taxpayers, Candy’s offshore holdings and associated profits raise clear questions about transparency and public trust.
Nick Candy and SpaceX
As Donald Trump’s political comeback in 2024 reshaped the US corporate landscape, that legacy portfolio placed ACME at the nexus of Big Tech money and Republican influence. In particular, its exposure to Musk’s SpaceX, which became one of Trump’s largest corporate allies and beneficiaries of new federal contracts, gave ACME a quiet stake in the era’s most politically charged company.
Nick Candy’s ACME investment tied part of his fortune to Elon Musk’s SpaceX – the company whose founder bankrolled Trump’s 2024 comeback with more than US $250 million in donations. Candy exited his investment in ACME Capital in January 2024, when SpaceX was valued at $180 billion (since then SpaceX has gone on to reach a valuation of $350 billion).
Candy Capital did not clarify the size of his investments or profits in relation to ACME Capital.
Although Musk’s relationship with Trump has since become fraught, he played a key role in driving Trump’s policy agenda through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) which he set-up and ran as a ‘special government employee’ in early 2025. Many of its earliest staffers were previously senior officers at SpaceX, such as Musk’s right-hand man Steve Davis, who runs DOGE’s day to day operations; Space X security engineer Christopher Stanley, and Space X’s vice president of people operations, Brian Bjelde, who was assigned to the State Department’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
Under Musk’s DOGE efforts, federal health, energy and climate institutions were gutted. In health, DOGE slashed funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), terminating more than $1.8 billion in medical research grants, laying off thousands of staff and even gaining access to internal data systems. In energy, DOGE accelerated fossil fuel expansion, rolled back efficiency standards and embedded loyalists to dismantle Department of Energy contracts on clean energy. On climate, it imposed sweeping cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), restricted spending decisions, scrapped key science and grant programmes – including the National Climate Assessment – and fast-tracked oil and gas extraction across federal lands.
Yet over the summer, Reform signalled its unabashed intent to mirror the Trump administration’s approach by launching its own ‘DOGE unit’ in the UK headed up by Zia Yusuf, the party’s former chairman, current head of policy and a major donor. In October, Yusuf resigned from his DOGE role, which was taken up instead by the party’s deputy leader Richard Tice.
Trump’s Tech Donor Base
The four other major ventures boosted by ACME Capital have close ties to the new Trump administration.
In 2024, Uber and its chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi each gave US $1 million to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee.
Robinhood Markets, the electronic financial trading platform that is now expanding heavily into cryptocurrency, contributed $2 million to the same fund while chief executive Vlad Tenev and the firm’s PAC steered further donations to senior Republicans including House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry.
OpenGov co-founder Joe Lonsdale, an alumnus of the defence tech firm Palantir co-founded by pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, channelled $1 million into America PAC through his company Lonsdale Enterprises Inc. and helped recruit fellow tech investors to its cause.
And Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia not only accepted a Trump-administration appointment in 2025 as Chief Design Officer in the new Department of Government Efficiency spearheaded by Elon Musk but, through his Peachtree Trust, donated $ 1 million to Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s re-election fund.
In addition to SpaceX, these companies form the financial core of Trump’s tech donor bloc – a web of venture capitalists, founders and megadonors funnelling hundreds of millions into Republican coffers.
While ACME Capital exited – and profited – from most of these investments, having played an instrumental role in their meteoric success, it is still invested in Musk’s SpaceX, as well as other Trump-aligned firms such as quantum computing company IonQ.
ACME Capital first invested in the latter in 2019 as part of a $55 million funding round. Currently valued at about £13 billion, IonQ appointed Trump’s former Chief of Space Operations to its board of directors in September. Over the last year, the company has ramped up lucrative multi-million dollar contracts with the Trump administration.
The British Power Play
If Candy’s venture capital ties connected his fortune to America’s Trump-aligned tech elite, his political activities in Britain have placed him at the heart of the country’s own populist insurgency.
In December 2024, Candy was formally appointed treasurer of Reform UK. The billionaire developer was slated to oversee the party’s fundraising drive and had pledged to commit at least £1 million of his own money. He told journalists he was bringing “business discipline” to Reform UK’s finances and that “a number of billionaires” were prepared to back Farage’s movement.
From December 2019 to June 2024, the website DeSmog UK showed that the party had already received more than £2.3 million from fossil fuel interests, high polluting industries, and climate science deniers.
In early October, Candy fulfilled his pledge to donate £1 million to Reform, and promises to raise a further £25-40 million. Under his treasurership the party is doubling-down on targeting fossil fuel donors who are “very disillusioned” with current UK government policies – a strategy echoing the US Republican fundraising model.
The New Atlantic Alliance
Yet what is being sold to voters as a return to ‘common sense’ is, in reality, a lurch back to the past. In the United States, Donald Trump’s second-term energy agenda is reversing the fastest-growing part of the modern economy: clean energy. Before his rollback began, renewable energy jobs were expanding three times faster than the rest of the labour market, but Trump’s policies have thrown the industry into retreat.
The White House has urged utilities to keep ageing coal-fired plants running to meet the surging power demands of data-centres and AI systems – doubling down on a dying technology instead of investing in the future.
Meanwhile, economic modelling of the consequences of Project 2025 – the blueprint drawn up by the Heritage Foundation guiding Trump’s transition – shows that its full implementation would erase 1.7 million jobs by 2030 and cut $320 billion from US GDP. In the name of fighting ‘woke net zero’, America is being pushed back towards the dark ages of coal, dismantling industries that had been building the next economy.
Nick Candy’s financial ties to investments inextricably bound up with Trump’s Silicon Valley backing – including Elon Musk’s SpaceX which drove the DOGE agenda – raises the question of whether the same ideology now drives Reform UK. Its manifesto promises to “unlock Britain’s vast energy treasure of oil and gas” and scrap the country’s net zero commitments – junking environmental regulation, reviving North Sea drilling and removing all public subsidies for renewable power. Ironically, this will gut the clean energy basis for expansion of AI and data platforms.
Reform’s leadership has openly courted pro-Trump climate denial networks such as the Heartland Institute, whose UK and Europe director told the Reform annual conference they were “grateful to be able to consult and influence the Reform Party at the highest level.” The Institute has received extensive funding from the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, including nearly $800,000 from ExxonMobil.
Nick Candy illustrates the paradox at the heart of this movement. By profiting from Trump-aligned Silicon Valley networks and funnelling capital into Reform UK, Candy personifies a new trans-Atlantic politics of plutocrats posing as populists. Reform UK did not respond to request for comment.
In Washington and in Westminster, the same story is unfolding: vast private fortunes weaponising culture war issues in order to dismantle environmental policy, public health and democratic safeguards. The banner may read ‘anti-establishment’, but the money and interests behind it could not be less so.