McSally Campaign Ad Highlights Mark Kelly’s Business With China
An ad by the National Republican Senatorial Committee is once again raising questions about Democratic candidate for Senate Mark Kelly’s ties to a controversial company, World View Enterprises. The Committee is investing $5.7 million the ad buy for Senator Martha McSally.
The NRSC ad highlights Kelly’s business ties with China.
Tencent, a Chinese tech company, has invested in World View Enterprises, a Tucson-based company which Kelly helped launch in 2014.
While Kelly has claimed to have dropped ties with World View, his daughter is still with the company according to her LinkedIn profile.
Kelly served as a strategic adviser to World View until launching his Senate campaign last year. He maintains a personal financial stake in the company of between $100,000 and $250,000 worth of non-public stock and $15,001 and $50,000 worth of stock options, according to the financial disclosure records Kelly was required to file in his Senate bid.
Additionally, Kelly’s campaign has accepted at least $5,000 from David Wallerstein, who serves as Tencent’s chief exploration officer, responsible for the company’s operations outside mainland China and overseeing business initiatives with multinational partners.
Kelly has faced scrutiny both in Arizona and nationally for investments made by Tencent, a surveillance arm of the Chinese Communist Party. The state-financed Chinese investor of a second company, Boom Technology, where Kelly served as an Advisory Board member, was also recently exposed.
“Mark Kelly spent years doing whatever it took to get rich, including allowing the Chinese Communist Party to invest in him and his companies,” said NRSC spokesperson Joanna Rodriguez. “His Chinese investors are responsible for putting not just U.S. national security, but also global security at risk all so he could make a quick buck.”
World View Enterprises, Inc., doing business as World View, is a private American near-space exploration and technology company headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, founded with the goal of increasing access to and the utilization of the stratosphere for scientific, commercial, and economic purposes.
World View was founded and incorporated in 2012 by a team of aerospace and life support veterans, including Biosphere 2 crew-members Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum, Dr. Alan Stern (the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission to Pluto), and former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly. The company designs, manufactures and operates stratospheric balloon flight technology for a variety of customers and applications.
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Senate Candidate Kelly’s Spying Company Bankrolled By Chinese Government
News of investments by Tencent, a wealthy Internet conglomerate closely associated with the Communist Chinese government, was revealed in May by RealClearPolitics, a conservative new site.
The amount of funding by Tencent Holding Limited, whose CEO is the richest man in China, has not been released to the public.
Arizona Daily Independent has learned that Kelly, a former NASA astronaut, was working for World View at the time that the company’s CEO went to Beijing to obtain funding for the company.
Kelly was named “director of flight crew operations” in December 2013, according to a July 2014 Wired magazine article. That article said that the company planned to “bring tourists on a balloon ride to the middle of the stratosphere by 2016.”
World View’s founding CEO, Jane Poynter, was a “personal friend” of Kelly’s at the time of his hiring, the Wired story said.
The Xinhua News Agency, the news service of the People’s Republic of China, published a story in November 2014, in which it was revealed that Tencent was funding World View.
“Jane Poynter, co-founder and chief executive officer of Tucson, Arizona-based World View Enterprises Inc., said in Beijing on Nov. 7 that her company has received another round of investment, including from Chinese Internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd.,” the XNA story said.
It was later revealed that this round of investment was for $7.1 million.
In the Chinese news agency’s story, Poynter is quoted as saying that David Wallerstein, chairman of Tencent USA, “has already met with one of World View’s pilots and exchanged ideas on technology.”
In April 2016, World View announced it raised $15 million, in a second round of investments, which included Tencent and three venture capital firms, said an article by techcrunch.com.
It is not clear how much of the total of $22.1 million was invested by Tencent.
Kelly’s U.S. Senate campaign has received $5,000 from Wallerstein, who is “responsible for (Tencent’s) operations outside mainland China and overseeing business initiatives with multinational partners,” said the RealClearPolitics article.
World View has also received millions of dollars of assistance from Pima County, including a building constructed for the company in 2016.
Kelly left the firm in February 2019, when he began his campaign for the seat now held by Sen. Martha McSally. He holds a stock investment in the firm of about $200,000, according to his Senate campaign financial disclosure statement.
Poynter and her co-founder and husband, Taber MacCallum, left their former company, Paragon Space Development Corp., at about the same time Poynter was obtaining funding from Tencent in Beijing.
Poynter and MacCallum left their posts at Paragon “to pursue a space tourism business that will lift paying guests into the stratosphere with an enormous helium-filled balloon,” said an Arizona Star story with a Nov. 9, 2014 dateline.
I fear that the average voter doesn’t seem to understand or care about the China problem. The Soviet Union could have saved a few trillion dollars and just paid off our politicians in order to take us over.