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.
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Tencent reports to communist government
Tencent, which is known as a surveillance arm of the Chinese government, operates WeChat social media app, with more than one billion users. WeChat, which is used by many people in the United States, monitors foreign users, in order to censor and control Chinese citizens, said a recent Wall Street Journal story.
Tencent Holding’s CEO, Ma Huateng – also known as Pony Ma — is the wealthiest man in China, with a fortune of $62.2 billion.
FBI Director Christopher Wray delivered a scathing rebuke to the Chinese government on June 24, in which he called it the biggest threat to the United States, while revealing there were 2,000 active espionage investigations involving that regime.
“There’s no country that presents a broader and more comprehensive threat to America’s innovation, to our economic security and to our democratic ideas,” Wray said during an interview on Fox News.
Wray said China’s economic espionage campaign relied on businessmen, advanced scientists and senior-level academics to steal confidential information and innovation to take back to China.
The former head of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, Charles Lieber, was indicted June 9 on two counts of making false statements, said a Department of Justice news release. Lieber allegedly lied about his involvement as a “strategic scientist” for China, which brought him $50,000 per month, living expenses of about $150,000, and more than $1.5 million to establish a laboratory in Wuhan, China. He had never disclosed the investments the Chinese government had made in him.
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