Folks, it’s happening.
Alex Spiro, the Quinn Emanuel partner who has represented Elon Musk, Jay-Z and Naomi Osaka, just told his old college paper that he is “still exploring what he can do with his life and with his career outside of law.” That’s from The Tufts Daily on October 8, 2026. In the same interview he said: “I think I know more about psychology than I do about law.”
Let’s be precise. Spiro has not announced his retirement. He’s still a partner at Quinn Emanuel, and just last month Law.com reported that he’s representing Joshua Kushner and Thrive Capital in discovery proceedings in New York tied to FIFA’s failed FIFA Forward Enterprise plan.
But this isn’t the first signal. It’s a pattern.
In July 2025 he sat down with Emily Chang on Bloomberg’s The Circuit, under the headline “A-List Litigator Alex Spiro Aims at ‘Bigger Business’ Than Law.” LawFuel summed it up a few days later: he’s bored, and he wants to get into something “bigger than the law.” LawFuel also noted that he sits on several boards and advises the investment firm Consello.
And this week his name is back in the press for a different reason. On September 3, 2026, Spiro put filmmaker Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Productions on formal legal notice over the documentary Musk, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The letter accused the film of falsely insinuating that Musk used Starlink to influence the 2024 election. The film opened in New York and Los Angeles on October 9 and expands nationwide on October 16. Same lawyer exploring life “outside of law” with Tufts, still swinging for Musk in the headlines.
So the man wants to go into business. Fine. He’s entitled to.
But if Alex Spiro is going to ask investors, partners and boards to trust him with something “bigger than the law,” then it’s fair to look at the last business board we know he sat on.
We’ve been here before. So let’s talk about it.
The seat Hunter left
As we first reported in Alexander Benjamin Spiro: Part I, leaked documents from a verified whistleblower show that Spiro took Hunter Biden’s seat on the board of Bohai Harvest RST (BHR) in February 2020. BHR is the Chinese private equity firm Hunter Biden and Devon Archer both had seats on. It renamed itself “BHR Partners (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd.” on May 31, 2023.
This was no favor to a friend, and it wasn’t on a whim. According to the emails we reviewed, Archer first put Spiro forward for a supervisor role at BHR back in September 2018. The first message between Archer‘s BHR email address and Spiro’s Quinn Emanuel address we found is dated November 16, 2017.
In Part II we laid out the paperwork:
February 2020: BHR executive Heng-Yin Zhang emailed urgent paperwork for Spiro to sign so he could replace Hunter on the board. An assistant at Quinn Emanuel sent it back with Spiro’s signature and a full-color scan of his passport.
April 2020: A written board resolution lists Alex Spiro as a director. Hunter‘s name is gone.
July 2020: Another board resolution, signed by Spiro in his capacity as director.
August–September 2020: Internal moves begin for Spiro to resign. In September, BHR receives an appointment letter stating he’s being removed as director.
He wasn’t a name on a letterhead, either. In our July 2024 BHR series, we published an August 3, 2020 email from BHR’s Managing Director, Jason Zhu, asking all the directors, Spiro included, to sign the FY2019 audit resolution in triplicate and courier the originals to the Beijing office. On August 31, 2020, Zhu sent the board the signed 61-page Ernst & Young audit report, and Spiro was on that email too. Weeks earlier, Spiro was copied on an email about penalties BHR owed Sinopec after an arbitration ruling.
And Spiro’s own words that October, in reply to Archer, as we reported in Part II:
“Devon - thanks for confirming nothing moved forward (as I never agreed for it to move forward). For the avoidance of any doubt, no one has or had my permission to use my name, likeness, etc for any purpose.”
Keep that quote in mind.
“Does not reflect the truth”
Here’s the part every future business partner should read twice.
On November 8, 2020, the day after the networks called the election, Zhang asked Archer whether Spiro “should be reappointed after the election as you previously suggested.” Archer replied: “We are going to hold off any decisions until the Inauguration as I was advised.”
On December 14, Zhang wrote that BHR was “aware of Alex Spiro’s concerns with reporters.” The next day Archer suggested having “a letter on hand for Alex in case needed that he can have on hand to share with any overly zealous reporters.” He even supplied the wording: BHR had only “explored the opportunity of Mr. Alex Spiro joining the Advisory Board.”
BHR CEO Jonathan Li signed it on December 15, 2020. Then Zhang wrote this to Archer:
“Please allow me to mention that the wording from your suggested statement does not reflect the truth, but we also understand that the truthfulness of the statement cannot be verified by the press.”
Read that again. BHR’s own executive, in writing, saying the official statement about Spiro “does not reflect the truth.”
A year later, in December 2021, Archer was still at it: “I just need Alex’s name off any searchable registries or databases.” In a December 29, 2022 email, Zhang said the holdup was the Bank of China, which hadn’t signed the document needed to take Spiro’s name off. A replacement was finally named in March 2023, in documents backdated to December 2021 and signed by Archer’s wife, Krista Archer.
“Spiro is gone”
Now go back to December 2022, when Spiro’s name was still sitting on BHR’s filing record.
As I showed in Part I, at 4:02am ET on December 8th, 2022, after analyzing leaked documents, we relayed a message to Elon Musk through a mutual friend: “You have a guy in your newly-private company, with undeclared conflicts of interest.” It went with an unredacted copy (redacted here on Substack) of Spiro’s passport. The screenshot in Part I shows the reply two minutes later: “Who is he? What is he?” Our answer: “Head of Twitter Legal. He’s in charge of Twitter right now.”
I didn’t name that mutual friend in Part I. I can now. It was Kim Dotcom, who was in touch with Elon at the time, and whom I sat with at his home in New Zealand just weeks ago.
A few more messages were exchanged. Then, on December 11th, 2022 at 3:49pm ET, the reply we had been hoping for arrived from Kim: “Spiro is gone.” It’s right there in the screenshot. Kim had just heard it from Elon. We wrote back: “Boom!!!” and “He did the right thing.”
Musk later said he had removed his personal lawyer from Twitter’s legal team because he was “unhappy with some of the decisions made by Mr. Spiro.” Those decisions were said to include Spiro’s call to keep ex-FBI general counsel James A. Baker on as Twitter’s deputy general counsel. That’s the public version. Mine, as I wrote in Part I, is that the decision to remove Spiro (or to make it look like he was removed) came after Elon was made aware of the facts.
Who he was in business with
Context matters when you’re judging someone’s business judgment.
As we laid out in Part III, BHR has ties to the Bank of China. Citing the Washington Examiner, we also noted its 2015 acquisition of Michigan-based Henniges Automotive alongside AVIC Automotive, a subsidiary of a state-owned Chinese military entity.
His partner in all this, Devon Archer, was convicted in 2018 over a tribal-bond fraud scheme worth more than $60 million. President Trump granted him clemency on March 25, 2025. And the emails themselves came out of what we’ve described as a controlled internal leak from BHR‘s Chinese “263” email servers, which kept copies of everything even after users deleted them from their devices. That’s almost half a million raw email files, handed to us and a few other publishers by a whistleblower.
To be fair, and we said this plainly in Part III: we have no concrete evidence of wrongdoing by Spiro. His board tenure, as we reported it, ran from February to September 2020. But the record is the record. As Zhang put it to Archer: “the filing record is the hard proof that he at least once served as a director.”
The story that disappeared
There’s one more piece of this history, and it’s one I’ve never fully told.
When the BHR whistleblower first came forward, they came to us, George News. We shared what we had, with Marco Polo, the 501(c)(3), and Marco Polo brought in Alex Diaz, a journalist at The Sun U.S.
On July 10, 2023, at 5:03pm ET, The Sun published Diaz‘s exclusive under the headline “Hunter Biden has ‘secret business ties’ to Twitter lawyer at center of legal battle against Meta’s rival app Threads.” It opened like this:
“HUNTER Biden has secret business links to the hotshot lawyer at the center of Twitter’s battle against Meta’s new social network Threads.”
The “hotshot lawyer” was Alex Spiro. The piece went on to say that Spiro, then 40, had sent a letter that Wednesday on Twitter’s behalf to Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, threatening legal action over the “copycat” app. It then laid out what the leaked documents “appear to show”: that Spiro took Hunter‘s seat on the BHR board in February 2020, the board resolutions, the letter signed by Jonathan Li, and Zhang’s line that the wording “does not reflect the truth.” We shared it on X the day it ran, along with some of the emails it mentioned.
Then The Sun’s editors took it down.
And fast. By the evening of July 11, barely a day after it ran, the page was gone. A Wayback Machine capture from 7:59pm ET that night shows The Sun’s “Sorry, page unavailable” page in its place, served with a 410 error.
Today, the original link (the-sun.com/news/8566820) returns an HTTP 410 error, the code a server uses when a page has been deliberately and permanently removed. But the internet remembers. An archived copy, captured on July 10, 2023, is still here (backup copy on the Wayback Machine). Read it and judge for yourself.
We know of no factual problem with that story, and no correction was ever published that we know of. The reporting was sound, and it lined up with the documents we’ve published since.
So why did it vanish? Nobody has told us. In our view, a seasoned journalist like Diaz doesn’t let a story like that go “on a whim.” We believe Spiro put the fear of God into him, and that’s why it was pulled. That’s our belief, based on what we saw happen at the time. We’d be glad to hear a different explanation.
We asked Spiro and Quinn Emanuel for comment on this story. Neither has responded.
The questions [we sent to Spiro]
Mr. Spiro, if you’re moving into business, investors will do their diligence. Here’s a head start:
Did you serve as a director of Bohai Harvest RST / BHR Partners from February to September 2020, as BHR‘s own filings and board resolutions show?
If, as you wrote in October 2020, you “never agreed” for it to move forward, why does your signature appear on BHR board resolutions in 2020?
Did you ever see or use the December 15, 2020 letter signed by Jonathan Li? Did you know BHR‘s own executive said it “does not reflect the truth”?
What exactly were the “concerns with reporters” BHR said you had in December 2020?
Were you paid, or did you hold any interest in BHR or a related entity, at any point?
Have you ever disclosed your BHR directorship to a client, a firm, a board or an investor you’ve worked with since?
Which boards do you sit on today, and will your next venture take any capital from China or from parties tied to BHR?
These are simple questions. Anyone who wants to build something “bigger than the law” should be able to answer them.
If you’re new here, start at the beginning: Part I, Part II, Part III, and the BHR document series (I, II, III). Then share this with anyone who might be thinking about doing business with him.
Stay tuned, folks. More to come.
~GEORGE and Team