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Welcome back! On Monday, our reporter Jemima McEvoy broke the news that venture capitalist Masha Bucher had deep ties with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Their correspondence, released in a dump of more than 3 million pages from the Justice Department Friday, showed Bucher—née Drokova, the name she was using at the time—working as a publicist for Epstein, setting flirty texts and getting advice for her early-stage fund, Day One Ventures. The library of email and chat logs provided further detail on what has previously been established: Epstein claimed and tried to cultivate deep connections to rich or connected figures in Silicon Valley. From around 2011 to 2018, he wrote about mingling with the tech elite at private dinners, holding meetings at his house—and occasionally inviting them to visit him on his island in the Caribbean. Mentions of VCs were rife: In one set of emails, bankers and other intermediaries emailed him about getting him to invest in SpaceX. In another, he discussed a friend’s efforts to set up a fund. In some cases, he was emailing directly and periodically with these tech cognoscenti. One of them was LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who apologized on X this weekend for interacting with Epstein “post-conviction.” (Epstein, who killed himself in 2019, had been convicted in Florida in 2008 for prostitution with a minor.) The files mentioned Hoffman more than 2,600 times, including in emails between the two to set up a Skype session, meet at a Los Angeles–area resort or simply check in on how the financier was doing. They mentioned Founders Fund co-founder Peter Thiel, who similarly emailed with Epstein about meetups, more than 2,200 times. (A spokesperson for Thiel has said he never visited Epstein’s island.) In other cases, Epstein tried to parlay his connections into other opportunities. For instance, in 2011, the emails referenced a meeting between the financier, London venture capitalist Ian Osborne and early Facebook investor Yuri Milner at Epstein’s house on 71st Street in New York. (Epstein later said in an email that Milner had come to his Paris apartment.) Osborne had been advising Milner’s firm, DST Global, on fundraising, and organized the two meetings in August and September 2011, DST Global said in an email Tuesday. Osborne, through a spokesperson, acknowledged discussing investment opportunities with Epstein but said Epstein had never made any investment in Osborne’s businesses. Osborne apologized for his interactions with the late financier, saying, “I am forever sorry for all the people who suffered by him. It was a serious error of judgment, and one I bitterly regret.” Milner showed up more than 140 times in the files, largely because Epstein referenced him, even describing Milner as a friend. In a statement, a spokesperson for Milner said: “There were no other visits by Yuri Milner to any of Mr. Epstein’s properties, other than those in New York and Paris,” in August and September 2011. “These meetings constituted the only interactions, contacts, or communications between Yuri Milner and Mr. Epstein,” the spokesperson said. At the time of these meetings, Milner was not aware of Epstein’s criminal record from 2008, the spokesperson said. “Any statements by Mr. Epstein claiming a close personal relationship with Yuri Milner or involvement in Yuri Milner’s business activities are entirely false and without any factual basis,” the spokesperson said. In another instance, Boris Nikolic, former scientific adviser to Bill Gates, sent Epstein a draft of a potential life sciences fund that Nikolic proposed establishing with Milner. Nikolic and Epstein also discussed an investment in genomics startup Foundation Medicine, which raised a Series B round from Milner and Gates. The spokesperson for DST said Milner had explored launching the fund but decided not to go ahead with it, and added that Milner wasn’t aware Epstein had advised Nikolic on the fund. Epstein also advised a senior Microsoft executive on a job search that took him to Andreessen Horowitz. In 2013, Epstein had a series of exchanges with former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky after the latter left the software company. Sinofsky wrote that he had been spending time as “basically a partner at Andreessen.” He mentioned a dinner that he said would include Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, as well as Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon, Dick Costolo (then Twitter CEO), Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Sinofsky also noted in 2013 Andreessen’s interest in “this whole virtual money space”—that is, bitcoin. “Not sure how to get you into this but I bet you could help!” Sinofsky wrote in an email. Sinofsky, mentioned more than 1,400 times in the files, was head of Windows at Microsoft from 2009 to 2012. He is now a board partner for Andreessen Horowitz, serving the firm’s interests on the boards of companies it has backed. Andreessen Horowitz didn’t respond to a request for comment. |
