Lucid Motors, an electric vehicle startup, was excited to raise a Series D funding round in 2017. The company had been courting Ford as a potential investor, but Jia Yueting, founder of rival EV startup Faraday Future, had secretly amassed a roughly 30% stake, effectively blocking any new investors.
David Stern, the mysterious businessman and close ally of former Prince Andrew, saw an opportunity to break the impasse by bringing in Jeffrey Epstein.
“Ford is likely to be led by Lucid’s $400 million Series D. It’s a big strategic move,” Stern wrote to Epstein in an email released last week as part of the Justice Department’s latest disclosure of 3 million Epstein-related documents. Mr. Zia “has significant cash problems” at Faraday and “needs to sell now to earn salary for other businesses,” he wrote.
Hundreds of documents reviewed by TechCrunch show that this wasn’t the first time Stern pitched the EV startup to Epstein, and it won’t be the last.
At the time, traditional automakers and startups were getting into electric and self-driving cars, spurred by Tesla’s breakthrough success and advances in Google’s self-driving project. And Mr. Stern clearly wanted to take advantage of the resulting deal flow. He also pitched investments in Faraday Future and another EV startup, Canoo, according to the documents.
It is unlikely that Epstein invested in any of them. Lucid didn’t close its Series D until late 2018, when it raised more than $1 billion from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Faraday ultimately received a major investment from Chinese real estate conglomerate Evergrande in late 2017. In a 2018 message included in a Justice Department file, Epstein said he had no “direct” or “indirect” interest in Canu.
Rather, these discussions offer deeper insight into the many connections that Epstein, a convicted sex offender, had with Silicon Valley startups before his arrest and death in 2019. It also provides a snapshot of relationships not explored in previous coverage.
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By the time of the Lucid emails, Epstein and Stern had been working closely together for nearly a decade, according to newly released documents. For Epstein, Stern was “my China guy.” For Stern, Epstein is “my mentor and I do what he tells me to do.”
Businessman’s “ghost”
Stern is mostly a digital ghost, with little information available on the internet before the files are made public.
He is perhaps best known as the director of Prince Andrew’s Pitch@Palace Startup Competition, which ran for several years until Prince Andrew’s relationship with Epstein was exposed. Andrew even called Stern a “ghost” in one 2010 email.
Emails released by the Justice Department show that Mr. Stern appears to have first contacted Mr. Epstein in 2008, just one month before the financier pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting sex from a minor. Mr. Stern had set up a fund called AGC Capital to take advantage of China’s booming economy, and he wanted Mr. Epstein to invest in it.
It is not clear how Mr. Stern was introduced to Mr. Epstein. Mr. Stern did not respond to a detailed list of questions for this article.
Mr. Stern, a German, attended the University of London and China’s Shi University in the late 1990s and served as chairman of China Millennium Capital, the China arm of Millennium Capital Partners, according to the biography section of AGC Capital’s pitch deck in a Justice Department file.
Before joining Deutsche Bank’s Shanghai office, Mr. Stern also worked at Siemens AG, where he negotiated “industrial joint ventures with Chinese state-owned enterprises.” He founded a company called Asia Gateway in 2001 that “advised blue-chip companies, Chinese companies, and even the Chinese government on growth strategies and investments.”
Those jobs appear to have helped Mr. Stern develop connections with powerful and wealthy Chinese businessmen, including Li Mudan, the son-in-law of China’s fourth-largest leader under Mr. Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao. (Lee would eventually become a founding investor in Canoe, along with Stern.)
It is unclear whether Mr. Epstein invested in AGC Capital. The financier spent the following year in prison. But Mr. Stern and Mr. Epstein continued to communicate, and in 2009 Mr. Stern began pitching other ideas.
The documents revealed a relationship that was initially formal and brief, with Epstein at one point accusing Stern of not properly preparing a potential business deal.
“[I]If you want to make real deals, you have to be precise and careful, Epstein wrote, and “every mistake is an asset.” “[Y]Our first grade is F. ”
One of the first big projects the two worked on together was to help Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, with her dire finances, according to emails.
Over the next ten years, the relationship deepened. The two became close enough in 2016 that Mr. Stern felt comfortable asking Mr. Epstein to be the godfather to one of his children. (Epstein wrote that he was “honored” but declined because he “promised his goddaughter that he would not be anyone else’s godfather.”)
It is difficult to say how fruitful this relationship was from a business perspective. But between 2009 and 2019, Mr. Stern provided Mr. Epstein with numerous potential deals across a variety of industries.
Early on, he appeared serious about launching a “secret” new fund to jointly invest in Chinese companies with Mr. Epstein. He called it “JEDS” (they combined their initials and called it “JEDS”). (It was also referred to as the “Serpentine Group” in some emails.) Mr. Stern went on to pitch the purchase of Russian farmland, proposed buying news outlet Al Jazeera and taking it public, discussed buying troubled music publisher EMI, and considered buying an apparently troubled (and obscure) undersea cable company.
They were also looking at banks. Mr. Stern and Mr. Epstein tried to buy Sal, a private bank headquartered in Luxembourg. Oppenheim, email shows. In 2016, he also discussed the acquisition of Deutsche Bank, which had a long history of business with Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Stern repeatedly touted his connections to prominent businessmen and politicians in emails to Mr. Epstein and other contacts. In February 2012, Mr. Stern suggested that Mr. Epstein introduce Jes Staley, then head of investment banking at JPMorgan, to Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim.
“I know Anwar well,” Stern wrote. “If he becomes the prime minister of Malaysia, [Staley] It will be purified and may become a treasure trove for JPM. (Mr. Ibrahim lost a bitter election in 2013, but became prime minister in 2022.)
Stern also claimed he had dinner with Jack Ma and was scheduled to have a “two-on-one” meeting with United Arab Emirates (UAE) President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and said he was “friends” with the grandson of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Towards electrification
By 2017, Stern seemed to be eyeing a rush to create new mobility companies.
He tried to get Epstein to meet Faraday Future founder Zia to discuss investments. It is unknown whether that actually happened. The company and Zia did not respond to requests for comment.
But Stefan Kraus, the former BMW and Deutsche Bank CFO brought in to save Faraday Future, filed a direct complaint against Epstein in April 2017.
“Faraday Future (FF) is a great story in itself, but unfortunately it is surrounded by a lot of noise surrounding Jia Yueting (YT) and his other businesses (LeEco, LeMall, LeSports to name a few). These businesses are not working, so he is running out of cash. FF is starving,” Kraus said in a letter to Epstein. “This is a great opportunity to build a better Tesla.”
(Mr. Kraus is described in the document as a “friend” and business partner of Mr. Stern. He did not respond to requests for comment.)
It appears that those conversations have ceased. Shortly after, Mr. Stern proposed investing in Lucid Motors.
In May 2017, a proposal arrived in Epstein’s inbox. This was raised by a fund called Monstera, which Stern founded. “Monstera will be able to acquire a 32% stake in Lucid by acquiring the shares currently controlled by Yueting Jia,” one slide reads. Mr. Stern expected to spend about $300 million for a 32% stake, according to other emails.
He called it a “fire sale” in an email. Monstera maintains position or[o]”If Ford comes in, ffload.”
Ford ultimately pulled out, and Lucid had to wait until August 2018 to close its Series D, when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund invested more than $1 billion. (SEC filings show Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund repurchased Zia shares over the next several years. Lucid did not respond to a request for comment.)
When Krauss left Faraday Future in late 2017 to start a new electric vehicle company (first called Evelozcity and later Canoo), Stern was one of the original backers. He gave just $1 million, in addition to larger donations from Mr. Li, a Chinese businessman with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, and Michael Chan, the billionaire owner of Taiwanese electronics giant TPK. (Later, when Canoo went public in 2020, Lee’s involvement triggered a national security review.)
In June 2018, Mr. Stern sent Mr. Epstein a letter about the startup, to which Mr. Epstein replied, “It’s fun.”
But Mr. Epstein also never invested in canoes. However, he replaced Stern with a capable talent. Epstein emailed Deepak Chopra in May 2018, telling the self-help guru that “David has started a new electric car company in Los Angeles.” He told Chopra, “They’re going to put the next generation of health sensors into cars. You guys should talk.”
In June 2019, Epstein sent a message to Italian businessman Eduardo Teodorani, senior vice president of agricultural machinery giant CNH. “My friend David Stern has an electric car company and I think you should look into it before he sells it to another company,” Epstein wrote. Mr. Epstein also connected Mr. Stern with Sheikh Jabor al-Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, on June 29 so they could “hear more about your car company.”
A week after sending that message, Epstein was arrested. He died in prison a month later.
It is not clear when Mr. Stern last spoke to Mr. Epstein. However, in March 2019, he forwarded an article to Epstein titled “Warren Buffett: Electric cars hold great promise for America’s future.” In the body of the email, Stern wrote, “How do we get him??”
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