Prince Andrew’s advisor offered Jeffrey Epstein to invest in electric car startups such as Lucid Motors

Electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors was scrambling to raise a Series D funding round in 2017. It had courted Ford as a potential investor, but Jia Yueting, founder of electric vehicle startup Faraday Future, had quietly raised about 30% equity and was essentially holding off new investors.

David Stern, the mysterious businessman and close advisor to former Prince Andrew, saw an opportunity to break the impasse: bring in Jeffrey Epstein.

“Ford will likely lead Lucid’s $400 million Series D,” Stern wrote to Epstein in emails released last week as part of the Justice Department’s recent disclosure of 3 million documents related to Epstein. He wrote that Jia “has huge cash problems” at Faraday, and needs to “sell now to pay off his other company.”

This wasn’t the first electric car startup Stern made an offer to Epstein, and it won’t be the last, according to hundreds of documents reviewed by TechCrunch.

At the time, legacy automakers and new startups, buoyed by Tesla’s meteoric success and the progress of Google’s self-driving project, were jumping into electric cars and self-driving vehicles. Stern appears to have been eager to capitalize on the resulting deal flow. He also made investments in Faraday Future itself, and in another electric vehicle startup, Canoo, documents show.

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 eventually received a significant investment from Chinese real estate company Evergrande in late 2017. Epstein said in a 2018 letter included in Justice Department filings that he had no “direct” or “indirect” interest in Kano.

These discussions instead provide insight into the many relationships that Epstein, a convicted sex offender, had with Silicon Valley startups until his arrest and death in 2019. They also provide a glimpse into a relationship that has not been explored in previous reporting.

By the time of the Lucid emails, Epstein and Stern had been working closely together for nearly a decade, newly released documents show. For Epstein, Stern was his “China contact.” For Stern, Epstein was “my mentor, and I do what he tells me to do.”

The “ghost” of the businessman

Stern is a mostly digital ghost with little information available about him online before the files were released.

He is perhaps best known as the director of Prince Andrew’s fledgling Pitch@Palace competition, which ran for a few years until Andrew’s connections to Epstein were revealed. Andrew himself even referred to Stern as a “ghost” in one 2010 email.

Stern appears to have first communicated with Epstein in 2008, according to emails released by the Justice Department — just a month before the financier pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida. Stern was setting up a fund called AGC Capital to capitalize on China’s economic boom, and wanted Epstein to invest in it.

(It is not clear how Stern was introduced to Epstein. Stern did not respond to a detailed list of questions in this article.)

Stern, a German, attended the University of London and Shi Da University in China in the late 1990s, and served as president of Millenium Capital China, the Chinese arm of Millennium Capital Partners, according to the biography section of AGC Capital’s bid, which is in Justice Department filings.

Stern also worked for Siemens negotiating “industrial joint ventures with Chinese state-owned enterprises,” before joining Deutsche Bank’s Shanghai office. He founded a company called Asia Gateway in 2001 which “advises major Chinese companies and corporations as well as the Chinese government on growth strategies and investments.”

These jobs appear to have helped Stern establish relationships with powerful and wealthy Chinese businessmen, including Li Botan – the son-in-law of China’s fourth-biggest leader under Xi Jinping’s predecessor, Hu Jintao. (Lee would eventually become a founding investor in Canoo with Stern.)

It is not clear whether Epstein invested in AGC Capital; The financier spent the next year serving his sentence. But Stern and Epstein kept in touch, and in 2009 Stern began tossing around other ideas.

The documents reveal a relationship that began formally and briefly, with Epstein at one point berating Stern for not properly preparing him for a potential business deal.

“[I]“If you want to make real deals, you have to be precise and careful,” Epstein wrote. “Every mistake is a fortune.” “[Y]Our first grade is an F.”

One of the first big projects the two men collaborated on was helping the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, with her desperate finances, according to emails.

The relationship deepened over the next decade. The two men grew close enough that Stern felt comfortable asking Epstein in 2016 to become godfather to one of his children. (Epstein wrote that he was “flattered” but declined because he “made a promise to my daughter that I would never be anyone else’s godfather.”)

It is difficult to say how successful the relationship will be on the business side. But between 2009 and 2019, Stern offered Epstein a number of potential deals in various industries.

Early on, he seemed intent on setting up a new “secret” fund with Epstein to invest in Chinese companies together, which he referred to as JEDS — the combined initials of the two men’s names. (It was also referred to in some emails as the “Serpentine Group.”) Stern later proposed buying farmland in Russia, proposed buying the news organization Al Jazeera and taking it public, discussed buying the troubled music publisher EMI, and considered taking over the struggling submarine cable company (which he did not name).

They also had their eyes on the banks. Stern and Epstein tried to buy the Luxembourg-based private bank Salle. Oppenheim, emails show. In 2016, they even discussed buying Deutsche Bank, which had done business with Epstein for years.

Stern repeatedly bragged about his relationships with prominent businessmen and politicians in emails he sent to Epstein and other contacts. In February 2012, Stern suggested to Epstein that he introduce Jes Staley – the head of investment bank JP Morgan at the time – to Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim.

“I know Anwar well,” Stern wrote. “If he becomes Prime Minister of Malaysia [Staley] “It will be cleaned up and it could be a goldmine for JP Morgan.” (Ibrahim lost a disputed election in 2013, but became prime minister in 2022.)

Stern also claimed he had dinner with Jack Ma, held a planned meeting “alone” with UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and said he was a “friend” of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin’s grandson.

Go electric

By 2017, Stern was apparently looking to rush into building new mobility companies.

He tried to convince Epstein to meet Faraday Future founder Jia to discuss the investment. It is not clear whether this ever happened; The company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

But Stefan Kraus, the former CFO of BMW and Deutsche Bank who was brought in to rescue Faraday Future, made a direct appeal to Epstein in April 2017.

“Faraday Future (FF) is a great story in itself, and unfortunately it is surrounded by a lot of hype around Jia Yueting (YT) and his other companies (LeEco, LeMall, LeSports, to name a few). These companies are not working, so he has run out of cash. “FF is starving,” Kraus wrote to Epstein. “Great opportunity to build a better Tesla.”

(Krause is described as a “friend” and business partner of Stern in the documents. He did not respond to a request for comment.)

Those conversations appear to have fizzled out. Soon after, Stern proposed investing in Lucid Motors.

In May 2017, a pitch arrived in Epstein’s inbox. It was put together by a fund called Monstera created by Stern. “Monstera could acquire a 32% stake in Lucid by acquiring the stake currently controlled by Yueting Jia,” one slide reads. Other emails show that Stern expected to spend about $300 million to acquire a 32% stake.

He referred to it as “selling cheap” in emails. Monstera can take over or “[o]Download “When Ford Comes.”

Ford eventually pulled out, and Lucid had to wait to close its Series D until August 2018, when Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund invested more than $1 billion. (SEC filings show that the Saudi sovereign wealth fund bought back Gia shares over the next few years. Lucid did not respond to a request for comment.)

When Krauss left Faraday Future to start a new electric vehicle company in late 2017 — initially called Evelozcity and later Canoo — Stern was one of the original backers. He contributed just $1 million along with larger sums from Li, a Chinese businessman linked to the Chinese Communist Party, and Michael Chiang, the billionaire who runs Taiwanese electronics giant TPK. (Li’s involvement later led to a national security review when Canoo went public in 2020.)

In June 2018, Stern sent Epstein a document about the startup, to which Epstein responded: “Interesting.”

But Epstein never invested in Canoo either. However, he promoted powerful people on Stern’s behalf. Epstein emailed Deepak Chopra in May 2018 and told the self-help expert that “David has a new electric car company in Los Angeles.” “They’re going to build next-generation health sensors in the car. You guys should talk up,” he told Chopra.

In June 2019, Epstein sent a letter to Edoardo Teodorani, an Italian businessman who serves as senior vice president of agricultural machinery giant CNH. “My friend David Stern… has an electric car company that I think you should explore before he sells it to another company,” Epstein wrote. Epstein also connected Stern to Sheikh Jabr Al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, on June 29 so he could “hear more about your car company.”

One week after sending that message, Epstein was arrested. He died in prison a month later.

It is not clear when Stern last spoke to Epstein. But in March 2019, he sent a story to Epstein titled: “Warren Buffet: Electric cars have a big role in America’s future.” “How do we get to him?,” Stern wrote in the email.