Prince Andrew’s mentor stopped Jeffrey Epstein from investing in an EV startup like Lucid Motors

Electric vehicle startup Lucid Motors was seeking to raise a Series D funding round in 2017. It once interested Ford as a potential investor, but Jia Yueting, the founder of the first competing EV, Faraday Future, had amassed a 30% stake and was effectively blocking new investors.

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

“Ford likely to lead $400m Series D in Lucid. Big strategic move,” 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. Jia has “serious financial problems” at Faraday, he wrote, and needs to “sell now to pay for his other business.”

It wasn’t Stern’s first EV startup that stopped Epstein, and it wouldn’t be the last, according to hundreds of documents reviewed by TechCrunch.

Meanwhile, legacy automakers and innovative startups, spurred by Tesla’s success and the progress of Google’s self-driving project, were jumping into electric and autonomous vehicles. And Stern was clearly hungry to take advantage of the deal flow. Documents show he also invested in Faraday Future itself, and another EV startup, Canoo.

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 finally received a major investment from Chinese real estate conglomerate Evergrande in late 2017. Epstein said in a 2018 memo filed in Justice Department files that he had no “direct” or “indirect” interest in Canoo.

These conversations instead give great insight into the many connections Epstein, a convicted sex offender, had to run Silicon Valley until he was arrested and died in 2019. They also provide a summary of relationships that have not been explored in previous reports.

At the time of the Lucid emails, Epstein and Stern had been working together for nearly a decade, newly released documents show. For Epstein, Stern was “contacting him in China.” For Stern, Epstein “was my mentor, and I did what he told me.”

The ‘ghost’ of a businessman

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

He is perhaps best known as the director of the first Prince Andrew’s Pitch@Palace competition, which lasted several years until Andrew’s connection to Epstein was revealed. Andrew himself even called Stern a “ghost” in one 2010 email.

Stern appears to have started talking to Epstein in 2008, according to emails released by the DOJ — one month before the financier pleaded guilty to soliciting a child for prostitution in Florida. Stern was creating a fund, called AGC Capital, to take advantage of China’s booming economy, and he wanted Epstein to invest.

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

Stern, a German, studied at the University of London and Shi-Da University in China in the late 1990s, and served as chairman of Millennium Capital China, the Chinese arm of Millennium Capital Partners, according to a bio section of the AGC Capital pitch deck, which is in DOJ filings.

Stern also worked for Siemens negotiating “industrial Joint Ventures with Chinese State Owned Enterprises,” before joining the Shanghai office of Deutsche Bank. He started a company called Asia Gateway in 2001 that “advises blue chip companies, Chinese businesses and the Chinese government on growth and investment strategies.”

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

It is unclear whether Epstein invested in AGC Capital; the financier spent the next year serving his sentence. But Stern and Epstein stayed in touch, and in 2009 Stern started throwing around some ideas.

The documents reveal a relationship that started off as formal and brief, with Epstein once teasing Stern for not properly preparing a potential business deal.

“[I]if you want to make real deals you have to be clear and aware” every mistake is luck,” writes Epstein. “[Y]Our first grade is an F.”

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

The relationship deepened over the next ten years. The two men became close enough that Stern felt comfortable asking Epstein in 2016 to be the godfather of one of his children. (Epstein wrote that he was “flattered” but declined because he “made a promise to my daughter that I would not be a god to anyone else.”)

It’s hard to say how fruitful the relationship was on the business side. But between 2009 and 2019, Stern brought Epstein many potential deals in various industries.

At first, it seems that he was determined to start a new “secret” fund with Epstein to invest in Chinese businesses together, which he called JEDS – the initials of the two men together. (It was also referred to in some emails as the “Snake Group.”) Stern later stopped buying a Russian farm, proposed buying the news organization Al-Jazeera and taking it public, discussed buying troubled music publisher EMI, and considered acquiring a seemingly distressed (and unnamed) submarine cable company.

Their eyes are also on the banks. Stern and Epstein tried to buy the Luxembourg-headquartered private bank Sal. Oppenheim, the emails show. In 2016, they even discussed the purchase of Deutsche Bank, which had been dealing with Epstein for years.

Stern repeatedly reveals his connections to high-profile businessmen and politicians in his emails to Epstein and other contacts. In February 2012, Stern suggested that Epstein introduced Jes Staley – then head of JP Morgan’s investment bank – to Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim.

“I know Anwar well,” Stern wrote. “If he becomes the prime minister of Malaysia [Staley] it will clean up and become JPM’s gold mine.” (Ibrahim lost a contested election in 2013 but became prime minister in 2022.)

Stern also said he had dinner with Jack Ma, had a scheduled “one-on-one” meeting with UAE president Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and said he was “friends” with the grandson of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.

It’s electric

In 2017, Stern was apparently looking to rush to build new travel companies.

He tried to get Epstein to meet with Faraday Future founder Jia to discuss the investment. It is not clear if that ever happened; The company and Jia did not respond to requests for comment.

But former BMW and Deutsche Bank boss Stefan Krause, who was brought in to save Faraday Future, made a direct request to Epstein in April 2017.

“Faraday Future (FF) is a good story in itself, regrettably surrounded by a lot of noise in the area of ​​Jia Yueting (YT) and his other businesses (LeEco, LeMall, LeSports, to name a few). These businesses are not working, so he is out of money. FF is starving,” Krause wrote to Epstein. “It’s a great opportunity to build a better Tesla.”

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

It appears that those negotiations are over. Soon after, Stern raised an investment in Lucid Motors.

In May 2017, the pitch deck landed in Epstein’s inbox. It was joined by a bag called Monstera developed by Stern. “Monstera could acquire a 32% stake in Lucid through the acquisition of a stake controlled by Yueting Jia,” reads another slide. Other emails show that Stern was expected to spend about $300 million to acquire a total of 32%.

He called it “fire sales” in emails. Monstera can hold a position or “[o]take out” it “when Ford comes in.”

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

When Krause left Faraday Future to found a new EV company in late 2017 — first called Evelozcity and later, Canoo — Stern was one of the early backers. He contributed only $1 million and significant funds from Li, a Chinese businessman with ties to the CCP, and Michael Chiang, a billionaire who runs Taiwan’s electronics giant TPK. (Li’s involvement later prompted a national security review when Canoo went public in 2020.)

In June 2018, Stern sent Epstein a document about the startup, to which Epstein replied: “It’s fun.”

But Epstein never invested in Canoo, either. However, he put powerful people in Stern’s place. Epstein emailed Deepak Chopra in May 2018 and told self-help that “David has a new electric car in Los Angeles.” He told Chopra “they are going to build the next health sensors in the car. you should talk.”

In June 2019, Epstein sent a message to Eduardo Teodorani, an Italian businessman who is CNH’s senior vice president of agricultural machinery. “My friend David stern… has an electric car that I think you should check out before he sells it to someone else,” Epstein wrote. Epstein also put Stern in touch with Sheikh Jabor al Thani, a member of the Qatari royal family, on June 29 to “hear more about your car.”

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

It is unclear when Stern last spoke to Epstein. But in March 2019, he submitted a story to Epstein titled: “Warren Buffet: Electric Cars Are Too Much for America’s Future.” In the body of the email, Stern wrote: “How do we find him??”