It was the week of Kimbal Musk’s 40th birthday in September 2012, and invitations went out for his party that Saturday, at 7 p.m. at New York’s Four Seasons Restaurant on East 57th Street.
As invitees learned via email the password to get in—“pussy riot”—the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was scheming.
Epstein and an associate had handpicked a woman he believed would interest Kimbal Musk; coordinated club reservations through an associate who promised “as many girls” as “needed”; and organized a lunch the following day at his Upper East Side Manhattan mansion for Kimbal, his older brother, Elon Musk, and Elon’s then-wife, Talulah Riley, according to dozens of Department of Justice emails released this month. (Kimbal Musk later apologized to Epstein for not attending the lunch, in another email released by the DOJ.)
“I told him that you are coming with [Sarah] and that [Kimbal] might want to ditch his ex/or current to be,” Boris Nikolic, a close associate whom Epstein describes as a “good friend” in an email, reported in an email to Epstein ahead of the party.
“So please prepare [Sarah],” Nikolic added, with a winking emoji. (While many of the victims’ names were not entirely redacted in the Department of Justice’s initial release of thousands of names, Fortune is changing the names of the women mentioned in this story in an effort to protect their identities.)
After the party and the lunch, Sarah and Kimbal Musk would go on to date for the next several months. Throughout that time, Epstein kept close tabs on Kimbal Musk’s relationship. He directed Sarah’s involvement and her travel with him, according to dozens of emails from the Epstein files—seemingly in an attempt to get closer to Kimbal Musk’s brother, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX who had just made Forbes’s billionaire list in 2012, the year the relationship began. (Kimbal currently holds board seats at both companies.) And after the lunch at Epstein’s Manhattan home, Epstein would say to others that he and Elon Musk “were talking all the time,” according to a person who worked at Epstein’s residence at the time.
The emails offer a revealing window into the tactics Epstein used to build his network of the rich and powerful, using women under his control like pieces on a chessboard. (All of the emails referenced in this article were part of the vast cache of files related to the Epstein case released by the DOJ earlier this month.)
The elaborate game plan involved identifying powerful targets like the Musk brothers, using women and intermediaries to forge stronger ties with the target, and then relentlessly trying to insert himself into their circles. Throughout it all, Epstein and his associates sent and received status updates on the progress of the project, according to the Department of Justice files. Kimbal and Elon Musk are two of dozens of high-profile businessmen whose correspondence has emerged in the new batch of emails and documents, and who have tried to distance themselves from the disgraced financier.