Epstein’s “wild” party with Zuckerberg, Musk, and Thiel

Mark Zuckerberg attends the 2025 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony on April 05, 2025, in Santa Monica, California. (Craig T Fruchtman/Getty Images)

In an August 2015 email, the late billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein wrote about a “wild” dinner he had with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman. (For more on Musk’s relationship with Epstein, you can read the Tuesday edition of this newsletter.)

A few days later, Hoffman sent an email connecting Epstein and Zuckerberg so they could carry on their conversation. “Jeffrey, Zuck,” he wrote under the subject line “intros,” adding, “email connections from the Ed Boyden dinner — so that convo can continue.” Ed Boyden is an influential neuroscience professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In another email sent around the same time, an undisclosed Epstein associate wrote to Zuckerberg’s top aide, Andrea Besmehn, “Mark requested Jeffrey send his contact details to him…could you please pass the [email and phone number] below on to Mark?”

“Noted, with thanks,” replied Besmehn, who is still employed as Zuckerberg’s chief of staff.

Zuckerberg has long sought to distance himself from Epstein. “Mark met Epstein in passing one time at a dinner honoring scientists that was not organized by Epstein,” a Zuckerberg spokesperson claimed to Vanity Fair in 2019. “Mark did not communicate with Epstein again following the dinner.”

Musk carries out SpaceX, xAI merger to launch ‘AI satellites from Earth’

Elon Musk announced a merger between SpaceX and xAI on Monday, creating what he described as a “vertically-integrated innovation engine.” The business press has called it the “biggest merger in history,” citing the combined entity’s claimed $1.25 trillion valuation. Because both companies are privately held by Musk, there is no independent way to evaluate that figure.

On its own, SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company, is immensely valuable due to its market dominance in the launch services industry. It is also by far the leading satellite broadband provider. A recent Reuters report revealed that SpaceX generated roughly $8 billion in profit last year.

But the latest reported numbers for xAI, maker of the Grok chatbot and owner of the X social media platform, show it burns through nearly $1 billion a month. And X continues to carry approximately $12 billion in debt stemming from Musk’s 2022 purchase of the platform then known as Twitter.

By combining SpaceX and xAI, Musk appears to be using a highly profitable business to bail himself out of his overpayment for Twitter and underwrite his AI venture. Musk said the merger was part of a futuristic plan to launch a fleet of space-based data centers that can be cheaply powered by solar energy.

He did not say how the data centers would withstand that much radiation, or what in-orbit repairs would look like. But he did envision them catalyzing his dream of a Martian civilization. “The capabilities we unlock by making space-based data centers a reality will fund and enable self-growing bases on the Moon, an entire civilization on Mars and ultimately expansion to the Universe,” he wrote.

As for the terms of the merger, SpaceX investors received 80% of the new company, with the remaining 20% going to xAI investors.

But SpaceX, which is preparing for a massive initial public offering this summer, and its investors are now also saddled with the scandals that follow Musk’s AI efforts. On Tuesday, less than a day after Musk announced the merger, xAI’s offices in France were raided by the country’s federal cyber unit. The raid was part of an investigation into Grok and X for disseminating sexualized images of children, as well as non-consensual sexualized images of adults. The Paris prosecutor’s office also summoned Musk for questioning and said that its investigation included posts in which Grok generated support for Hitler and denied the Holocaust.

On X, Musk described the raid as “a political attack.”

This Week in Musk:

• The privacy watchdog office in the U.K. has also opened a formal investigation into X and xAI over the use of Grok to create sexualized images of people without their consent. (The Guardian)

• A federal judge in Maryland ruled that Musk must appear for a deposition for leading the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency as it dismantled USAID. (Business Insider)

• In December, Musk donated a combined $10 million to two super PACs seeking to maintain Republican control of the House and Senate through the midterms. (Politico)

• A lawsuit filed on Wednesday blames Tesla’s unreliable, electrically powered doors for the death of 20-year-old Samuel Tremblett, who died last year after being trapped in a burning Model Y. “Unable to open the doors, Mr. Tremblett was trapped in the Tesla vehicle and died from thermal injuries and smoke inhalation before he was able to be rescued,” reads the lawsuit that was filed in federal court. (Bloomberg)

Bezos guts The Washington Post

Centibillionaire Jeff Bezos had The Washington Post’s newsroom dramatically reduced on Wednesday, cutting the newspaper’s staff by roughly 30% and firing more than 300 journalists. Bezos, who purchased The Post for $250 million in 2013, has not publicly explained his motivation behind the cuts. But Post executive editor Matt Murray told staffers that the newspaper has been losing money for too long, according to The New York Times.

Murray partly blamed the cuts on AI chatbots, which have reduced search engine traffic to news sites.

Among those most impacted by the cuts were The Post’s local and international teams, while its sports and books sections were eliminated entirely. The Post even laid off one foreign correspondent while they were working out of a war zone in Ukraine, per The Times.

The newspaper also dismissed its Amazon beat reporter, Caroline O’Donovan. Bezos, who has a net worth of $256 billion, is the founder, largest shareholder, and executive chairman of Amazon.

The Post has been losing subscribers rapidly since 2024, when Bezos, in an apparent attempt to win favor with Donald Trump, killed a planned editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for the presidency. Hundreds of thousands of Post readers cancelled their subscriptions following that decision. Then, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Bezos doubled down, installing a conservative overhaul of The Post’s editorial section in the name of “free markets and personal liberties.”

While Bezos previously took credit for saving the newspaper — “We saved The Washington Post once, and we’re going to save it a second time,” he said in 2024 — he could have used a tiny fraction of his fortune to avoid this round of layoffs. Peter Baker, a top reporter at The New York Times, noted that Bezos could have covered The Post’s $100 million in annual losses for five years with the money he accrues in a single week.

This Week in Bezos:

• Amazon’s Melania, the pseudo-documentary on first lady Melania Trump, made $7 million at the domestic box office over its opening weekend. That made it the highest-grossing non-music documentary in a decade. But Tom Brueggemann, a box office expert, reported that “blocks of [Melania] tickets were purchased for the weekend, then distributed to senior citizen homes, Republican activists, and other interested parties for free to help boost audiences.” Amazon also shelled out $35 million to market the film after spending $40 million for the rights. That amounted to a direct payout to the Trump family, with the first lady taking a $28 million cut. (CNN)

• On Monday, Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke at a facility owned by Blue Origin, Bezos’s rocket and defense company. The visit was part of Hegseth’s “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, which aims to generate hype for the Trump administration’s defense spending bonanza. “No more business as usual, which I know, Mr. Bezos, is music to your ears,” Hegseth said. Bezos, meanwhile, promised that Blue Origin is “committed to supporting national security.” (USA Today)

• Blue Origin announced last week that it is suspending its space tourism business to prioritize completing its work for NASA to send astronauts back to the moon. (New York Times)

• Amazon MGM Studio, the film and television production subsidiary of Amazon, is developing new AI tools to cut costs and “streamline the creative process,” according to Reuters. What that will mean in practice is not entirely clear. Albert Cheng, the head of Amazon’s new AI Studio team, claimed that it will help the streaming giant churn out more content at a faster clip. “The cost of creating is so high that it really is hard to make more, and it really is hard to take great risk,” he said. “We fundamentally believe that AI can accelerate, but it won’t replace, the innovation and the unique aspects that (humans) bring to create the work.” (Reuters)

Epstein advised former Israeli prime minister to ‘look at’ Palantir

In 2013, Jeffrey Epstein told former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to look into Palantir, the analytics and defense company cofounded by right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. “I’ve never met Peter Thiel. And everybody says he sort of jumps around and acts really strange, like he’s on drugs,” Epstein told Barak, according to a recording recently released by the Justice Department. “However, he has a company called Palantir... so he thought that Peter would put you on the board of Palantir... he’s going to come here next week so I wanted to talk to him, if I talk to you.”

Despite his disparaging characterization of Thiel to Barak, Epstein forged close ties with the Palantir cofounder. From The Byline Times:

In a [2016] communication with German technology investor Nicole Junckermann – released as part of the Epstein Files – Ehud Barak asked Junckermann to attend a meeting with Valar Ventures executives “who are seniors in a new Investment Fund owned by Peter Thiel and JE [Jeffrey Epstein]”.

The email shows that Epstein and Barak planned to pitch an Israeli tech surveillance firm, then called “Reporty”, later renamed Carbyne, to Valar Ventures.

In 2018, Thiel’s other venture, Founders Fund, invested in the Epstein-Barak firm.

A spokesman for Peter Thiel denied that Jeffrey Epstein was a co-owner of the fund with Thiel, but confirmed to Byline Times that he was a limited partner.

Thiel scheduled regular meetings and calls with Epstein from 2014-2017, during which they discussed Bitcoin, Brexit, and other topics. Their meetups were frequent enough that Thiel’s assistant at the time had his severe dietary restrictions sent to a member of Epstein’s staff, as noted by Wired.

In 2016, Epstein also told Thiel that he would “gladly” pay to help him take down the news site Gawker. Thiel, who funded the lawsuit that led to Gawker’s demise, replied with a smiley face emoticon.

Additionally, a December 2016 email shows that Epstein’s financial adviser received an email from hedge fund executive David Fiszel describing a sit-down between Palantir executives and then-president-elect Trump as “Huge for the company.” Palantir has since become a massive software and analytics contractor for the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Israeli Defense Force.

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Oligarch Roundup

Meta gives $65 million to influence 2026 elections. In California, Meta has pumped $65 million into two of its super PACs to tilt state elections toward candidates who support the tech industry and oppose bills that would regulate AI. The news comes after a quarter in which Meta spent more than all of its peers on federal lobbying. (Politico)

Trump says he’ll stay out of Netflix and Paramount’s battle for WBD. In an interview with NBC, the president claimed that he hasn’t been “involved” in the fight between Netflix and Paramount Skydance to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. “I’ve been called by both sides,” he said. “It’s the two sides, but I’ve decided I shouldn’t be involved. The Justice Department will handle it.” (CNBC)

Musk’s tunneling startup to start project in Dubai. According to U.A.E. officials, The Boring Company, Musk’s tunneling and transit startup, is set to begin the first phase of its “Dubai Loop” project. The news came on the same day that the company was heavily criticized at a Nevada legislative hearing for numerous worker safety and environmental violations related to its tunneling project in Las Vegas. (Semafor)