A new batch of documents from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein includes mentions of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, and Steve Bannon on what appear to be scheduling notes for the deceased pedophile financier.
Business Insider hasn't independently verified whether these meetings actually occurred. Representatives for Musk, Gates, Thiel, and Bannon didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
On Friday, Democrats serving on the House Oversight Committee, which subpoenaed Epstein's estate, published six pages from a tranche of documents the committee received.
Several of those pages include emails that appear to be from one of Epstein's assistants showing draft schedules for different days. They feature scheduled haircuts, teeth cleanings, movie screenings, and meetings with some of the most powerful people in the world.
The documents don't include any accusations of wrongdoing. The schedules are all for dates after 2008, when Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to soliciting a minor for prostitution. Epstein later died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex-trafficking charges.
On X, formerly known as Twitter, Republicans on the committee accused Democrats of publishing the documents selectively and said "We are releasing them all soon."
Elon Musk
In the documents released Friday, an entry for Saturday, December 6, 2014, places Epstein at his Zorro Ranch in New Mexico.
On that same day, it suggests Musk may visit an island and questions if the trip would still occur.
"Reminder: Elon Musk to island Dec. 6 (is this still happening?)" the note reads.
House Democrats didn't include documents with scheduling notes from the subsequent days.
In 2019, Musk told Vanity Fair that Epstein tried "repeatedly to get me to visit his island" but that he declined. He also said he visited Epstein's Manhattan mansion with his then-wife, who was interested in meeting him as she was writing a novel. "We did not see anything inappropriate at all, apart from weird art," Musk told Vanity Fair.
Epstein owned a vast property in the US Virgin Islands, and multiple women have alleged that he sexually abused them there. In 2022, Epstein's estate agreed to pay $105 million to the government of the US Virgin Islands to settle a civil sex-trafficking case.
During a dramatic split with President Donald Trump in June, Musk said the president was to blame for not publicly releasing documents about Epstein, commonly referred to as the "Epstein files," and said the president is in them.
Epstein and Trump were friends in the 1980s until they had a falling-out in the 2000s, before Epstein registered as a sex offender. Trump, who said in 2019 that he "wasn't a fan" of Epstein, has given different accounts of how their friendship ended.
White House spokespeople have since said that Trump booted Epstein from Mar-a-Lago for "being a creep." In July, Trump said he parted ways with Epstein because he "stole" employees from Mar-a-Lago, including Virginia Giuffre, who was working as a masseuse at the Palm Beach club before she was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell and sexually abused by Epstein.
Bill Gates
According to the newly released documents, on December 5, 2014 — the day before the entry that mentions Musk — Epstein had a scheduled breakfast meeting with Gates.
"TBD TENTATIVE BREAKFAST Party w/Bill Gates (Invited Ron Baron and Josh Harris...awaiting," the entry read.
Gates and Epstein have had a complicated relationship. The two met multiple times. Gates has repeatedly said he had "made a mistake in judgment."
Emails produced in a lawsuit between the US Virgin Islands and JP Morgan — which was later settled — show that Epstein tried to get the tech billionaire to establish a foundation with the bank, with the apparent expectation that he'd receive a fee for brokering the connection. The project never came to fruition.
The Wall Street Journal also previously reported that Epstein appeared to threaten to reveal an affair that Gates had. And in Epstein's will, he named Boris Nikolic, a former advisor to Gates, as a backup executor for his estate.
Earlier this year, Gates told the Journal that his association with Epstein was "foolish."
"I thought it would help me with global health, philanthropy," he said. "In fact, it failed to do that, and it was just a huge mistake."
Peter Thiel
Another entry for Monday, November 27, 2017, shows a scheduled noon lunch with investor Peter Thiel in New York.
Epstein had several other meetings scheduled with Thiel in the mid-2010s, according to copies of other schedules previously obtained from Business Insider. The New York Times previously reported that Epstein was an investor in Valar Ventures, one of Thiel's funds.
Thiel previously told The Wall Street Journal that Epstein "was a crazed networker and low on substance in one-on-one conversations."
Steve Bannon
Just months before Epstein's death, in February 2019, Epstein had a scheduled 7 a.m. breakfast with Steve Bannon, also in New York.
In the months leading up to Epstein's July 2019 arrest, on sex-trafficking charges, he and Bannon frequently met.
Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein's brother, previously told Business Insider that Bannon tried to help the pedophile rehabilitate his reputation following the Miami Herald's "Perversion of Justice" series, published in late 2018, that showed how Epstein got a light plea deal in 2007 even though law enforcement believed he had sexually abused dozens of girls.
Bannon has said he took videos of Epstein answering questions as part of a documentary project about him. To date, no such documentary has been released.
