After the Justice Department released a trove of new documents tied to infamous sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, journalists digging through them have found extensive connections to Silicon Valley.
TechCrunch’s Sean O’Kane examined how a mysterious businessman named David Stern built a relationship with Epstein and pitched him investments in multiple electric vehicle startups, including Faraday Future, Lucid Motors, and Canoo.
On the latest episode of the Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec and I talk to Sean about what he learned, and we discuss whether the Epstein revelations will lead to broader fallout in Silicon Valley.
You can read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, in the transcript below.
Sean: There are always people at the edges who don’t necessarily want to be front and center in the investment scene. And that was why I started looking through these files, in part because a long time ago, flashback 10 years ago on my beat especially, there was just a ton of Chinese investment in the space.
This was before even the rush of EV startups in China that we see today […] In autonomous vehicles, but electric vehicles especially, there was this moment where Chinese investors and Chinese companies, state-owned automakers, all they wanted to do was to be looked at like Silicon Valley startups. So they came here and they invested in companies and helped get them off the ground, or in some cases even set up offices in Silicon Valley.
And it was in that environment that a lot of the companies that I’ve covered for a long time popped up. There was just never a full picture of how a lot of them were funded.
Techcrunch event
Boston, MA
|
June 23, 2026
One in particular, this company called Canoo, which is now bankrupt and out of business, had maybe the most mysterious set of investors of all of them. They really were not upfront about it when they first sort of came out of stealth in early 2018. And it frankly took unt …