When we talk about Musk drama, it's usually, you know, rockets,
social media rebrands, maybe a cage match.
That never quite happens. It's always big, it's always
public, and it's almost always Elon.
But today, we're doing something different.
We're looking at the other Musk Kimball, the one in the cowboy
hat. The farm to table guy.
The restaurateur who sits on the board of Tesla and SpaceX.
He's often branded as like the good Musk.
Exactly. But the documents we're digging
into today, this huge release from the Department of Justice
analyzed in detail by the Guardian, they just, they
completely dismantle that entire persona.
It's a huge shift, and we're also looking at this really
sharp opinion piece from Cholera's Sun that kind of
grapples with the fallout. The core of it all is Kimball
Musk's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
And it's not just that they knew each other.
That's not the headline. It's the sheer scale of the
connection that's so jarring. Yeah.
We're not talking about a quick handshake at some gala.
Kimball Musk appears in the Epstein files over 300 times.
300 I mean, that number alone just changes the whole
conversation. It really does.
It takes you from, oh they might have known each other to
something something much more systematic.
And that's where the real conflict is, because Kimball has
been trying to get out ahead of this.
He went on Ex, you know, formerly Twitter, on February
9th. He did.
He put out this statement that was basically a total disavowal.
He. Claimed he met Epstein just once
in some New York office and knew right away that the guy was, and
this is a direct quote, demon. A demon.
I mean, that's a really powerful choice of words.
It suggests this immediate moral horror, right?
I saw evil and I walked away. He also tried to explain away
all those emails by saying, oh, Epstein was just on my mass
newsletter mailing list. Like thousands of other people
getting updates on what organic kale and school gardens.
Which, you know, on the surface, that sounds kind of plausible
for a public figure. You have a big mailing list.
But the Guardian and the Boulder for a reporting lab, they
actually read the emails. And that newsletter defense, it
just falls apart immediately. Instantly, these weren't mass
blasts. They were personal.
They were direct, specific, ongoing conversations.
They were logistical, they're intimate, and they totally
contradict that whole I met him once story.
I think the most damning piece of evidence for that is probably
the island invitation. Oh.
Absolutely. That was from January 2013.
Right. So think about it, if you meet
someone once and decide they're a demon and then they invite you
to their private island. You block them.
You, I don't know, call your security team.
You definitely don't reply politely.
Exactly. But Kimball didn't do that.
He didn't recoil in horror. His actual reply was that would
be nice. That would be nice.
He said he couldn't go, but not because of who Epstein was.
It was because he was dealing with, in his own words, the
nuclear explosion that is my life, which was his divorce.
He even kept the door open, he said.
Maybe in the spring. Maybe in the spring, that's a
not how you talk to a demon. That's that's how you reschedule
with a friend when you're busy. It just completely undermines
his entire public statement. It does.
But honestly, if you look past the hypocrisy of it all, the
actual content of these emails shows something way more
disturbing than just a couple of rich guys hanging out.
Yeah, it reveals this, this sophisticated operation.
This is what the sources call engineered intimacy.
Yes, Epstein wasn't just a pal. He and his circle, They were
actively managing parts of Kimball's personal life.
And this brings in a third person, a guy named Boris
Nikolik. Right.
Nikolik was a science advisor for the Gates Foundation and a
really close associate of Epstein.
And the emails show Nikolik and Epstein working together, almost
like handlers, to set Kimball up on a date.
The timeline on this is September 2012.
It's right around Kimball's 40th birthday and there's this e-mail
chain. It's incredible.
They're planning a party for him in New York.
But they're not just talking about catering or a DJ, they're
talking about people as if they're inventory.
That's the only way to put it. Nicola writes to Epstein about
bringing a specific woman to this party.
Her name's redacted, but the message is crystal clear.
He tells Epstein please prepare the woman and he adds a little
winky face emoji. Prepare the woman.
And what does that even mean? It sounds like they're prepping
an asset for a mission or something.
Then he adds, she might like Elon as well.
So transactional. But the detail that just takes
it to another level of like, inhumanity is how they plan to
deal with Kimball's X. The ambient e-mail I.
Had to read it twice, I thought I was misreading it.
It's so stark. So Nikolik is basically
strategizing how to get Kimball alone with this new woman.
He writes that they need to distract the X, and then in
parentheses he just asks any spare Ambien.
It's so chilling because it's so casual.
They're not talking about a person.
She's just an obstacle and the proposed solution is sedation.
Let's just drug her so we can move our asset into position.
It shows this completely utilitarian view of the world
where people just chest pieces and if a piece is in your way,
you just you remove it. If you need a piece to do
something, you prepare it. So the big question becomes, how
much did Kimball actually know about all this engineering?
Well, he definitely knew about the end result because despite
his claim about one meeting in an office, he had lunch at
Epstein's penthouse on October 7th, 2012.
And the e-mail he sent after that lunch, it just it removes
any doubt that he knew he was being set.
Up. It really does.
He writes to both of them, to Epstein and Nicola, and says,
Jeffrey and Boris, Many thanks for connecting me with the
woman. I believe you both played a
role. Another :) he's thanking them
for providing a service. He might not have known about
the ambient detail, but he knew he was being handled.
He knew they were curating his love life.
And that gratitude, it seems, opened the door for Epstein to
become this this invisible third person in the relationship.
This is wasn't just a setup, it was ongoing surveillance.
Right. The Guardian found that the
woman was forwarding Kimball's private emails, his love
letters, directly to Epstein. It feels like something out of a
spy movie. Kimball is there, you know,
pouring his heart out, sending these romantic notes, making
travel plans, thinking he's building a real connection.
And on the other end, she's just hitting forward and sending it
all straight to Jeffrey Epstein. Who was basically tracking them?
He knew their itinerary. He was giving travel advice, I
think he suggested they go to Morocco at one point.
He was choreographing the whole thing from the shadows.
And Kimmel, he wasn't just some passive pawn in all this.
There's a level of comfort there, of banter that suggests
he felt like part of the group. We have to talk about the
Halloween costume idea. Oh, the Halloween e-mail, Yes.
Kimball emails them with a joke about a group costume for the
three of them, him, Epstein and Nicolik.
And it wasn't a subtle joke, no. He suggested they go as the Holy
Spirit, the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus.
You just don't make that kind of joke with a demon you met.
Once you make that joke with people you feel very, very
comfortable with, it signals he felt like he was in the inner
circle. Exactly.
It signals a feeling of safety, but that safety was a total
illusion, especially for the women involved, because
eventually this relationship between Kimball and the woman it
it started to crumble. Right in April 2013, Kimball
tries to pull back. He sends the downgrade e-mail.
He tells her he's stressed and exhausted and wants to go back
to just dating. You know, on the surface it
sounds like pretty standard relationship stuff.
But her reaction confirms everything about the power
dynamic. She doesn't call a friend.
She forwards Kimball's e-mail to Epstein.
She's panicked, worried that she's failing her mission or
something. And Epstein's reply?
I think this might be the single most revealing line in the whole
investigation. The good news?
E-mail, Yeah. You read back to her.
OK, good news. Now I have you back again full
time. Just makes your skin crawl.
Good news. Her heartbreak is good news to
him. It implies her time with Kimball
was just a deployment, an assignment, and now she's being
recalled. She was an asset, and when the
job was over, she went back on the shelf.
And it wasn't just Epstein saying this.
Another associate, a guy named Steve Hanson, emails her and
just lays it out. He tells her, and he even has a
typo. It's a game you're losing.
Then he orders her to leave immediately.
It's a game. I mean, that really is the
mission statement for this whole circle of men, isn't it?
The women, the relationships, the power plays, it's all just a
game. And they're the only players,
Everyone else is just part of the scenery.
So you have to ask why? Why go to all this trouble?
Why is Jeffrey Epstein, A billionaire financier, playing
matchmaker for Kimball Musk? Access.
It's always comes back to access.
Epstein collected powerful people and by 2012 the Musk
brothers were rocketing up. Getting close to Kimmel was a
clear pathway to Elon. And Elon does pop up in these
files, too. It's not all about Kimball.
No, there are mentions of Elon doing Kung Fu practice and
things, but there's one e-mail from November 2012 that really
complicates Elon's own attempts to distance himself.
The helicopter one. Yeah, he asked Obscene about
getting a helicopter ride. But then he asks what day night
will be the wildest party on your island.
Wildest party? That's a very specific phrase.
Now we should be clear, the reporting shows that trip never
actually happened. Logistics got in the way.
Correct, the trip didn't happen, but the intent is what's so
telling here. He wasn't asking for stock tips.
He wasn't asking about science philanthropy.
He was asking for the wildest party on an island that was
already notorious. It suggests that for both
brothers, Epstein was seen as a kind of facilitator for a
certain lifestyle. Exactly.
And you know, to give Kimball some context here, he has
admitted he was in a really bad place at the time.
He called it an unhealthy version of himself.
He was just divorced. He was drinking, partying a lot.
He was vulnerable. And predators like Epstein, they
have a sixth sense for vulnerability.
They absolutely do. They find a void and they offer
to fill it. You're lonely?
Here's a curated girlfriend. You're bored?
Here's the wildest party. But, and this is the huge caveat
that you just can't get around, the timeline is absolutely
damning. This was 20/12/2013.
Jeffrey Epstein was not some mystery man.
Not. At all.
He was a convicted sex offender. He'd been convicted back in
2008. He'd served time, such as it
was. He was on the registry.
It was public record. It wasn't some dark secret.
So when Kimball or Elon or anyone else from that orbit
claims they had no idea, it just it doesn't hold any water.
They knew who they were dealing with.
They made a choice, yeah. They decided that the access,
the parties, the connections, whatever he was offering was
worth overlooking the fact that he was a known predator.
That's the Merrill calculation. And that brings us to this idea
of the muck. Yeah.
That's from the Colorado Sun piece.
The author, Diane Carmen, she brings up that old saying about
how it's just as easy to love a rich man as a poor man.
Right. But she points out the warning
that always came with it. Associating with that kind of
extreme wealth, it often involves wading through a lot of
muck. It's the same word Melinda
French Gates used when talking about her divorce from Bill
Gates. Yeah, his relationship with
Epstein, she said. She couldn't stand the muck.
And these emails? This is the muck.
It's The Dirty, sticky reality of how these networks of power
and influence actually work. And for guys like Kimball Musk,
the consequences for wading into it all seems surprisingly light.
That's what the article points out so well.
The fallout is so asymmetrical. Kimball had to step down from
the Burning Man board because a petition went around, which is,
you know, it's an embarrassment. Yeah, but it's not jail time.
No, for the women, the ones who were being prepared and told it
was all a game, the trauma can be lifelong.
For the men, it's APR problem. They go to their private
islands, they wait for the news to blow over.
They have the money to insulate themselves from the damage they
caused. It forces you to really think
about what complicity means. I think that's the real take
away here. We tend to think of complicity
as, you know, actively helping someone commit a crime.
Sure, like driving the getaway car.
Right, but what these files show is a different kind of
complicity. It's the complicity of
normalization. Normalization.
Explain that. Well, if you're joking about
Halloween costumes with a known sex offender, if you're taking
his dating advice, if you're having lunch at his penthouse,
you are sending a very clear message to him and to everyone
else that his crimes don't actually matter.
You're saying your value to me is more important than the harm
you've done to others. Exactly.
You are normalizing his presence in polite society, and that
normalization is what gives predators a shield.
It's what allows them to keep operating.
Epstein thrived because powerful people treated him like a
friend, not like a pariah. And that's why looking at these
specific emails, these smiley faces and jokes, is so
important. It's not just celebrity gossip,
it's a blueprint for how that shield of respectability gets
built. One casual e-mail, one lunch
meeting, 1 ambient request at a time.
Which is why it's so critical to look past the public statements
and dig into the primary sources.
Don't just read the tweet where he calls him a demon.
Read the e-mail where he's sending a :) and asking for a
rain check. The truth is always in the
contradictions. And that's where we'll leave it
for today. It's a dark story, but it's a
necessary one if you want to understand how power really
works behind the curtain. Thanks for joining us for this
deep dive. Take care.