Masha Bucher is one of the more high profile female VCs in Silicon Valley. New emails released from the Department of Justice reveal a deep, years long relationship with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein was late.
A startup founder sat in an ornate room in the financier’s Upper East Side mansion, dominated by a nine-foot-tall painting of former President Bill Clinton wearing the infamous blue Monica Lewinsky dress, hoping Epstein might be interested in funding his company. One of his early investors, Masha Bucher, had arranged the meeting, describing Epstein as a rich businessman with a passion for science. He’d only realized Epstein had a different, darker reputation after doing a quick search for his name in the Uber to the meeting.
When Epstein finally arrived, he shrugged off questions about his career as a money manager, then bragged about his connections to Bill Gates and the Google founders. But when the founder finally began pitching his company, he was interrupted. Two young women had walked into the room. One sat on Epstein’s knee while he leered, “Can you guess which one is older?”
The founder, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, said he ducked Epstein’s question about the women’s ages, and left the meeting feeling revolted. It was the last he ever saw of Epstein. “It’s one of those things that’s radioactive level 10,” the founder told Forbes.
This was one of at least nine connections that Masha Bucher, the founder of VC firm Day One Ventures, would make between Epstein and Silicon Valley startup founders, according to hundreds of emails and messages between Bucher and the convicted pedophile released as part of the Department of Justice’s Epstein document dump. According to the files, Epstein had originally met Bucher in 2017, bringing her on as a publicist to help massage his reputation in the wake of his 2008 sex trafficking conviction, then supported and encouraged her as she began investing out of her own fund.
She later credited him with helping her establish Day One Ventures in 2018. “I would never create my fund without the ideas and knowledge you shared with me,” she wrote to Epstein in a 2019 text.
Now, the 36-year-old investor boasts of having written early checks to 22 unicorns, including Elon Musk’s xAI, Sam Altman’s iris-scanning startup World and small nuclear reactor builder Valar Atomics, and has raised over $450 million. That is a rare feat for any female VC, but doubly so for a Russia-born former publicist who had no prior track record of investing, let alone a marquee Sand Hill Road fund on her resume. (xAI, World and Valar Atomics did not respond to a comment request.)
The time frame of the emails and texts between Epstein and Bucher (then using her maiden name Drokova) ranged from their initial meeting in 2017 to just days before his arrest in 2019. The young publicist, then in her 20s, initially helped broker meetings with journalists, the documents show. But their relationship grew from there. Epstein tasked his assistants with sending her Prada handbags and booking her haircuts at New York’s exclusive Fekkai Salon. She stayed at his expense at the Four Seasons hotel, according to the emails. Bucher would take hour-long phone calls with Epstein and the pair also swapped photos and videos over Skype. In one chat exchange, Epstein solicited nude photographs from her; it is unclear if Bucher sent them.
Bucher did not provide comment by press time. She has said previously she was not paid for any of the work she did for Epstein and she “didn’t do research in the beginning, which I very much regret.”
The venture capitalist is one of thousands of prominent people who exchanged emails and messages with Epstein, or were copied on correspondence with his associates. The people named in the files range from politicians like President Donald Trump, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barack and former British Minister Peter Mandelson, to tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Peter Thiel. Some of those named in the files are only mentioned in passing by Epstein or his associates, or have already had their connection to the disgraced financier made public. Others have downplayed their relationship to Epstein as amounting to little more than email introductions, or brief exchanges, dating back over a decade.
The cache of 3.5 million emails, documents and notes from the disgraced financier were published on January 31 as a result of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. When the documents landed, Bucher was hosting an extravagant party at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum where a troupe of masked figures wearing white gowns and silver masks stalked the halls, a “psychomagic performance” designed to be an “experiment in collective imagination,” according to the invitation.
It’s unclear if the Department of Justice has now published all of Epstein’s files (lawmakers, watchdogs and survivors of Epstein’s abuse have accused the government of withholding additional records; Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said this cache is the last of the government’s releases). Many of the documents are fully or partially redacted.
There’s no allegation that Bucher, or others named in the files, broke laws, or took part in any wrongdoing. But choosing to associate, communicate or do business with Epstein long after he pled guilty in 2008 to sex trafficking charges involving minors, has created a reputational headache for many powerful figures who had sought to downplay their ties to the disgraced financier.
In March 2017, an email with the subject line “Wonderlady – Masha Drokova & her project” landed in Jeffrey Epstein’s inbox. “Young age lady will be glad to meet you and show you her current plan to conquer the world,” the message reads, from an unknown sender whose name was redacted.
The same associate appears to have followed up in a May 2017 email with a Wall Street Journal article about Bucher’s pivot from PR to angel investing. “She also helps me sending candidates for PA job but her candidates are not pretty enough to present you :/,” the unnamed author wrote.
The emails didn’t shy away from sharing Bucher’s complicated history. Bucher was born in Russia in 1989 and had found fame locally as a teenage leader of Nashi, a Russian youth movement that had close ties to the Kremlin. Bucher was featured in a 2012 documentary about the movement called Putin’s Kiss, a reference to a famous moment when she kissed President Vladimir Putin on the cheek. She has said that she gave up her citizenship after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. (Epstein has his own ties to Russia. The newly released files suggest he sought a meeting with Putin over a number of years.)
It’s not clear when Epstein and Bucher first met in person. But over the next two years, the young publicist helped broker several meetings with journalists, and apparently secured favorable coverage that glossed over his sexual abuse of minors. “Rich [Epstein accountant’s Richard Kahn] send Masha 25k, Masha feel free to give some to Dylan,” Epstein wrote in one 2017 email, referring to former Business Insider tech reporter Dylan Love with whom she’d arranged an interview.
“Jeffrey has an interesting perspective on what it will take to fill the gaps.”
In 2017, Love penned an article for tech publication The Next Web sharing Epstein’s outlook on bitcoin that did not mention his conviction. The Next Web editors later added the correction: “This article has amended the glaring oversight that Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from an underage woman.”
Bucher’s reputational work for Epstein was first made public in 2019. That September, Science journalist Jeffrey Mervis published an account in which Bucher brokered a meeting between him and Epstein at his seven-story townhouse in Manhattan. “I saw your piece on [President Donald] Trump’s science budget,” Bucher wrote to Mervis. “Jeffrey has an interesting perspective on what it will take to fill the gaps.”
During the time Bucher was working for Epstein, she began to move into investing. She has said in past interviews that she went from advising startups like Houzz, HotelTonight and PandaDoc on PR to angel investing, then raised her first $20 million seed fund named Day One Ventures in 2018. (Houzz said Bucher was a PR consultant for a few months in 2015 and the company has not had contact with her since then. HotelTonight (now owned by Airbnb) and PandaDoc did not respond to comment requests.)
Bucher has since backed many high-profile startups, and even collaborated with OpenAI on an AI-generated art show. In a previously undisclosed deal, Day One claims to have invested in the Series B round for Elon Musk’s xAI, then valued at $24 billion. It later merged with X, and now Musk plans to fold the combined entity into SpaceX with a total valuation of $1.25 trillion. Such deals helped land Bucher a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2019.
In 2022, Washington Post journalists reported that Bucher’s fundraising pitches touted her connections to Russian oligarchs, but Bucher disputed those emails as fake, and said she did not have any Russian funding. She said at the time she deeply regretted supporting Putin and his government.
There is no reference in the Epstein emails of him directly investing in Day One. However, one email dated 2017 shows Bucher asking him for introductions to “adequate Russian oligarchs” because she was looking for the “right investors” for her fund.
Bucher’s ties to Russia have continued to draw scrutiny, especially as she’s started investing in defense and AI companies. She’s now one of the most prominent investors in an emerging hub of defense startups based in El Segundo, California. Bucher said in a now deleted August 2024 interview with podcaster Molly O’Shea that she had invested in at least five El Segundo-based startups that included Valar Atomics, which has a pilot nuclear reactor contract with the Department of Energy, cloud seeding company Rainmaker and space startup Starpath.
Rainmaker’s CEO Augustus Doricko said that he had cut all ties with Bucher and Day One after verifying her background. “In retrospect I wish I’d taken the time and been more protective over who we took checks from,” Doricko said. Valar and Starpath did not respond to comment requests.
As she kicked off her investments, Bucher continued to correspond with Epstein. The emails show she introduced him to startup founders like longevity obsessive Bryan Johnson, Runa Capital’s Serg Bell, Neil Serebryany of CalypsoAI and Jay Jideliov of cloud phone service Callision. Johnson said he had one Zoom call with Epstein, and was not aware of his past at the time. He said he left the call “with a deep unsettling feeling as though Epstein was the most dark and evil person I had ever encountered,” and did not interact with him again. Bell, Serebryany and Jideliov did not respond to comment requests.
One founder, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said they met Bucher at a VC event. She offered to make an introduction to a wealthy philanthropist, but wouldn’t share the person’s identity until they agreed to the meeting, saying the individual had been slandered in the press. The founder agreed. In the meeting, Epstein was an “asshole,” they said. They never spoke to either Epstein or Bucher again. “If these were the type of people she felt were good folks to talk to, I didn’t want to be part of that,” the founder said.
It’s not clear from the emails if Epstein was looking to invest in these entrepreneurs. Epstein’s emails show that he regularly emailed top names in Silicon Valley like Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk, but ultimately made few of his own tech investments.
As Bucher shared updates on her fund, and travels, she bragged to Epstein about one of her angel investments, Acquired.io, being bought in December 2018. “I’d never forget how you told me that women are not great investors because they don’t sell. It was true and this realization helped me a lot. Thank you Jeffrey! I’m so grateful for you,” wrote Bucher. Epstein replied: “great work. , proud.”
The emails and messages continued until just 11 days before Epstein’s arrest in July 2019. He would die in a Manhattan federal detention facility just a month later. In their last exchange, Bucher shared updates on her health, notes on her startups (“topic of safety of teens on the internet is super hot”) and thanked her “great friend.”
Katharine Schwab contributed reporting.
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This story was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
