During his time as a New York financier, Jeffrey Epstein met and did business with dozens of other investors, entrepreneurs, tech founders and members of the elite.
Which means it was inevitable that he would intersect with Ad Land at some point.
The most recent batch of documents that make up the Epstein Files, which was released by the Department of Justice on January 30, includes emails from several individuals who’ve held prominent roles within the ad tech and advertising ecosystems. Many of these interactions occurred well after 2008, when Epstein pled guilty to Florida state charges of solicitation of prostitution with a minor and began serving an 18-month sentence.
Of course, having come into contact with Epstein does not constitute a crime and is not evidence of any explicit wrongdoing. (In fact, AdExchanger itself appears in the files, as you’ll see below.)
However, these connections demonstrate how deeply Epstein had embedded himself into the upper echelons of the corporate finance world and how frequently he and his business partners sought out tech startups across various industries, including ad tech.
Ad/Fin
In 2013, both Epstein and current US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik acquired significant stakes in Ad/Fin, a company that frequently billed itself as a “Bloomberg terminal” for buying online media. Although Epstein’s signature appears in these documents, the shares are made out to his company, Southern Trust. CBS News first reported on this investment earlier this month.
Epstein’s involvement in Ad/Fin was seemingly spurred by Epstein’s business partner David Mitchell, who invested in the business as early as December 2012 (the same year Ad/Fin was founded). Mitchell also served as a member of the Ad/Fin board, for which he reportedly received additional shares, according to a letter he sent other investment partners in 2016.
Alongside that letter, several other Ad/Fin investor decks and one-sheeters also appear in the files.
Mitchell and Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, appeared to facilitate many of the day-to-day operations within Southern Trust and served as the primary points of contact for Ad/Fin leadership. This included Jeanne Houweling, who co-founded the company and served as its CEO until mid 2014, and Andrew Altersohn, who took over the CEO role until early 2019.
Although both CEOs are mentioned in the files a dozen or so times each, neither appeared to have direct contact with Epstein. (At one point, he even declined to meet Altersohn via a curt, one-word message of “no”.) All correspondence appeared to flow through either Mitchell or Kahn.
In fact, Mitchell even sent two AdExchanger links to Epstein highlighting coverage of Ad/Fin; a Q+A in 2014 and a brief newsletter mention in 2018.
Not long after being invited to join a new financing round for Ad/Fin in early 2018, Epstein told Kahn to relay that “we are a seller at cost. 875 and we are out.” At that point, Southern Trust had invested $875,000 worth and owned 4.29% of the company, an on-paper value of $1,287,000.
From there, however, the trail runs cold. In April 2018, Mitchell floated the idea of selling to a “Jonathan,” likely Ad/Fin co-founder Jonathan Leitersdorf, but there’s no evidence to confirm whether or not any type of transaction actually occurred.
Not long after, Epstein’s financial involvement became a moot point. By the time Ad/Fin shut its doors in late 2019, Epstein had already died in prison.
Dstillery (formerly Media6Degrees)
Ad tech industry veteran Joshua Abram exchanged several emails with Epstein after becoming acquainted in person through a business partner, most likely Mitchell, in late December 2011.
In his initial email to Epstein, Abram seemed interested in discussing the financial potential of his “adtech and data driven businesses,” and specifically highlighted Media6Degrees, which rebranded to Dstillery in 2013. At the time, Abram was a non-executive board member of the company, and remained so until 2017.
All in all, however, the correspondence between both men was minimal and ended soon after it began (although Abram later followed Epstein on Twitter, according to an email notification from August 2014).
Also in 2014, Mitchell wrote to Epstein several times inviting him to NeueHouse, a private co-working space and membership club that Abram opened in 2013 with his investment partner, Alan Murray. It is unclear whether Epstein visited the New York location (although he ended up on their email mailing list), but he briefly entertained plans, possibly facetiously, to buy the building next door and open up a competitor somewhere else in the city.
Abram died of cancer in August 2025, and NeueHouse abruptly shut its New York and Los Angeles locations roughly a month later upon filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
A spokesperson for Dstillery confirmed that the company never engaged directly with or received financing from Epstein, nor did it ever have any other business with Epstein.
Publicis
Starting in 2004, before Palm Beach Police first launched an official investigation into Epstein’s activities, longtime collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell worked extensively with staffers at both Publicis Groupe and the William J. Clinton Foundation to produce an inaugural kickoff event for the Clinton Global Initiative, the New York Times recently reported.
In one email exchange, Maxwell made plans to wire $1 million to pay Publicis for producing the event. Where the money came from is unclear, although it appears that Epstein was aware of the transfer – so, too, was at least one of his lawyers, likely Darren Indyke, who complained to Maxwell about the lack of a finalized budget.
Regardless, the event went ahead as planned in September 2005, after which it appears that Publicis and the Clinton Foundation continued to quarrel over financial reports. And so did Epstein – in an email from Epstein’s Yahoo account (which was not included in the DOJ’s files but has been independently verified by Bloomberg an Drop Site News), he asked Indyke for a “complete brakdown [sic] of revenue and expenses” regarding the Publicis report.
Richard Attias, former chairman of Publicis Events Worldwide, told The New York Times that funding came from a variety of sources, but could not remember whether Epstein was one of them.
Since then, much of the Publicis Events Worldwide branding has been supplanted by PublicisLive, which was formed as a separate entity and, among other events, hosts the World Economic Forum in Davos – where the idea for the Clinton Global Initiative came about in the first place, ironically enough.
Publicis declined to provide comment to AdExchanger for this story.
Havas (sort of)
As of December 2024, PR consultant and venture capitalist Ian Osborne is now a non-executive director on the board at Havas, where he is eligible to serve for up to 12 years.
Before that, however, Osborne frequently communicated with Epstein on both a personal and professional level; his name appears in the Epstein files over 3,800 times.
Osborne and Epstein were seemingly connected in 2011 by journalist Michael Wolff, after which Osborne developed a PR strategy to help Epstein rehabilitate his image. This strategy included building relationships with newspapers, politicians and scientists to establish a more positive reputation, and cleaning up his Google search results to downplay any references to “the Florida charges.”
Havas did not respond to AdExchanger’s requests for comment. However, a Havas spokesperson told London-based business newspaper City AM that the agency was “looking into this topic, which we were not aware of.”
Osborne, for his part, told the Telegraph that he had no idea about Epstein’s criminal activities.
“I wholeheartedly regret that I ever met or had any association whatsoever with Epstein,” he said. “I never witnessed, nor was aware of, the repellent and illegal behaviour by him. I am forever sorry for all the people who suffered by him. It was a serious error of judgment and one I bitterly regret.”
