A Peter Thiel Retreat Roster Sat in Epstein's Inbox. Thirteen Years Later It Reads Like the AI Establishment, and the 'Epstein' on It Is Someone Else
On November 28, 2012, an invitation to Dialog, the off-the-record retreat Peter Thiel founded with Auren Hoffman, landed in at least two inboxes that forwarded it to Jeffrey Epstein. The invitation carried a list of 129 entries billed as participants in the 2013 retreat. That list is now in the public Epstein files. Read today, it looks like a seating chart for the AI industry. It also contains a man named Jeff Epstein who is not the Jeff Epstein everyone assumes.
What the documents are
Four files tell the story, all from the same afternoon: House Oversight documents 013484, 017574 and 017581, and DOJ file EFTA02392691.
The invitation. Auren Hoffman wrote to invitees about Dialog 2014, a "two-day bipartisan retreat" at the Sundance Resort in Utah, "100% off-the-record," limited to 150 people, and signed "Peter Thiel and Auren Hoffman." To sell it, the email listed "a partial list of people who will be participating in the 2013 Dialog Retreat (all are references)."
Lisa Randall, the Harvard physicist, forwarded hers to Epstein with four words: "Is this worthwhile?" Epstein answered: "sundance is nice „ go." She wrote back: "So let me understand. You are suggesting tourism?"
Ian Osborne, the financier, forwarded his with a sharper note: "Same shit. Peter doesn't even attend. I will tell him that he should stop them using his name."
That last line is the most interesting sentence in the thread, because the roster Osborne forwarded lists Peter Thiel himself as a 2013 participant. The documents do not settle who was right. They show a retreat sold on Thiel's name, and a recipient telling Epstein the name was hollow.
The Epstein on the list is a different man
Entry 30 on the roster reads "Jeff Epstein, fmr CFO, Oracle. Fmr CFO, DoubleClick. Fmr CFO, King World Productions." That is Jeffrey E. Epstein, the finance executive Oracle named CFO in 2008, who left in 2011. He shares a name with the financier and nothing else in these documents.
The mix-up is easy to make and it is already loose. At least one public Epstein-files archive headlines its page on these documents as Jeffrey Epstein's "inclusion" in the Dialog invite list. The documents do not support that. Epstein received the list because two invitees forwarded it to him. The only Epstein on it is Oracle's former CFO.
Thirteen years later, the roster reads like the AI establishment
The 2013 descriptions are of their time: Quora, Slide, Chegg, early Palantir. Read against 2026, a different pattern shows up.
Adam D'Angelo, listed as CEO of Quora, joined OpenAI's board in 2018, voted with three others to remove Sam Altman in 2023, and was the only one of them to stay. CNBC still listed him on the board in July 2026.
Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, all listed, co-founded Palantir, now one of the defining AI platform companies in government and defense.
Reid Hoffman, listed as LinkedIn's founder, later co-founded the AI company Inflection.
Luke Muehlhauser is listed as head of "Singularity University." He was in fact executive director of the Singularity Institute, renamed MIRI in 2013 and one of the first organizations devoted to AI risk. He now leads AI governance grantmaking at Open Philanthropy.
Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, then at MIT, became two of the best-known economists of AI and work.
The roster also includes a former senator, a sitting governor and a future one, a future federal judge, two Nobel laureates and a Fox News anchor. It was built to impress.
What this list is not
It is not an Epstein list, and we are not publishing it as one. Nearly all of these 129 entries appear in the Epstein files for a single reason: an invitee forwarded a marketing email to him. Nothing in these documents shows any of them knew Epstein, met him, or knew he would see their names. Presenting the full roster under his name would attach him to people the record does not connect to him. That is how a namesake CFO becomes a viral claim, and it is the kind of error a searchable archive exists to prevent.
The documents do show something narrower and real: in 2012, accomplished people asked Epstein whether elite gatherings were worth their time, and he answered.
Read the documents yourself
The full thread is searchable in our free Epstein files index, along with the rest of the 400,000-plus documents: search "Dialog 2014". Researchers and newsrooms can query the same index through our free API.
Earlier reporting on Dialog and the Epstein files: Forbes, June 18, 2026.
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