Good morning. Manhattan federal prosecutors are investigating Tesla’s use of company funds on a secret project that had been described internally as a house for Chief Executive Elon Musk, people familiar with the matter said.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York has sought information about personal benefits paid to Musk, how much Tesla spent on the project—which called for a spacious glass structure to be built in the Austin, Texas, area—and what it was for, the people said.

• The background: The Wall Street Journal was the first to report in July that Tesla board members had investigated whether company resources were misused on the secret effort, known internally as “Project 42,” and whether Musk was personally involved. The outcome of Tesla’s internal investigation couldn’t be learned.
   
• SEC investigation: The Securities and Exchange Commission has also opened a civil investigation into Project 42 and is seeking similar information from the company, one of the people said. The SDNY and SEC investigations are in their early stages and may not lead to formal allegations of wrongdoing.
   
• Tesla driving range also under scrutiny: Federal prosecutors also have sought information about the driving range of Tesla’s electric vehicles, people familiar with the matter said. Reuters reported in July that Tesla had inflated the projected distance its vehicles could travel on a single battery charge.

How Jeffrey Epstein tried to tap into Trump’s circle.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Jeffrey Epstein began setting up meetings with people close to Donald Trump. He introduced some of them to another of his associates, a top Russian diplomat.

Although Trump was a sizable underdog to Hillary Clinton, Epstein began saying in 2016 that he thought Trump could win, and the convicted sex offender bragged about how many people in Trump’s orbit he knew, according to people he met with at the time.

Epstein scheduled lunches with venture capitalist Peter Thiel and real-estate investor Thomas Barrack in 2016, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. At the time, both were high-profile financial backers of Trump’s campaign.

• Rudy Giuliani has been found liable for defaming two Georgia election workers, setting the stage for a jury trial to determine how much money the former Trump lawyer must pay for spreading conspiracy theories about them fabricating ballots.
   
• Long before his private jet plunged from the sky, Yevgeny Prigozhin suspected it could be the stage for his assassination. Aboard, Prigozhin sought to evade a growing dragnet of sanctions and wanted lists, according to former Russian air force officers, Wagner defectors, African and Middle Eastern officials and other people familiar with his travel routine.
   
• Companies will have to disclose more details about the income taxes they pay to government authorities under new requirements approved by the Financial Accounting Standards Board, a move to provide investors with greater transparency.

Europe’s biggest wildfire this century rages in Greece. 

A wildfire in northern Greece has become the biggest observed in Europe this century, burning an area larger than New York City, and fueling a debate about Greece’s shortcomings in adapting to the dangers of southern Europe’s increasingly hot and dry summers.

The fire in the Evros region, near Greece’s border with Turkey, has been raging for 12 days and has so far burned some 312 square miles, according to the National Observatory of Athens. The fire has killed at least 21 people, including a group of 18 migrants who were trapped by the flames in a forest last week.

• Johannesburg Fire Kills at Least 73 in Multistory Building

• Hurricanes aren’t just getting a lot more devastating, they are getting more intense more quickly. That makes the destruction from storms like Hurricane Idalia harder to predict.
   
• Ukraine launched its largest drone attack on military targets across Russia since the war began, disabling several military aircraft in a strike on the Pskov air base, as Moscow unleashed the most sustained missile barrage on the Ukrainian capital in months.
   
• Gauges of activity in China’s economy showed signs of weakness in August, heaping extra pressure on policy makers to revive crumbling growth as consumers keep a tight leash on spending and factories are hit by sinking exports.

• Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s China trip that ended Wednesday marked the resumption of economic and commercial dialogue between Washington and Beijing, offering a glimmer of hope among U.S. companies that say they face increasingly hostile business conditions in China.
   
• Five months into his detention in a Russian prison, no date has been made public for the trial of Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter caught in a justice system in which defendants can wait for a year or more before their cases are heard.
   
• Logistics companies are increasingly building artificial intelligence technology into their operations, but many say they’re taking it slow when it comes to incorporating the kind of chatbots that are becoming a growing part of the consumer scene.
   
• Workers who make around $55,000 a year or less would be eligible for overtime by default under the plan—extending eligibility to 3.6 million more workers, the Labor Department said Wednesday. The proposed rule would raise the annual salary threshold from the current $35,568 a year, set at the start of 2020.
   
• UBS booked a record $29 billion net profit last quarter after it integrated Credit Suisse into its books. But the gargantuan gain comes with an equally large challenge to meld the banking giants.

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