2024: When Epstein Smoke Meets Epstein Fire, Perhaps
Early on in COVID, I was periodically doing some work at this WeWork with one guy. His back-fence neighbor had kids his age, so they were “friends” in the way that guys are simply out of logistical convenience. My friend’s back-fence neighbor, who I believe was a defense attorney and who I met once, was obsessed with the Jeffrey Epstein case. Apparently he’d go around the front of my friend’s house, burst in the door, and scream out: “I saw the manifest of his plane! Tom Hanks flew on it!” This happened for four to five months.
Epstein is no doubt an interesting case, because if you believe that most rich people belong to some club and do nefarious stuff together in that club, he’s all the ammo you need. His story also popped at a perfect time whereby you had people more concerned about:
It’s an interesting rabbit hole, absolutely.
Look at this here video:
If you don’t want to read that article, let me just pull-quote the first paragraph:
On Monday, Sept. 8, 2014, Jeffrey Epstein had a full calendar. He was scheduled to meet that day with Bill Gates, Thomas Pritzker, Leon Black and Mortimer Zuckerman, four of the richest men in the country, according to schedules and emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
That’s a combined net worth of … well, let’s do some math.
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So, that’s about … what? $130B of meetings in one day. How the hell did Epstein get those four meetings in one day?
Well, other rich guys always say “I needed him for help raising money” or “I need him for help with large gifts.” Lawrence Summers, of Harvard and Obama fame, said he needed him with help raising $1M for his wife’s PBS project. I get that Epstein traveled in these circles and was probably a “connector,” and that’s reasonable. Maybe that’s the Occam’s Razor. But … if you have billions of dollars, why do you need some random guy in a townhouse on 76th Street to “find money” for you or “help you with large gifts?” Don’t you have access to the best accountants and lawyers in the world, at that level?
It definitely seems like some of these guys maybe wanted something else from him. What could that be? I will let you speculate. Am I saying every rich is a pedophile? No. But I am saying a lot of rich guys are inherently sociopaths and they know they’re at a perch where they can get away with a lot of stuff, so … maybe they went for it?
Do I think that means Epstein was killed? No. He might have been, sure. But he also might have wanted to avoid life in prison and took an easier, faster way out.
Melinda Gates walked a tightrope with the comment of her not being able to “trust what they had” in discussing how Epstein and Bill’s dynamic played into Melinda and Bill’s divorce.
As for Leon Black, we have some legal proceedings on him from 2022.
People ran as far as possible from Epstein starting in about spring 2014 — and arguably it should have started way sooner, because his Miami-area conviction was, I believe, 2007 or 2008. Look at how fast MIT tried to run from him in summer ’14.
This meeting day with the $130B of value was after summer 2014. It was that September — so six years after his sexual conviction, and months after other major players and institutions were trying to create distance.
There’s something here. It could be as simple as “he was a connector” and/or “He knew the secrets of all those guys, and traded their intel around that way.” It could be much more devious.
What’s your take?
A-CSM, SAFe 6.0 SA, ICAgile CP
11 个月I think when it comes to money, most very rich people became very rich people because they have zero filter or judgment about who someone is as a person. If someone can help them with a financial opportunity, they will work with them. As you say, there's no way they hadn't known for years about the monster Jeffrey Epstein was. It wasn't a secret, even before his first conviction (Trump hinted at it to the New Yorker about it for a profile in 2002). If it meant being less rich and not interacting with people like that (or even much less of a monster than that), I'd be happy to be less rich. Probably one of the dozens of reasons I'm not rich.