Transcription
The release of the Epstein files has given us more than just insight into the disgusting dealings of Jeffrey Epstein himself. It's revealed the biggest trove of evidence of elite collusion ever, like seeing bugs writhing under a rock after the rock got moved because it's a pedophile or something. It looks like Epstein was deeply embedded in every major institution in our country: in tech, in finance, in charity, and even in politics and intelligence. And more importantly, he knew how to connect people between those fields. So despite people knowing full well about his hobbies, many, many people continued to work with him. I'm going to answer a few questions you've probably been wondering. What did Epstein offer that was so appealing that people were willing to risk the ethical and PR nightmare to work with him? And how did the Epstein network, in secret, shape the world we live in today?
It's a story of the ultra-wealthy elites demanding and protecting their own freedom, their own wealth, and their own privacy, while infringing on everyone else's. It's a power structure that explains many other things that will be familiar to everybody watching. We're going to literally shine a light on five of the people in the Epstein network and examine not only how they built our world, but the parallel world they lived in that you don't have access to. We'll start by just introducing some characters and then tell you what it all means.
Let's start out simple with one of the names most associated with Epstein's crimes: Leon Black. Epstein's primary legitimate business was financial management. Rich people would give Epstein their money to invest, he'd advise them on how to protect their wealth from taxation and public scrutiny, and he'd take a little cut. One of Epstein's most prolific clients was Leon Black, the leader of Apollo Global Management, a major investment firm itself. Epstein was managing money for a money manager like a barber's barber, but there are a lot of financial advisors and investors out there, and at least a few of them aren't registered sex offenders. So why Epstein? Was he particularly good at it? Well, he helped Black avoid over a billion in taxes. And in turn, Black paid Epstein massive fees.
Some of the ways Epstein handled Black's money show his aptitude with hiding wealth and avoiding taxes. Epstein managed Black's charitable foundation, which was really a method of hiding Black's wealth from taxation. Epstein was paid in a similarly opaque way. Black transferred money to Epstein's foundation through the LLC Black had entirely for holding the ownership of his car collection. Jeffrey also managed Black's art collection, nearly $2.7 billion worth of valuable pieces, and heralded the strategy of storing cash wealth in art. Many of Black's owned artworks were kept in storage. No one got to even look at or enjoy them, not even Black. And they were used purely as financial instruments for bogus tax deductible donations and as collateral for big cash loans.
I spoke with Anand Giridharadas, who writes about the Epstein class for his outlet, The Ink. He explained why this is so frustrating even if you aren't a big art fan. There's a kind of fantasy in America that we can't tax billionaires because it'll deprive all of us of ideas that are useful. Well, the emails provide a glimpse of what a lot of them are really thinking about, which is how to set up LLCs for the purchase of their paintings to avoid taxes, and how to pass on money to their kids, so their kids become oligarchs, too. These loans are a big part of the extravagant lifestyle these people live — loans you have no access to because you don't own a Picasso or whatever. The parallel world of the wealthy. But this is pretty standard rich people stuff. So again, why Epstein? Let's keep looking.
There's even women in Epstein's orbit, like Kathy Ruemmler. Ruemmler is a high-powered lawyer who frequently communicated with Epstein and called him Uncle Jeffrey. She was a lead lawyer for Goldman Sachs and worked in the Obama administration. Epstein was there for her when Ruemmler interviewed for a job at Facebook, and Epstein bought her lavish gifts. And she also just really isn't a great person. She's describing driving from D.C. to New York and she says something to the effect of, invariably, I'll stop at a rest stop along the way, I'll get out, I'll see a bunch of people who are 100 pounds overweight, and then it'll inspire me to never eat another bite of food in my life out of the fear of ever becoming like one of them.
This is the attitude that a lot of people in this network have to you watching this at home. Whether or not you realize it. It's people like this who are making decisions about what kind of policies we have in government, about the ways in which the banking sector interacts with the mortgage markets. It was just a such a powerful distillation of the contempt that so many people in that super elite feel for the average person. But again, Ruemmler was already powerful when she met Epstein. What are any of these people really gaining from him? Let's look at another.
Boris Nikolic. Nikolic was Epstein's in to the Gates Foundation. He served as Bill Gates' science and technology advisor and had frequent business and social contacts with Epstein. Yes, there are island visits and emails about girls. But there were also emails about using the Gates Foundation to hide money and direct untraceable donations. But Epstein was most obsessed with one form of charitable giving: the donor-advised fund. He chases creating a DAF over half a decade, like Howard Ratner chasing down that opal... [Howard] Holy shit. constantly bringing it up in every context.
Donor-advised funds are basically bank accounts that people can put money in and write off as a charitable tax donation. The fund is then supposed to donate that money to nonprofits, but technically never has to. The donations they do make are attributed to the fund itself, making the original donor completely anonymous. And years after Epstein was registered as a sex offender, many people were interested in creating a DAF with him. Boris Nikolic worked on pulling Gates into it. And bankers at J.P. Morgan helped him put together a pitch. And Epstein's emails are important here because they prove what we all assume: The point was never altruism. The point was tax avoidance and anonymity in donations.
Epstein used his own charitable giving to fund out-there science and to launder his image. His publicist put out numerous press releases referring to him as an education philanthropist, and heralded him for bringing artificial intelligence to Ethiopia, which other emails confirm was a ploy to fix Epstein's Google search results, which were less than favorable.
To dig in further, let's look at two more names that I'll pair together here. Tech billionaires from the PayPal mafia, who both went on to become major political donors, ostensibly on opposite sides: Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. This guy is in there, too, but it really seems like he just wanted to go to the parties. Thiel and Epstein exchanged a number of emails and seemed to be close, both personally and professionally. From investment advice, Thiel told Epstein not to invest in Spotify and only gave him a maybe to investing in Thiel's own company, Palantir. Eventually, Epstein invested millions in Thiel's venture capital fund, Valar Ventures, which means that Epstein had holdings in Stash Financial, Anduril, the autonomous killing machine company, something called Brat Inc, and other big tech companies. But Thiel's venture funds don't have a problem getting investors. So, we still need to figure out what Epstein truly offered, and we'll get to that.
Reid Hoffman also frequently communicated with Epstein. Again, both about money, and just chillin'. Epstein advised Hoffman on large luxury purchases, tried to wrangle him into the DAF scheme, and Hoffman was generally one of Epstein's ins to Silicon Valley. In 2015, Hoffman invited Epstein to an intimate dinner with himself, Musk, Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, some neuroscientists, and a few others. Just months before over half that table would go on to found OpenAI. And AI was an interest of Epstein's. But this dinner epitomizes an important point here. The network.
After PayPal, Hoffman created LinkedIn. [Anand] Reid Hoffman, an Epstein associate and founder of LinkedIn, has talked about in the future, your career will be the network, not a job hierarchy. And he, like Epstein, embodied the network. The network itself, not the individual people, is the key here. It's how they were all connected and what they all do for each other. And we can see that by using a new light. The kind of light you need when you're investigating this type of person, to see what they're really up to. It's connecting each other. And the less well-known people behind them maybe hold the real power now.
Why did Peter Thiel want Epstein as one of his investors? Perhaps due to Thiel's many investments in defense and surveillance tech. Epstein had government connections and even introduced Thiel to William Burns, the onetime head of the CIA. Epstein also took the liberty of recommending Palantir to foreign officials in Israel and across the Middle East. One of Epstein's favorite tech investments was the Israeli tech company Carbyne 911. Epstein helped connect the founders of Carbyne with Trae Stephens, also of Palantir, who ended up on Carbyne's advisory board. Carbyne works to replace the 911 system with artificial intelligence. [Advertisement] Live video. Precise location. Complete situational intelligence. With little to no oversight over how the calls are handled privacy wise. They were purchased by Axon, the makers of tasers and body cameras, and have begun getting contracts across the United States. So, next time you call 911, you could be directed to an AI, stemming from Jeffrey Epstein and Israel.
Lesser known tech investors and CEOs like Epstein's publicist-turned-venture-capitalist, Masha Drokova, communicated with him up until his arrest. Drokova's VC firm Day One Ventures, which she built with the influence, input, and advice of Epstein owns parts of dozens of tech companies, including Sam Altman's surveillance and crypto tech company, world, and Calypso AI, whose founder, Neil Serebryany, Drokova introduced to Epstein. Serebryany particularly seemed to have no issue with Epstein's proclivities. Emails show multiple mentions of girls and Serebryany brags about going to the porn convention in the context of he and Epstein's shared interests. Calypso AI is an AI surveillance company that has contracts with the United States government.
Some of these people must have faced consequences, right? Well, yeah. Our buddy Leon Black left Apollo in shame. But the new CEO, Marc Rowan, also communicated heavily with Epstein. Today, he's in the executive leadership of President Trump's Board of Peace, the organization responsible for continuing to annihilate the Palestinian people and replace their homes with private construction projects intended to enrich others in the Epstein network.
The power of this network, what Epstein and the rest of them could do for the people in the network, is why you rarely see anyone emailing him like, "hey, man, you shouldn't be doing all this stuff." In our networked age, there is a sense that if you can get yourself to the heart of a network like this, the world is your oyster. And at the same time, if you fall out of the network, it is a kind of death. We, the regular people, obviously shouldn't be emulating everything we see in these emails, but if we want to defeat this elite network, there's one thing we do need to do. When you actually see the way they're functioning in this network, they're all on the same team. There's this very powerful network of people who lobby and buy power and buy access and rig the world against regular people. And we're down here thinking that the guy two doors down from us is the biggest obstacle to our progress. And, in fact, the guy two doors down from me was often just another of their victims.
The Epstein network has billions of dollars: power, connections, planes, art, homes. But the most important thing they have is, and I'm sorry if this sounds corny, but it's class solidarity. And the story of this network doesn't end with Epstein's death. The Epstein class is still entrenching themselves into all aspects of our lives, taking us to a pointless war and trying to shape the elections that will determine America's future. We're still living in the Epstein network's world today.
Leon Black's son, Ben Black, who Epstein hosted a birthday party for and who Epstein hired a portrait artist for, is today in charge of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, a government body established during the first Trump administration that provides loans, capital, and insurance to American corporations abroad using taxpayer dollars. That includes insurance for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, a focal point of the Iran War. Meaning a guy Epstein helped commission a painting of will decide which corporations get your tax dollars.
As midterm elections approach, the Epstein network is plotting to seize further control of our government. Reid Hoffman has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to oppose progressive candidates in Democratic primaries. He often uses donor-advised funds to make those donations, a tactic Epstein recommended to him in 2016. And it's possible we wouldn't have today's AI intrusion into our lives without Epstein. While I wasn't able to find any direct ties between Epstein and the heavy hitters like OpenAI or Anthropic, he did fund early AI research, including bankrolling the researchers who coined generative AI and AGI. He also made early investments in the infrastructure behind AI, like data center build-outs, that he never got to see come to fruition.
Looking at these members of the Epstein class shows us that the conspiracy at the heart of our country's biggest problems aren't just about one man. It's about a network, a club of elites across every major industry, and both political parties that have built a web of relationships with each other, designed to keep the rest of us locked out.