EFTA01200525

It's an absurdly vast house, among the largest in 
Manhattan, but the dining room is windowless, creating 
a hermetic or stop-time sense, broken only by the 
household staff ferrying in time-of-day-appropriate 
foods and beverages. 
In sweatshirt, draw-string pants, palm beach 
slippers, and half glasses, Jeffrey Epstein sits at the head 
of the table. He spends most of his day in the dining 
room in front of a laptop and beside a row of reading 
glasses (there are a lot of them in case, apparently, he 
misplaces a pair, but being quite meticulous he never 
does) advising or instructing a startling collection of the 
rich and powerful, who are slotted in on an hourly basis. 
The apartness of Epstein's dining room might seem 
to offer some buffer for a super rich man who attends to 
even more fabulously rich men (and the occasional 
extremely rich woman). But with the paparazzi often 
posted near by, the outside world is dangerously close 
too. Once I arrived for a visit and found several police 
cars blocking the street and thought the worst—they'd 
come for Jeffrey. But it was a security detail for a 
controversial head of state who was visiting him. 
His subject, on this morning in early November 
during a set of interviews he's agreed to have with me 
about his life and views, is "hyper wealth." His subject 
is always wealth—how capital should react to the given 
global political, economic, and cultural moment. The 
faux-baronial quality of the dining room is disturbed by 
an ever-present white board, where he scribbles 
EFTA01200525

calculations and notes, conducting the world's most 
rarified economics class, often attended by many of the 
world's finance ministers and foremost economists. 
His stock in trade is not precisely the making of 
money, but the issues that arise when money, at a 
heretofore unimaginable rate, makes itself, altering 
many basic economic, social, and personal calculations. 
He recounts a dinner he had two nights before. The 
scene is, like much of what he does, a conspiracy 
theorist's fantasy—the six men at this dinner, all 
technology entrepreneurs, representing, together, several 
hundred billion dollars and now trying to figure out how 
to use it to shape the world to their liking. 
"In the past, only governments had this kind of 
money, money of a reality altering scale," says Epstein 
in a chipper and smoothed-out Brooklynese. "In fact, it 
used to be that the rich, reaching a certain point of 
philanthropy, merely hoped to help make the world a 
better place, now they want to change the world. 
Rockefeller and Carnegie were, as examples of social-
engineering philanthropy, unique. They alone had such 
resources and will. Now you have legions of people who 
have to give away vastly larger fortunes than 
Rockefeller or Carnegie had at their disposal, or might 
even have imagined. 
"Except that it's actually hard to give away this 
kind of wealth, without unintended consequences that 
can cause more problems than you're solving." 
EFTA01200526

Epstein's long-time business thesis is that the rich 
know very little about money. They may know about 
their own businesses, but the great sums that are the 
result are ultimately an afterthought and demand an 
entirely different sort of intellectual discipline. The 
Forbes 400, says Epstein, not immune to an amount of 
wonder, increased their wealth by $500 billion last year, 
meaning, in effect, that on average every Forbes-list 
billionaire makes more than another billion every year. 
And, points out the 62-year-old Epstein, they will 
almost all be dead in 40 years, most well before that, 
meaning $4.2 trillion, compounding everyday, will have 
to be given away. "So, to understand the future, what 
you have to begin to do is follow the money, not in 
Watergate-like terms backwards, as in who has gotten it, 
but forwards to where it will go and who will get it." 
Epstein can find himself echoing aspects of 
Thomas Piketty on the inequities of the accumulation of 
wealth ("the divide is between people with assets, which 
appreciate, and people without assets, who fail to 
advance—that is, of course, the miracle of compounded 
interest"), except for the fact that Epstein, knowing the 
rich, understands a point that Piketty doesn't: "Nobody, 
nobody, wants to give it all to their children. Everybody 
now has the modern appreciation that one of the curses 
of great wealth is that it can make your kids weird and 
fucked up." 
Epstein's position in this private allotment of a 
decent fraction of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product is 
EFTA01200527

not as a philanthropist but as a sort of adviser or guru or 
brain—a rich whisperer—making him, in addition to 
rich himself, arguably among the most influential people 
you've never heard of. 
Though, likely, you have heard of him—not for his 
prowess with high abstraction, but for a scandal of such 
luridness that he is, for a great many, the poster child for 
the lawlessness of privilege. He is that Epstein, sent to 
jail in 2008 in Palm Beach on a prostitution charge, 
based on the complaints of over a dozen underage girls 
making him, according to the Daily Mail—among his 
most fervent antagonists—"one of America's most 
notorious sex offenders." 
And yet the mighty and powerful, disregarding his 
notoriety, still beat a path to his door. It's a fantastic 
conclave of influence in his dining room: financiers, 
billionaires, heads of state, economic ministers. This 
includes, hardly least of all, Bill Gates, for whom 
Epstein has become a key advisor. Epstein has proposed 
leveraging the resources of the Bill and Melinda Gates 
Foundation to accommodate many other fortunes, so 
that, Epstein explains, "you might join 50 or 60 
billionaires on one giving project." 
Hence, as part of a Gates-encouraged effort to get 
"out in front" of the notice that might be expected to 
greet Gates' public association with him, Epstein—
whom I first met in 2002 as part of a group of TED 
participants he was ferrying on his plane to the west 
coast—agreed in early fall to these on-the-record 
EFTA01200528

conversations with me. He hoped that, six years after his 
release from prison, he could begin to rebuild his public 
reputation. 
Then, just before the New Year, Epstein forwarded 
me a heads-up email that Alan Dershowtiz, one of 
Epstein's longtime friends and occasional legal 
advisors—they have a bickering brotherly 
relationship— had received from a reporter at Politico. 
The Politico reporter had been following Epstein-related 
court filings and found a new one added to an old 
lawsuit with some rather jaw-dropping claims. The civil 
filing, based on claims of one of the plaintiffs, purported 
to connect a catch-all of bold-faced names associated 
with Epstein more than a decade ago, including 
Dershowitz and Britain's Prince Andrew, to a "sex 
slave" ring. Indeed, she claimed that she had been 
forced to have sex with Dershowitz and the Prince at 
Epstein's command. 
Epstein, who sometimes seems to have an out-of-
body attitude toward his own fate and bad press, said 
that while the claims were ludicrous—putting 
Dershowitz in a sex slave ring, he said, ought to point 
out just how ludicrous—he thought it might provoke 
"quite a show." In short order, Prince Andrew's alleged 
involvement sent the U.K. into tabloid frenzy (even the 
normally sniffy Guardian, in full anti- royal and anti-
billionaire fever, joined in), which then effectively 
exported the story back to the U.S., where Epstein's 
EFTA01200529

now-long-defunct connection to Bill Clinton, suddenly 
became a shadow over Hillary, and hence big news. 
"I told you," said Epstein. 
There is Epstein in his inner world, trying, ostrich like, 
not to look out. Little beyond his strict realm seems 
palatable or even all that familiar to him. Not long ago, 
when I met him for lunch in the West Village, he noted 
that he hadn't been out to lunch in a restaurant in ten 
years. It was a not particularly pleasant experience for 
him and we were done in 30 minutes. 
Then there is the outside world pressed to the glass, 
appalled and titillated by the monster inside the big 
house. Press accounts recycle the mysterious billionaire 
mythology—a man of vast and unsourced riches living 
in a parallel universe of absolute entitlement—with brief 
glimpses of him stepping out of the house (the same 
photos endlessly republished), and the assumption of 
depravity inside. 
In fact, the life in the house, without wife or 
children or conventional domestic demeanor, in some 
way conforms to the scripted fantasies: a life somewhere 
between Daddy Warbucks and Eyes Wide Shut. There is 
indeed a group of young women—in their twenties and 
thirties—who act as Epstein's support staff and 
companions. Some have worked for him for many years, 
marrying, having children, and continuing as part of his 
business and household infrastructure. One woman, on 
an afternoon when I was there, had just returned from an 
EFTA01200530

around-the-world honeymoon that Epstein had arranged 
for her. Some are, or have been, his romantic interests. 
His present girlfriend, whom he met four years ago at a 
dinner party in New York, is in dental school. One 
former girlfriend, Eva Andersson Dubin, a Swedish 
model and Miss Universe finalist whom Epstein has 
known for more than thirty years, became a doctor—
Epstein sent her to medical school—and married hedge 
funder Glen Dubin. Together they finance the Dubin 
Breast Center at Mount Sinai Hospital. Most of the 
women at one time will travel with Epstein to his other 
floating residences—the ranch in New Mexico, a vast 
apartment in Paris, the island in the Caribbean, the 
house in Palm Beach. 
Epstein will sometimes move a meeting in his 
dining room outside to the park—his idea of going out 
to lunch is a Sabrett's hot dog—with the various girls in 
the house the accompanying entourage, as though 
something out of an 18th-century French court. 
But the Hefnerian prurience can also be quite 
businesslike: poised young women in a mansion on the 
Upper East Side with various office responsibilities are 
really not that different from any of the art galleries in 
the surrounding neighborhood. They mingle freely with 
his powerful guests, not so much as hostesses—or, in 
tabloid language, harem-like "sex slaves"—but as 
attentive students (which, of course, might be regarded 
as having its own fetish-like attraction). Epstein 
explicitly denies that there is an sexual quid pro quo. 
EFTA01200531

(TK Jimmy Goldsmith quote.) Still, the constant 
attendance of so many comely young (but of age) 
women—especially given his past conviction—seems 
so outside of conventional living or staffing or social or 
romantic relationships that it is hard to describe in a 
straightforward or straight-faced way. And while it may 
be part of the appeal for the men who come to visit 
Epstein, it is as well a peculiarity they put up with in 
order to spend time with him. It sometimes seems part 
of Epstein's implicit challenge: not just look at me, but 
do you even believe what you see? Or it seems he is just 
oblivious to what others are thinking. A willful and 
perhaps fatal tone deafness. 
The Epstein house/office is, by careful design, 
exclusive and clubby, part hang out, part secret society. 
Along with the fact that, even after his jail term, the rich 
and powerful have continued to so eagerly solicit him, 
it's also notable in the fixed hierarchy of who comes to 
whose turf, that, when they want to see Epstein, they 
tend to come to him. He's created a world and you enter 
it. 
A week in late September—U.N. week as it 
happened—begins, over Sunday lunch, with a colloquial 
for billionaires: Gates, Mort Zuckerman, the real estate 
billionaire and owner of the Daily News, and Peter 
Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook 
investor. The subject is Epstein's concept for the Gates 
Foundation of what he calls a "donor advised fund" that 
could lend the Gates expertise to other billionaires and 
EFTA01200532

his view that only the Gates Foundation has real 
experience in the vast complexities of giving away 
"hyper wealth." 
That evening, Epstein, preternaturally responsive to 
both the price of oil and to the politics of the Middle 
East, entertains a delegation from Qatar, including 
Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim, the foreign minister. Hamad 
lives across the street in a similarly furnished house—he 
and Epstein have the same decorator. Epstein, in his 
relaxed and amused manner, keeps prodding: "Why are 
you financing the bad guys? What do you get out of 
that?" The Qatarians, in some mild diplomatic 
discomfort, seem most worried that their bid for the 
World Cup might be compromised by bribery 
allegations. 
At 9 the next morning, Epstein is joined for 
breakfast in the dining room by Reid Weingarten, who's 
represented, among other fat cats in trouble, 
Worldcom's Bernie Ebbers and Goldman Sachs's Lloyd 
Blankfein, and is one of attorney general Eric Holder's 
closest friends. Weingarten
 is just 
back from a failed defense of former Connecticut 
Governor John Rowland. After a blow-by-blow of the 
trial, there was a discussion of the Qatarian's visit-
Epstein served chocolate made from pistachios grown 
on the Sheikh's farm—and speculation about who 
actually controls ISIS, with Weingarten arguing that the 
Turks are not getting enough scrutiny (he posits that 
ISIS is part of their proxy war against the Kurds). There 
EFTA01200533

is, in Epstein's dining room, always an alternative 
version of world events—"perception versus reality," 
says Epstein, "not to imply that one necessarily has 
greater weight than the other." 
"Why," I ask Weingarten, when Epstein briefly 
steps out of the room, "do so many people keep coming 
back here, everything considered." This is before the 
most recent blowup but has been an obvious question 
ever since his stint in jail. 
"Why we camp out here? I guess because there's 
no place like it." 
Epstein summons in the next person cooling his 
heels in the ante-room. It's a young man named Brock 
Pierce, a former child actor and dotcom high flyer—a 
principle in a gaming company called DEN, a notorious 
dotcom burnout with its own sex scandal—who now 
describes himself as the "the most active investor" in 
Bitcoin and the programmable currency space. 
After a bit, Epstein invites his next appointment to 
join them. Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary 
and President of Harvard, enters the dining room. 
Summers, off Diet Coke, digs deep into the Sheikh 
Hamad chocolates, then focuses in on the Bitcoin 
investor. 
"Okay," he says, after listening for a bit to Pierce 
and his update on the rapid Bitcoin price swings, "I have 
opportunities here. But an additional feature of my 
decision problem, roughly speaking, is that the worst 
that could happen to you is that you could lose all the 
EFTA01200534

money you put into it. Whereas, I could go—I mean I 
don't look that great now—but I could go from being 
seen as a figure of some probity and some intelligence 
to being a figure of much less intelligence and much less 
probity..." 
"Well," says Pierce in seeming dramatic 
understatement, "you are going to have some low 
quality characters playing early in the space..." 
That evening, in the Epstein dining room (he seems 
rarely to use the rest of the house's 50,000 square feet), 
there is a small cocktail party, which includes the former 
Prime Minister of Australian, Kevin Rudd, and 
Thorbjcam Jagland, the head of the Nobel Peace Prize 
Committee, who offers an affable, but generally 
scathing, critique of U.S. diplomacy (and a brief defense 
of Obama's Peace Prize award) and to whom Epstein 
offers a ride back to Europe on his jet. 
The next morning, it's Ehud Barack, the former 
Israeli Prime Minister, for breakfast. Barack is, over his 
omelet, able to defend both Obama and Putin. Then a 
high ranking official from the Obama White House, 
whose name I am asked not to use. There follows the 
former head of the UN Security Council, Hardeep Purie, 
and then head of the central bank of Kazakhstan, Kairat 
Kelimbetov. Then Nathan Myhrvold the former chief 
technology office at Microsoft. Then Martin Nowak, a 
Professor of Biology and Mathematics and Director of 
the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard, the 
institute that Epstein has funded with $30 million. Part 
EFTA01200535

of Nowak's research has to do with trying to "describe 
cancer mathematically." (Epstein preempts Nowak's 
explanation : "Think of cancer the same way as you 
think of a terrorist group. The NSA has been able to 
thwart a great number of terrorism acts by intercepting 
communication signals from one terrorist to another. 
That same dynamic, a form of signal intelligence, of 
finding a terrorist in Europe, can be used to intercept 
communication between cancer sells. Cancer cells 
merely communicate in protean code rather than 
electronic code. If you can decode what the signals are 
saying you can jam those signal between terrorist 
calls—essentially wipe out their cell phones. Likewise if 
you can decode biological signals you can jam them too, 
that's the holy grail.") 
Then Richard Axel, a Nobel prize winner in 
physiology. Then Ron Baron who has $26 billion under 
management in his Baron Fund. Then Josh Harris, the 
co-founder of Apollo Global Management ($164 billion 
under management) and owner of the New Jersey Devils 
and the Philadelphia 76ers. 
What goes on at Epstein's house confirms 
everyone's worst fears about power and the powerful: 
they are all in a secret and shared conversation. The 
world runs on insider information. And, certainly, inside 
Epstein's dining room, it remains a man's world—a rich 
man's world. Indeed his salons tend to offend most 
every aspect of reconstructed gender and political 
sensibilities. 
EFTA01200536

The rich come here, risking public opprobrium, not 
to mention the censure of their wives, because there 
aren't, in this leveled age, too many places where they 
don't have to pretend that they are something other than 
rich and powerful. The conversations at Epstein's are 
the conversations, I suspect, that rich men dream of, but 
in the real world are actually hard to have. At Jeffrey's 
the rich don't have to humor the sensitivities of the rest 
of the world. This is unfiltered power and wealth, which 
seems not so much crass as efficient: this is the way the 
world works, no bullshit. Epstein facilitates that 
conversation without guilt or worry, and, in fact, with 
great glee and enthusiasm. It is not just the remarkable 
flow of valuable information before it hits the New 
York Times (including, while I sat here, notice of the 
resignation of a cabinet secretary a week before it hit the 
Times), but Epstein's almost small-town narrative of the 
doings of the powerful in the face of this week's 
economic trends, a kind of back-fence gossip that just 
happens to feature the comings, goings, and secrets of 
some of the world's most astute players and assorted 
megalomaniacs. 
Wealth is the bond and the experience. Once, at 
lunch in the Epstein dining room with Bill Richardson, 
the former Governor of New Mexico, and past 
Presidential aspirant, when Epstein left the room for a 
few minutes, I asked the obvious question, the one 
everybody asks each other, "How did you meet 
Jeffrey?" Richardson seemed surprised: "Jeffrey," he 
EFTA01200537

said, as though stating what should have been perfectly 
obvious, "is the biggest landowner in New Mexico." 
Epstein has a yet more structural explanation as to 
why, after prison and with continuing tabloid infamy, he 
can maintain his valued place. It comes back, not 
unexpectedly, to the nature or the needs of money: "At a 
certain level of finance, almost everyone is allied with 
an institutional interest. You are part of government, or 
you want to be in government, or you are connected to a 
bank or other portfolio, or you have key relationships 
with certain corporations or industries. Because of my 
situation, I have none of that. I have no institutional ties 
which makes me in some sense one of the few wholly 
independent sources of information and actual honest 
brokers. That's the usefulness of disgrace." 
It's also true that Epstein's circle might be more 
forgiving of disgrace than the rest of the world. Many of 
these men have themselves been on the wrong side of a 
negative story or a scandal or a damaging public 
lawsuit. Any hyper-prominent person might run afoul of 
prosecutors, the political moment, the media, or the 
Internet hoi polloi. And they know that the media's (or 
prosecutors') version of events seldom square's with 
their own. In that way, they are, even after a conviction, 
quite willing to give Epstein the benefit of the doubt. 
There is even a wry sense of humor about his 
propensity for a certain kind of scandal. People who 
know Jeffrey exchange "Jeffrey" stories. "That's 
Jeffrey," says Mort Zuckerman, (whose paper, the Daily 
EFTA01200538

News, is ever vitriolic in its coverage of Epstein), with a 
twinkle in his eye and obvious enjoyment, to tales of 
Epstein escapades. It is an outreness that Epstein seems 
to cultivate. In his Paris apartment, 10,000 square feet 
on the Avenue Foch, a neighborhood otherwise 
occupied by foreign potentates, there is a stuffed baby 
elephant in his living room—that is, the elephant in the 
room. (Epstein says too it's a reminder that elephants 
have 23 copies of tumor suppressor genes and humans 
have only 1.) The single book on his bedside table is 
Lolita (he is, beyond the joke, a great Nobokov fan). 
And, too, he seems often to be right. Since I began 
working on this piece in September, Epstein predictions 
about the price of oil, yen, ruble, and euro have all born 
out. If I had invested $100,000 the way Epstein said I 
should in early September, by the end of January I 
would have made $2.4 million. (Alas, I did not invest.) 
At any one moment, he is making a series of bets for 
himself and others. Recently he identified a dozen or so 
promising quants, each hawking their own special-sauce 
algorithm, and planned to test their math with 
investments of up to $5 million each. But don't mistake 
him for running anything like a workaday hedge fund; 
this is much more a privileged association. Money is 
always about the club it gets you into. 
Most everyone who is now of a certain age and ambition 
and status grew up in, and found they were 
temperamentally suited to, the era of wealth that started 
EFTA01200539

in the late 1970s. A meritocracy on steroids, or, as 
Vanity Fair would baldly dub it, the new establishment, 
an increasingly parallel world, a self-invented one, at 
further and further remove from the ordinary one. 
Epstein's is just one version, albeit picaresque and 
louche, of this shared story. 
Epstein often tells, with some obvious marvel, his 
middle class to riches tale: born in 1953 in Coney 
Island, father worked for the city's Parks Department, 
mother a housewife. 
The captain of the math team at Lafayette High 
school in Bensonhurst, he went on to Cooper Union 
where the tuition is free. He dropped out after two years 
and began taking classes at the NYU's Courant Institute 
of Mathematics. Then, without a college degree, hence 
by a slight of hand, he got a job teaching math and 
physics at Dalton in 1974. (A few years ago, during a 
chance encounter with a former Dalton math department 
chairman, Margo Gumport, I asked her about Epstein. 
She said he was the most brilliant math teacher at 
Dalton in her 50-year career and that she had often 
wondered what had become of him.) 
Dalton was his first exposure to the wealthy. They 
have, he concluded, just as many problems as the people 
in Coney Island, but different ones, almost invariably 
involving divorce and money. "I found it interesting as a 
science experiment," he recalled recently as we chatted 
about his life. "It did not really involve me. I could just 
stand back and watch." 
EFTA01200540

Dalton fathers were attracted to him as a young 
man clearly on the make. Punch Sulzberger, the 
publisher of the New York Times, and a Dalton father at 
the time, tried to recruit Epstein to come to the Times. 
(Epstein recounts a story of riding with Sulzberger in his 
wood paneled station wagon to the family's country 
estate and Sulzberger talking to the chauffer on a phone 
from the backseat to the front.) But he wasn't interested 
in being a journalist. 
In 1976, another Dalton father, asking "wouldn't 
you rather be rich than be a teacher?" introduced him to 
Bear Stearn's chief Ace Greenberg, a conversation 
Epstein recounts as this: 
Greenberg: "Everyone tells me you're super smart 
in math and you're Jewish and you're hungry...so why 
don't you start working here tomorrow?" 
Epstein: "What?" 
Greenberg: "If you're supposed to be so fucking 
smart, don't you understand English?" 
Epstein: "Ok. Count me in." 
Hence, Epstein, like many in the late `70s, arrived 
on Wall Street. By the fortuitous luck of being there at 
that point in time, Epstein was propelled by a much 
more explosive form of upward mobility than had ever 
before existed. With a facility for mathematics as well 
as for getting along with wealthy men, he got rich at an 
even faster rate than so many others. 
He moved into the penthouse of a new building at 
66. Street and Second Avenue—still in the shadow of 
EFTA01200541

the Maxwell Plum era when the 60s on Second was the 
glamour address—a building that was, he says as a fond 
memory, full of "actresses, models, and euro trash." (It 
would shortly become the Studio 54 era, where Epstein, 
who has, proudly, even militantly, never had drink or 
taken any drugs, was a regular). 
If on one side of Wall Street there were the 
salesmen (the Wolf of Wall Street model), on the other 
side there was a new sort of finance type able to 
embrace a level of acute abstraction. "In the past," says 
Epstein, "investing was all about reputations and 
relationships. You invested in a company on the basis of 
who was running it. Did they have integrity? Were they 
married? Good family men? It was a `50s mentality. But 
in the mid `70s options started to be traded. In essence, 
the first formal derivatives. The movement of this 
instrument is not directly attached to the stock price. 
The world of investing began turning from relationships 
to math. In a sense I didn't really make money as much 
as I tried to create it. This was intellectual activity of a 
fairly high order." 
Intellectual activity aside, he met Helen Gurley 
Brown and she made him Cosmopolitan Magazine's 
Bachelor of the Month in 1980. 
"What," I ask, "was your social life like?" 
"Well, I was a playboy." 
"That's all? Not looking to get married?" 
"No. Never. I never wanted to get married. I 
enjoyed sex. I adore women. I wanted freedom. I was 
EFTA01200542

attracted to the rich because of their freedom. But I 
wanted also to avoid their burdens. And I didn't want to 
hide. I didn't want to be a hypocrite. I wanted to be free. 
I was not remotely ambivalent about what I wanted: to 
be free. That was the reason to make money." 
His rise at Bear Stearns was a swift one. And he 
soon became the protegee of Jimmy Cayne (also hired 
by Ace Greenberg on a whim—he met him in a bridge 
game), who would go on to run Bear and to lose his 
fortune in Bear's 2006 collapse). Epstein's leave-taking 
or ouster from Bear was the result of politics, envy, 
overreaching, or a securities violation, or...unclear. But, 
no matter, when he left in 1982 he took with him 
billionaire clients, including Marvin Davis, a real estate 
developer who owns Twentieth Century Fox, and Herb 
Seigel, a major media investor in the 1980s. At this 
oint, Epstein wa 
in the new 
The Concorde phase of his life coincided with the 
Concorde phase of the 1980s. If the `80s were 
happening pell mell in New York, they were happening 
at double time and catch up speed in London. Thirty-
year-old Epstein was living a Lifestyle of the Rich and 
Famous (he befriended the show's star, Robin Leach), at 
English shooting parties and country estates with 
Saturday night black tie dinners, where he was meeting 
the over-the-top families of Europe. 
EFTA01200543

"I didn't take it seriously," Epstein recounts. "I was 
not caught up in it. I wasn't trying to make a billion 
dollars. There was no ultimate goal. It was just fun to 
meet smart people, interesting people. But no long-
range plans. Often no short-term plans either. I would 
head to Kennedy and, on the theory that most important 
events in one's life are serendipitous, I wouldn't decide 
where I was going until I got there." 
At the same time, he was developing a perception, 
or, at least a market differentiation: the hyper wealthy 
had different problems than the very wealthy. Dealing 
with a billion dollars was different from dealing with 
$100 million. "If you had a billion dollars I would think 
the last thing you should be worried about was money, 
in truth money was what you most worried about. How 
to make more of it, how to give away more of it, how to 
protect your children from it, how to hide it from your 
wife or husband, how to minimize your taxes on it. The 
traditional wealth service structure, an accountant, and 
investment advisor, a personal lawyer, and an idiot 
brother-in-law, became hopelessly outdated as amounts 
exponentially increased. 
"You can't spend a billion dollars, you can just 
reallocate it to a different investment class. And you 
can't give away a billion dollars without a vast staff, in 
effect going into the business of giving away money, yet 
another business you are likely to know little about." 
For a period, one part of his activities, he says, was 
recovering monies for countries looted by exiled 
EFTA01200544