Epstein Insecurities

Weeks into the war against Iran, I still don’t have a clear idea of the American motivations or goals driving the invasion. That means I - somehow - can’t rule out that this is all an extremely destructive and expensive attempt at drowning out the Epstein files.

So I wanted to draw attention to, and build on, Ezra Klein’s interview with Anand Giridharadas from a couple of months back. Anand writes The Ink and is a self-identified class-traitor. He got to the top of the American social hierarchy and was disgusted by what he found there. He’s been writing and thinking on its hypocrisy for close to a decade.

It’s a wide ranging conversation covering some of Epstein’s background, why he saw utility in, and was then able to, cultivate elites from across the commercial and political spectrum. How we can’t ignore the fact that Epstein’s from Coney Island - and Trump is from Queens - when their needs.

It doesn’t really get into how associating with Epstein may have been driven by how people get off from breaking taboos, but it does get into how the emptiness of winning at capitalism could make a billionaire pre-disposed to a different form of grooming.

The full interview is certainly worth a listen but it’s that last bit I want to dwell on.

“You might have thought you would get rich and you would have access to all the fun parties and you would be a playboy and you would have girls all over you. And for a lot of them, it didn’t work out that way. And you can come into it, and he will give you entree into this, which, for the people who don’t need more money but who maybe want this, is a kind of power and leverage and transactionalism.”

Ezra and Anand spend a small chunk of their conversation discussing one of the great reversals that characterizes our current social culture: “The elite used to work less hours than the working class. And now they work more.”

So the pathway to getting to the top is very different than it was even a century ago. Of course inherited wealth and the landed gentry are very much real forces, but the top is more dynamic that its ever been. Moreover, the money you earn is seen not just as an end but also as a pathway to filling all the needs you thought you were lacking.

That doesn’t just include material goods like the the (multiple) homes in the burbs or the Florida or Monaco docked yacht. It also means sex. It means intimacy. It means you’ll be wanted.

The problem for a lot of the new uber-wealthy is that the characteristics that make you likely to win the economic game - supreme intelligence, unrelenting dedication to the craft - are in many ways antithetical to competing in the social game.

You don’t develop the ability to flirt or come off mysterious or even be vulnerable, by winning at capitalism. Coming up with a brilliant idea, executing on it for years, and interacting more with a computer/bloomberg terminal than any friend, doesn’t develop emotional intelligence.

Not only did this leave many of the men who rose to the top wanting. It was also going to inevitably raise the question of why they had done many of those hard, life-defining things in the first place.

Maybe they did manage a childhood dream but that doesn’t get you equipped to get over latent insecurities. Money is at best a band-aid and hanging out with Epstein promised a cure - because as Ezra and Anand say - he was the living embodiment of a cartoon-like mogul.

So I think we can read the allegiance many of these “objectively” successful men felt to Epstein as an unbelievable indictment of market systems. Not just because there has been such little accountability. But because they were still left so bereft of meaning after, and arguably because, they were successful.

But it gets worse.

You only become honest once you’ve made a billion.

That’s one of my favorite quotes from my time interviewing lawyers that work for oligarchs. It gets me for two reasons. First, that obvious indictment of the system. Second, it makes me wonder about all the almost-stories.

How many people were on the precipice of untold economic power and then said no? It’s easy to assume the answer is zero. But I don’t - maybe I simply can’t let myself - believe that, and yet the billionaire ranks keep growing.

But do you think that Sergey Brin - who features heavily in the Epstein emails - was thinking about that numerical status when he started Google? Or that he thought he would “sell out” and become an Ads machine where the prowess of his company comes less from technological ingenuity and more as acting as capitalism’s most efficient matchmaker? Or that Zuck was thinking about how he would be caving to the political headwinds whenever necessary to keep the theoretical dream of connecting people alive?

My point is that to get to the top even the most idealistic - companies that make and even believe grand manifestos of “doing no evil” - make compromises. They might start small. A questionable deal here, a corner cut there.

But then it gets routinized. The dream slowly gets chipped away. Corrupted. It’s those people that end up garnering the biggest monetary rewards.

The ones with their principles intact probably didn’t even make it onto the most lucrative rolodexes.

The ones who compromised - their morals, their sense of identity - can tell themselves that they compromised to make a dream come true. But the price usually isn’t worth it. Dreams rarely live up to the reality especially when the path to get there is filled with moral landmines. Epstein could milk that loss, that grief. He learned how to provide the access, to fill the unfulfilled wishes, to make the billionaires feel the compromises meant something.