Epstein’s Commentary on Wealth, Philanthropy, and Future Money Flows

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.” 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 an ultimate after thought 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 1s, of course, the miracle of compounded interest’’), except for the fact that Epstein, knowing the rich, understands a curious 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 not as philanthropist but as a higher sort of banker 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, but not for his prowess with high abstraction, but for a scandal of such luridness that he is, for a great many, the poster child of the lawlessness of privilege, and for a much smaller circle, the poster child for what can happen when you become the target of a resentful world. He is that Epstein, according to the Daily Mail—among his HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022708