Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion hosted high‑profile guests including heads of state, tech founders, Bill Gates and Prince Andrew

Date: Saturday, October 8 2016 08:05 PM From: jeffrey E. <[email protected]> To: Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]>; It’s an absurdly vast house, among the largest in Manhattan, but the dining room is grand but peaceful, creating a hermetic or stop-time sense, broken only by the household staff ferrying in time-of-day-appropriate exotic foods and beverages. The real world seems terribly far away, but with paparazzi often posted near by, it’s 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 him . But it was a massive security detail for a well known head of state who had come for tea. We met several years before he became arguably the world’s most notorious sex offender. In 2002, his plane, a meticulously appointed 727, ferried a group of people to the TED conference in Monterey. He was the mysterious and peculiarly gracious host arriving after everyone had boarded: tanned, relaxed, attentive, soliciting every guest’s story and views, and accompanied by three young women not his daughters, witty, poised, helpful, and beautiful—out of a men’s magazine fantasy of the luxe life. One more thing about this trip suggesting something of his unique view of the public world and what you got to see when you are near him. Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with their company rising into the stratosphere, came out to see his plane on the Monterey tarmac and, with a few other Googlers, literally ran whooping from one end of the plane to the other. Then, sitting in the plane’s plush living room, they described, in what I could not be sure was a put-on or entrepreneurial brainstorm, the future of search .. Since that trip, and through his travails, I have often been invited to his house to participate in the conversations of the newest ideas that often take place there. In sweatshirt, draw-string pants, palm beach slippers, and half glasses, Jeffrey Epstein—that Epstein, most recently embroiled in charges involved under age women ,Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew—spends most of his day at his dining room table in the 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) conducting what must surely be the world’s most extraordinary colloquial. Pictures on the table have Jeffrey and prime minister, princes, leading scientists.with fidel castro next to the photo with pope, I guess his attempt at levity. These meetings, and this lifestyle, have somehow stayed private or secret—or apart—not out of any formal or stated restrictions, but because, in some sense, it would be very hard to explain just what you’re doing there with a well known sex offender ina mouth dropping home flaunting all moderation. And yet, defying controversy , and tolerating his societal tone deafness—or shy attitude toward the zeitgeist—still so many come. Gladly. Willingly. Feeling that his invitation is frankly quite an extraordinary privilege. Among his frequent guests is Bill Gates, for whom Epstein has become a friend, proposing a way to leverage the resources of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to accommodate many other fortunes, so that, Epstein explains, “you might join 10 or 20 billionaires on one giving project.” They can leverage your unique experience and expertise in the philanthropic world and learn from your early mistakes. As part of a many friends encouraged effort to get “out in front” of the notice that might be expected when it was revealed the number and wide diversity of the most rarified thinkers of our generation that come to visit . Epstein agreed to a limited on-the-record conversation with me. His subject, on a morning in late fall, sitting at the dining room table—its humorous but baronial quality disturbed by an ever-present white board—is “hyper wealth.” His subject is always wealth—how capital , in uber amounts should react to the given new global political, economic, and cultural moment. His stock in trade is not the making of money, (his proletariat background not withstanding ) but the issues that arise when wealth growing at a heretofore unimaginable rate, makes its entrance , altering many basic economic, social, and personal calculations. Watching his presentation recounts a math class of the mighty. The professor at the blackboard and the students ( the titans ), still hoping they are not called upon to answer a difficult question. 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, over a hundred billion dollars and now trying to figure out how to use their resources in order to help shape the world. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023627