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Notes -
Epstein's Unanswered Questions
In a recent speech at the Turning Point USA conference, Tucker Carlson criticized the administration's recent closing of the book on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Carlson alleged that there was 'no answer' to his central question, namely how a "high school math teacher at Dalton" became a "billionaire" who owned the largest private residence in Manhattan "by providing accounting advice". Apparently, this is a question for which no answer has ever been provided. According to him, the truth is that Israel provided Epstein with his money.
In this comment, I will suggest
(1) By far the most plausible explanation for the source of Epstein's wealth
(2) Implausibilities in the Mossad agent theory
How Did Jeffrey Epstein Get Rich?
Jeffrey Epstein was born in the early 1950s to a working class family in Coney Island. He was an extremely smart student with a talent for maths and physics, and graduated high school two years early.
He pursued a major in math at Cooper Union and then at NYU (for just under three years), which he dropped out from, then took a job as a math teacher at Dalton aged 21. Dalton, which as I noted recently is the most progressive of Manhattan's old prep schools, was undergoing a time of transition. It had become co-ed a decade earlier, and - in the long aftermath of the sexual revolution of the 1960s - liberalized in other ways too. Unlike the city's public schools, subject to the strict demands of NY's extraordinarily powerful teachers' union, private schools can hire who they want.
In the 1970s, with the city in slow-motion financial crisis, tuition at elite private schools was also much lower than today, in inflation-adjusted terms about a quarter of the price. As youth became prioritized above all else and the peak of the baby boom in education led to increased demand for teachers (the boom itself had peaked in the late 1950s, meaning the mid-70s were peak demand for high schools) hiring a 21 year old NYU math dropout as a math and physics teacher was less unusual than it might seem to us. At Dalton, Epstein quickly made an impression and a name for himself as an intelligent, charming and handsome man.
Epstein was at Dalton for around two years. At parent-teacher conferences, a parent who knew Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns (whose own children also studied at the school, but weren't taught by Epstein) was repeatedly impressed by him, thinking he was a smart and capable young man. When Epstein was fired by the school as enrollment numbers dropped, the city-wide spillover from the financial crisis continued to dent confidence in NYC and drive the UES wealthy out to the suburbs, he begged that parent for an introduction.
As Bloomberg found, Greenberg offered Epstein a job - not as a trader, as has repeatedly been falsely alleged - but as a trading floor assistant, essentially a clerk to a trader. This was a clerical job that required no particular education, certainly not a degree (which wasn't necessary even for traders until the mid-1990s).
Epstein arrived on Wall Street in 1976 at an auspicious time, even though the decade was poor for equities. Options on securities had existed for centuries, but had always suffered from a fundamental problem with liquidity because they were largely specific bets made between individual buyers and sellers, with no standardized pricing, each arrangement a custom contract, traded over the counter if at all, with price discovery difficult. From 1973, the CBOE allowed the easy trading of options as a hedging tool which, coupled with the slow emergence of computerized valuation and ledger tools, allowed investment banks and brokerages to offer a much larger and ever more complex array of tools to their corporate clients. This tied into growing financialization that made intermediaries like Bear more important than ever after the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, the oil crisis and growing globalization of American firms who wanted to hedge huge swings in fuel prices, FX rates and so on.
Epstein made partner at Bear in four years. This was not unheard of at the time for an exceptionally talented young man. Even today, while progression is much slower in most of finance, it can still be that fast in booming sub-fields for very smart people. I know of someone at a leading quant firm who made partner at 28, in his first job, after four years, in the early 2020s. In 1981, Epstein was asked to leave Bear for a violation of securities law, possibly for failing to register products with the CFTC. Avoiding an expensive revenge-driven regulatory case would have been the firm's overriding interest, meaning that even for Epstein's brief partnership and overall tenure he would likely have received a decent payout.
In the early 1980s, Epstein floundered as an 'independent' financial consultant. A huge amount of drivel has been written about his activity between 1981 and 1986/1987. He used his looks to embark on brief relationships with a couple of heiresses he ripped off, most notably Ana Obregon. Her father had been caught up in the collapse of a short-lived firm playing games in the reverse repo business; Epstein merely facilitated her family's addition to an already-extant lawsuit with Chase, who were caught up in the affair, and who eventually repaid most of those involved. Epstein took a modest cut for pretty much no work. At around this time, Epstein socialized with some moderately influential people in New York. This was hardly surprising; he had met many advising corporate executives at Bear Stearns. They were also usually new money or outsiders to NYC; not UES generational New Yorkers.
Epstein told some of these people that he was a secret agent for the CIA, and perhaps Mossad. He told others he was deeply involved with Adnan Khashoggi, the world's richest man at that time, who had made his fortune taking a cut of arms deals between the UK, US and Saudi Arabia. Epstein had a fake gimmick Austrian passport, likely of a low quality and kind you could order in gray-area magazines at that time, and carried around a fake handgun sometimes, to impress party guests. He claimed he was an arms dealer, and lated claimed he was involved in facilitating Iran-Contra. There is no evidence of any of these claims, which are regularly repeated by the credulous. Khashoggi was famous at the time and Epstein was a compulsive liar; Khashoggi was one of the most photographed men in the world, his parties and debauchery attracted the world's press, he loved the media and was happy to appear on TV shows about the rich and famous. Epstein does not appear to have been part of his circle, just a liar who pretended he knew him.
My guess is that the occasional cut of a deal with the poorly informed, his payout from Bear and his winnings from Obregon tided Epstein over through to the mid 1980s. According to Vanity Fair, he lived in a small one-bedroom apartment; other sources suggest that he had no office at this time other than a temporary space he occasionally rented. Not exactly the lifestyle of an ultra-rich international arms dealer man of mystery.
The true source of Epstein's fortune dates to 1986, and his meeting with Les Wexner. Wexner had taken over his parents' clothing store in Ohio and built it into a chain of discount stores, which he then leveraged to buy and found a number of other store chains, including Victoria's Secret and Bath and Body Works. Wexner didn't need to move to New York (he could easily have run the conglomerate from Columbus, as he now does), but he chose to, and chose to buy a series of ever more extravagant homes in Manhattan as his fortune grew. In 1986, Wexner was an almost-50-year-old billionaire who had never been associated with any woman, was unmarried, and was widely considered a 'confirmed bachelor'. He was on magazine covers as 'the bachelor billionaire', with all the implicit subtext. There was rumor in both Columbus and Manhattan.
That year, Epstein met an insurance executive named Robert Meister on a flight from New York to Palm Beach. The insurance executive was taken in by Epstein's charm and bluster (no doubt full of stories about Khashoggi, international deals, arms, scandal) and invited him to an event also attended by Wexner after Epstein repeatedly showed up to his racquetball games and begged to meet Wexner. Epstein charmed Wexner, and within a year they were 'business partners', with Epstein increasingly directing Wexner's investments. It is impossible to do more than speculate here, but Wexner's business partner's thoughts, followed by some other anecdotes from the Vanity Fair piece:
Wexner's own friends, according to several sources, believed that Wexner and Epstein were in a romantic relationship, and referred to him as "the boyfriend". Epstein denied he and Wexner had a sexual relationship in a filmed deposition.
In the early 1990s, well into his fifties, and at the urging of his elderly mother (who abused him in company meetings and was his unspoken co-CEO) Wexner married a London-based corporate lawyer in her early 30s. Epstein wrote the prenuptial agreement. The couple moved back to Ohio and had four children. Wexner stayed close with Epstein, and gave him control over his finances and investments. Even very rich people regularly make terrible financial decisions, especially when love is involved. Anyone who has been in the presence of that rare, 99.9th percentile charisma knows that very few people are immune to it, no matter their usual sobriety.
The bond between an older and younger man, protege and elder, can be particularly strong in cases. Unlike some thieves, Epstein didn't even take all the money, because as will become clear, he didn't need to.
Behind the BS, Wexner was Epstein's only ever client. Which brings us, at long last, to the money. Epstein 'stole' $46m from Wexner according to Wexner, and made at least tens of millions more in asset management fees in which he was paid (as is common practice) a percentage of the money he made his client. Wexner’s business was already turning over $3bn a year by the early 80s, with exceptionally high margins for the already lucrative clothing retail business. Of course, Epstein didn't invest the money himself. Instead, he just handed it (as was made clear in the recent Jes Staley case) to JP Morgan and a handful of other banks and firms, who did the work for him. Fortunately for him, Epstein was again lucky. The bull market of the age mean that even an index fund for the S&P 500 would have returned almost 500%, meaning that Epstein's loot, plus his share of Wexner's own gains, could easily have amounted to over a billion dollars by the early 2000s in a 2-and-20 arrangement, without Epstein doing anything more than acting as a middleman between private wealth teams at a few big Wall Street banks and his dear friend Les.
Was Jeffrey Epstein an Agent for Israeli Intelligence?
It is important to be clear about the specific nature of this allegation. By the late 1990s, many of the social connections Epstein had fantasized and lied about the in the 1980s were real. He really did know Bill and Hillary Clinton, Oprah, and various other important and famous people. He was not the most well-connected man in the country, and there were social scenes in which he was less widely known, but the combination of his relationship with Maxwell, who had been raised into the British elite and had connections he didn't, in addition to Wexner's money, had been good for him. Now well-connected in Washington and internationally, in part because Wexner had introduced Epstein to his social club of Zionist activist billionaires (the Lauder family etc) who Epstein had tried and failed to pitch his 'financial advisory' services to, Epstein made friends with Ehud Barak, the Labor Prime Minister of Israel. Barak's influence in the Israeli state was already declining; he would be the final left-wing Israeli leader.
It is to me entirely plausible that Epstein trafficked gossip to Mossad, and likely also American intelligence agencies. It is possible, although unlikely, he was paid for it, and I suspect anyone who did pay would have found out, as so many of Epstein's associates did over the course of his life, that he was full of shit, but it may have happened. This is different, however, from the Israeli state being the source of his wealth and power. I will summarise some reasons here:
The substantial majority of those alleged to have been victims of Epstein's supposed blackmail scheme were Zionist Jews. Consider this logically. You do not need to blackmail rich Jewish-American billionaires to support Israel. They will do it for free. The idea of Israeli intelligence spending a huge percentage of their budget on destroying the goodwill of their number one supporters who already spend billions lobbying for Israel is absurd. Step One: Gather prominent people who already support Israel, often fervently. Step Two: Film them having sex with underage prostitutes. Step Three: Tell them to keep supporting Israel Or Else... Anyone who approves that operation likes burning money.
Even the gentiles allegedly involved in the scheme had no natural hostility toward Israel. Most were old-school WASPs uninvested in either the socialist or Islamic angles of Palestinian liberation. Almost no Muslims were involved. If you were Mossad and wanted to blackmail people ambivalent or hostile toward Israel into supporting it, you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims, particularly in the Gulf. You would not target Alan Dershowitz. The blackmail argument betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic purpose of blackmail. It also betrays an understanding of diaspora Jewish politics and Mossad's influence over it. Most critically, those rich Americans who were more skeptical of Israel do not appear to have associated much with Epstein (likely because that isn't really their crowd). Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.
Epstein had no ingrained loyalty to Israel beyond that he was ethnically Jewish (like 7 million other Americans), and so there is no good reason for Mossad to trust him with one of the most expensive intelligence operations in history. There were and are plenty of charismatic Israeli-American businessmen, who have served in the army and who in some cases have connections to intelligence, that Mossad could would have prioritized for an overseas influence operation. Many were - unlike Epstein - actually successful on Wall Street or in other industries. A random conman and compulsive liar who had been fired from every real job he ever had isn't a good target for this kind of operation. It is telling that while "Mossad wanted to blackmail Americans into doing Israel's bidding" sounds like a clever plan, nobody can even present a compelling case for why Jeffrey Epstein's inviting of various influential pre-existing zionists into his social circle would actually serve the goals of that plan. Was there some great mass of principled Anti-Israel (largely Jewish, presumably) Americans just waiting to go full BDS if Mossad didn't have the sex tapes? A poor argument at best.
Much of the argument for Epstein's supposed connections to Israel involves either Ehud Barak (whose influence in the country was again on the decline, who was PM for a very brief period, and who was 'collected' by Epstein as just another famous political or media figure to show off at events like the Clintons, Prince Andrew etc) or an alleged connection to Robert Maxwell. There is no evidence that Epstein ever met Robert Maxwell beyond hearsay by anonymous callers into a popular Epstein grifter podcast that they 'supposedly' met in London in the late 1980s. Again, no photographs exist, no record of them being at the same social event or party exists (interesting given that there are tens of thousands of pictures of Epstein at big social events over the last thirty years; he didn't shy away from a camera, and neither did Maxwell). Maxwell was considered a hero by Israeli intelligence because he facilitated weapon and plane part shipments, illicitly, from the Soviet Union, France and elsewhere in the early years of Israel's existence. He was badly connected in America, such that his takeover of the New York Post was a desperate attempt to try to lobby for a bailout for his failing media empire, which collapsed upon his death.
I think a point you stake a claim on doesn't necessarily withstand scrutiny.
Epstein wasn't a pathological liar. He was a sociopath who lied when it suited him, that's not the same as compulsive lying. For your examples, he was lying to ingratiate himself with higher social circles. He also maintained his fortune, and as you said, he left it in the hands of professionals. That's proof that he had an honest assessment of himself, not one overblown as we would expect from other sorts of behavioral pathologies. It might be easy for a "boy toy" to get himself in a good position, staying there isn't easy, and you've described a competent man.
You then stake on the idea of intelligence agencies not working with liars and conmen, that's exactly what they do. Treachery, betrayal, is considered the gravest sin. The lowest circle of the Inferno, the ice is full of traitors. What has the US done, time and again? Turned spies against their country of origin. If the US government can find a reason to trust someone who commits the gravest sin below treachery to God, no doubt with as little slack as they're given, they can find a reason to trust a guy who lied at parties and fumbled around early in his career. It's an idea from how the world should be, or an idea from how the world operates in fiction about spies. None of what you describe of his background is specifically disqualifying for his use as an asset. The question is the link, whether his connections make sense, or the impact, whether blackmail makes sense.
Israel, as a state, knows history isn't over, and they act like it. They're operating from a timeline looking to the end of the century and the next. Having the US as an enduring ally is an existential requirement, just as is keeping every country around them unstable until they have enough of a technological edge to assert permanent regional supremacy. They have reason to run a perpetual blackmail machine, including targeted those who appear to be on their side. Appearing like it isn't enough when the game is whether your country keeps existing. It could be, as @Quantumfreakonomics wonders, that for some it was a carrot, and others a stick. It could be that the stick becomes a carrot. Once they've got you on tape fucking one 17 year old, what's ten more? And on that note, you think the sorts of guys hearing about Sex Monster Island aren't aware of the power of the jews in America? They'd notice if they never saw any other jew. I'm reaching here, but you've also reached in looking for benign explanations. Like with Epstein's death, you start with the frame of suicide, so you make the explanation for why. I would ask, given what we know about his life and how often men like him skirt justice, is it probable that rather than torching literally any VIP he could draw from the list of flights, he instead just killed himself? It's not.
There is also maxwellhill. Ghislaine Maxwell had a prominent hand in the general psy-opping of the giant psy-op that is Reddit. She was, maybe still is, an intelligence asset. What was Epstein, then?
This part of the theory was always baffling. Why would a known socialite working to pull off a psyop use her real name?
She made the account in 2006. It has her last name but connecting that would be tenuous without knowing a lot about her. Her name also isn't the meat of the allegations. It's that a weird, politically active and well-connected account had repeated lapses in activity that could be tagged to events in the life of a similarly weird, well-connected woman, the activity halting completely when that woman was arrested.
Eh, if that post is the meat of the allegations, I would quite strongly lean towards it being a coincidence.
The evidence seems to boil down to:
Alignment of gaps in posting with two big events in Ghislaine Maxwell's life. Just two events? Surely a person this public and active will have had more than two known events during which they could not have been on Reddit. Did the internet sleuths check for that? Why no mention? Seems like the potential for cherry-picking is great.
The reddit user posted pro-pedophilia dogwhistles. Pedophilia absolutely mindkills normies, so it's not surprising they overindex on this (and preferring world models in which your enemies are a small number of individuals with many aliases is a curiously universal tendency: see the standard 4chan argument where all the disagreeing posts in a thread are insinuated to be by the same person, or more recently organised as a raid by some discord), but this in isolation is actually a fairy weak Bayesian signal considering that Reddit powermods are a famously degenerate bunch. Also, wasn't the narrative about Ghislaine Maxwell that she looked more like a case of someone who would (for whatever reason) do anything for Epstein, than like a proactive pedophile?
The username.
The reddit user stopped posting after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest. From what I understand, this happened well after the Reddit user started being dogpiled on the suspicion of being Ghislaine Maxwell; it is plausible enough that the Reddit user abandoned their account from the pressure (I imagine they were getting smothered in loads of hatemail, and there were probably some e-bloodhounds on the case who would have gotten to their personal email, phone number, address etc.).
Against this, we have:
The low base probability.
The extra low base probability that an active, put-together socialite would have the time and motivation to be a Reddit powermod. Again, Reddit mods are a famously low-human-capital bunch; is the amount of energy the job takes even compatible with normal functioning?
The Reddit user, per the screenshots in your post, seems to have primarily posted tech and privacy activism news. This alone codes so heavily male that, if I saw it on some aggregator blog being linked from HN with a female name attached, I would pull the "I bet this person is a transwoman" card. (Fun game to play with tech blogs.) Am I supposed to believe that, on top of being a rich socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell also was a one-in-a-million unicorn nerd girl with male self-actualization patterns who is into privacy and free speech rights?
All the other evidence that one would expect to be found under such a level of scrutiny but is conspicuously absent. Did the Reddit user ever insinuate insider knowledge of finance or high society, which Maxwell would have had? Reddit's status economy places a high value on "I have this uncle who has real insider information so let me explain to you plebs". Would the powermod have foregone this opportunity? What about the absolute standard things OSINTers do such as trying to infer time zones from posting patterns? Are we to believe that Maxwell had perfect opsec about this while being so conspicuously trash about other things?
In the end, "Epstein's manic pixie also secretly controlled Reddit and used it to spread hypnotic pedo propaganda" seems too much like the sort of appealing but unrealistic narrative that people with main character syndrome would fall for (like, "everyone's political archenemy once slighted me by deleting my edgy post on /r/offmychest; this is personal"), plus the QAnon tendency of yearning for the legible tropes of cartoon villains, and then confirmation bias would do the rest.
It did not. maxwellhill's last post was June 30, 2020. Maxwell was arrested July 2, 2020. I would wonder if claims of harassment preceding maxwellhill's disappearance were propagated from the mods who claimed they were still active in modmail when, obviously, they weren't.
"Coincidence" has no explanatory power. "Reddit-type" is just wrong. If the account were made in 2014 it might, the account was made in 2006. This indicates a different category of person. It indicates someone very savvy in tech, which Maxwell is. The probability also isn't low. Bayes favors Ghislaine. The name is one bit of information, her lapses in activity is two, or four. It's true these examples could be cherry-picked, but the question isn't only how much the stopping coinciding with her arrest increases her probability, but how much it decreases the probability of it being someone else.
For Ghislaine herself, assuming the number of all users on reddit in 2020, which best I can tell was 600 million, the probability difference ranges from being >5 million times more likely to >150 million times more likely. The lack of probability for the others says enough. But we're not looking at everybody, we're looking at a specific subset of all people who stopped using reddit. For the definition of the power-user, the most probable explanation is an involuntary stop. That means death or incarceration. If it's incarceration, it's Ghislaine. If it's death, then we consider the probable causes for death for a user who posted every single day then abruptly and completely stopped. That's an instant death. Heart attack, blood clot, accident, manslaughter, homicide, suicide. That would narrow it to deaths on June 30 and July 1, but let's say we expand it out to a week, just because. That's 5500 people.
The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero. We can round way up and say it's exactly one person. Ghislaine, or Rando, and with two options, their probability sums to 1. What's the probability Rando would be savvy enough to register an account in 2006? Probably high, given their acumen. What's the probability vs Ghislaine they would name themselves "maxwellhill?" Let's say indeterminate. What's the probability they would show similar interests? Again, probably high. What's the probability they would also have prior lapses in activity that could be tied to specific outings? Very low.
It's not 50/50, but even if it were, it's Ghislaine. It's 90/10 her favor. We rounded up so realistically it's 99/1. Super-realistically it's 100/0, which I know you can't actually say under Bayes. Fortunately in this little area of reality, we can say. It was her.
Ahahahahahahahahahaha.
Bayes doesn't work if you don't accurately evaluate the evidence.
Would mark as "bad."
Everything following "The probability of one person in a selection of 5500 deaths being skilled enough to be a Top 10 redditor is zero" is charity extended to my interlocutor. With sub-1% chance of death and sub-1% chance of a voluntary stop, the probability of it being Ghislaine Maxwell is already over 90%.What's the probability alone of someone incorporating a bit of personal information into their reddit username? 5%? How's it change when our options for maxwellhill are Ghislaine Maxwell and person who probably doesn't exist?
This is not how evaluating coincidences should work.
https://www.econlib.org/just-a-coincidence
What are the chances that out of 8 billion plus people in the world, it's you and me right now debating this? Astronomical really.
Someone with a massive public profile doing shady shit would have -10000% probability to put their last name as their Reddit handle where they were a power user and top mod.
It's far more plausible it's just a coincidence, unless there is strong evidence to even consider this hypothesis at all. (There isn't, which is why your merely privileging the hypothesis.)
See also: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-secret-reddit-account/
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