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It's absolutely amazing to me that you quoted my question, then regurgitated the same talking points I said I wasn't convinced by. This explanation just papers over all the weird stuff by saying "IDK he was really charismatic or something."
But unless Epstein was literally the most charismatic man of all time, there's a lot of charismatic people out there, but Epstein's arrangements were extraordinary. There's no other examples I've ever seen of a billionaire handing over PoA to his finance guy, when it comes up the normal tone industry people use about it is that it's shocking and they never saw anyone else do that. Maybe Wexner was gay, but once again, we don't have any other examples of wealthy gay men getting conned at this scale by a man who, however handsome, didn't even live with Wexner and must have been much too busy to schtupp him very often.
You just pass over every extraordinary and weird aspect of Epstein's life by saying he was charismatic or gay. Ok, there are a lot of charismatic gay men out there, yet there's only one Epstein.
This reminds me a lot of Reza Aslan's biography of Jesus, Zealot, in that Aslan constantly used historical accounts of other Jewish messiahs and assumed Jesus must have been exactly the same as them. Except that, you know, Jesus was different. You can tell because his name and his likeness are everywhere, and the other Jewish messiahs are mostly only remembered in reference to Jesus.
I think Epstein was charming, in that con artist way, because he seems to have had a track record of convincing people to give him a break, to get him introductions to jobs, to let him manage their money, etc. It wasn't just Wexner, he was just the biggest fish Epstein hooked.
The whole reason Epstein is such a big deal is because he had a laundry list of famous contacts, which has now blown up as the alleged paedophile/underage sex scandal. How did he get all those people to come to his parties, let him meet them in their own environments, fly out on his plane to his island? Yeah, Ghislaine Maxwell probably was very helpful in getting access to the likes of Prince Andrew, but Epstein had established himself already when he met her. He was charming, he was plausible, he seemed to have money or connections to money.
You can theorise all you like about "he must have been run as an intelligence agent by some agency or government that set it all up for him" but that alone won't do it; nobody is going to Jim The Spy's party if Jim is boring and dull.
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You don't have to be the most charismatic man in the world, you just need to find the one person who thinks you are. It's a pretty fine distinction but most yucks are somebody's yum, we've all seen incredibly mismatched couples and so on.
Right, and @FiveHourMarathon says there’s no precedent. There are examples of billionaires handing over their fortune to be managed by others, although the small number of billionaires and fact that these kinds of private financial affairs would usually never be reported on unless there was either a famous legal case or high profile scandal / crime surrounding the arrangement affects visibility.
But if you look more generally, Epstein had been around super rich people to some extent for more than ten years when he met Wexner in the 80s. He had met a large number. All he needed was one. And he had a very good record of charming rich people. He charmed Ace Greenberg as a teacher. He charmed Bear Stearns’ rich clients. He was very good at charming even wealthy women, obviously.
Lauren Sanchez married one man who became a billionaire, then seduced (as a middle-aged woman!) one of the richest men in the world, convinced him to leave his wife in an extremely costly divorce, had herself made the figurehead of his yacht, and got a nine figure wedding out of it all. In total she cost Bezos dozens of times what Epstein made from Wexner.
99.9th percentile charisma people exist, you’ve probably met one or two. Most are harmless and most of the harmful ones are relatively powerless, but coupled with intelligence a few standard deviations above the norm and extreme personal ambition (as noted by Greenberg and others) and what Epstein is alleged to have done with Wexner really isn’t so impossible.
I am reminded of a supposed fact about scammers - that they will often have deliberate inconsistencies, typos, and so on because it helps them not waste time. They filter out the people who will notice and ask questions.
To me this seems absurd, who would fall for that?
But people do, and the mechanisms of that don't always match our intuitions.
See: Lauren Sanchez, as you mention.
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