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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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