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also notable in the fixed hierarchy of who comes to whose turf, that everybody, when they went to see Epstein, comes to him. A week in late September, U.N. week as it happened, began, on Sunday, at Epstein’s house with a colloquial for billionaires—Gates, Mort Zuckerman, and Peter Thiel [TK]. Epstein, preternaturally responsive to both the price of oil and to the politics of the middle of east, entertained that evening a delegation from Qatar, including Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim, the foreign minister. Hamad, indeed, lives across the street in a similarly furnished house—he and Epstein have the same decorator. Epstein, in his relaxed and amused manner, kept prodding: “Why are you financing the bad guys? What do you get out of that?” The Qatarians, in some mild diplomatic discomfort, seemed most worried that their bid for the World Cup might be compromised by bribery allegations. At 9:00 next morning, Epstein is joined for breakfast in the dining room by Reid Weingarten, who’s represented among other fat cats in trouble, Worldcom’s Bernie Ebbers and Goldman Sach’s Lloyd Blankfein and is one of attorney general Eric Holder’s closest friends. Weingarten, horse, with a cold, and dejected, is just back from a failed defense of former Connecticut Governor John Rowland. After a blow by blow of the trial, there’s a discussion of the Qartarian’s visit—Epstein is serving chocolate made from pistachios grown on the Sheikh’s farm—and speculation about who actually controls ISIS. “Why?” I asked Weingarten, when Epstein briefly steps out of the room, “do some many people keep coming back here, everything considered.” “Why we camp out here? I guess because there’s no place like it.” Epstein summons in the next person cooling his heels in the ante-room. It’s a young man named Brock Pierce, a former child actor, and dotcom high flyer—a principle in a gaming company called DEN, a notorious dotcom burnout, with its own sex scandal—who 1s now a leading investor in Bitcoin. He describe himself as the “one of the most active investors in the field.” And, indeed, is the first clear explanation I actually get about Bitcoin. It is so good that Epstein stops him and checks to see if his next appointment is here. And seconds later, Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and President of Harvard, enters the dining room. Summers, off Diet Coke, digs deep into the Sheikh’s chocolates, focuses in on the Bitcoin investor. “Okay,” he says, after listening for a bit, “I have opportunities here. But an additional feature of my decision problem roughly speaking is that the worst that could happen to you is that you could lose all the money you put into it. Whereas I could go from being seen as a figure of some probity and some intelligence to being a figure of much less intelligence and much less probity...” “Well,” says Pierce in some dramatic understatement, “it is true that you are HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022849