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News, is ever vitriolic in its coverage of Epstein), with a twinkle in his eye and obvious enjoyment, to tales of Epstein escapades. It is an outréness that Epstein seems to cultivate. In his Paris apartment, 10,000 square feet on the Avenue Foch, a neighborhood otherwise occupied by foreign potentates, there is a stuffed baby elephant in his living room—that is, the elephant in the room. (Epstein says too it’s a reminder that elephants have 23 copies of tumor suppressor genes and humans have only 1.) The single book on his bedside table is Lolita (he is, beyond the joke, a great Nobokov fan). And, too, he seems often to be right. Since I began working on this piece in September, Epstein predictions about the price of oil, yen, ruble, and euro have all born out. If I had invested $100,000 the way Epstein said I should in early September, by the end of January I would have made $2.4 million. (Alas, I did not invest.) At any one moment, he is making a series of bets for himself and others. Recently he identified a dozen or so promising quants, each hawking their own special-sauce algorithm, and planned to test their math with investments of up to $5 million each. But don’t mistake him for running anything like a workaday hedge fund; this is much more a privileged association. Money is always about the club it gets you into. Most everyone who is now of a certain age and ambition and status grew up in, and found they were temperamentally suited to, the era of wealth that started HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022908