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“No. Never. I never wanted to get married. I wanted sex. I liked women. I wanted freedom. I was attracted to the rich because of their freedom. But I wanted also to avoid their burdens. And I didn’t want to hide. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite. I wanted to be free. I was not remotely ambivalent about what I wanted: to be free. That was the reason to make money.” His rise at Bear Sterns was a steep one. And he soon became the protégée of Jimmy Cayne (also hired by Ace Greenberg on a whim—he met him in a bridge game—who would go on to run Bear and to lose his fortune in Bear’s 2006 collapse). Epstein’s leave taking or ouster from Bear is the result of politics, envy, overreaching, or a securities violation, or...unclear. But, no matter, he leaves in 1982 with billionaire clients, including Marvin Davis, a real estate developer who owns Twentieth Century Fox, and Herb Seigel, a major media investor in the 1980s. Epstein is dating Morgan Fairchild, a television star in the 1980s rich-family soap operas, Dallas and Falcon Crest. Now begins the Concorde phase of his life—and the Concorde phase of the 1980s. If the 80s are happening pell mell in New York, they’re happening at double time and catch up speed in London. Epstein is 30 years old and living, in Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous fashion, at English shooting parties at country estates with Saturday night black tie dinners, where he’s meeting the richest families in Europe. “T don’t take it seriously,” Epstein recounts. “I’m not caught up in it. I’m not trying to make a billion dollars. There is no ultimate goal. Or its just to meet smart people, interesting people. But no long-range plans. Often no short-term plans either. I would head to Kennedy and, on the theory that most important events are serendipitous, I wouldn’t decided where I was going until I got there.” At the same time, he is developing a perception, or, at least a market differentiation: the hyper wealthy had different problems than the very wealthy. Dealing with a billion dollars was different from dealing with $100 million: “If you had a billion dollars I would think the last thing you should be worried about was money, in truth money was what you most worried about. How to make more of it, how to give away more of it, how to protect you children from it, how to hide it from your wife or husband, how to minimize your taxes on it. The traditional wealth service structure, an accountant, and investment advisor, a personal lawyer, and an idiot brother-in-law, became hopelessly outdated as amounts exponentially increased. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022737