HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022895.tif

calculations and notes, conducting the world’s most rarified economics class, often attended by many of the world’s finance ministers and foremost economists. His stock in trade is not precisely the making of money, but the issues that arise when money, at a heretofore unimaginable rate, makes itself, altering many basic economic, social, and personal calculations. He recounts a dinner he had two nights before. The scene is, like much of what he does, a conspiracy theorist’s fantasy—the six men at this dinner, all technology entrepreneurs, representing, together, several hundred billion dollars and now trying to figure out how to use it to shape the world to their liking. “In the past, only governments had this kind of money, money of a reality altering scale,” says Epstein in a chipper and smoothed-out Brooklynese. “In fact, it used to be that the rich, reaching a certain point of philanthropy, merely hoped to help make the world a better place, now they want to change the world. Rockefeller and Carnegie were, as examples of social- engineering philanthropy, unique. They alone had such resources and will. Now you have legions of people who have to give away vastly larger fortunes than Rockefeller or Carnegie had at their disposal, or might even have imagined. “Except that it’s actually hard to give away this kind of wealth, without unintended consequences that can cause more problems than you’re solving.” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022895