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“T didn’t take it seriously,” Epstein recounts. “I was not caught up in it. I wasn’t trying to make a billion dollars. There was no ultimate goal. It was just fun 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 in one’s life are serendipitous, I wouldn’t decide where I was going until I got there.” At the same time, he was 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 your 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structure, an accountant, and investment advisor, a personal lawyer, and an idiot brother-in-law, became hopelessly outdated as amounts exponentially increased. “You can’t spend a billion dollars, you can just reallocate it to a different investment class. And you can’t give away a billion dollars without a vast staff, in effect going into the business of giving away money, yet another business you are likely to know little about.” For a period, one part of his activities, he says, was recovering monies for countries looted by exiled HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022913