HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022952.tif

It’s an absurdly vast house, among the largest in Manhattan, but the dining room is windowless, creating a hermetic or stop-time sense, broken only by the household help ferrying in time-of-day-appropriate foods and beverages. In sweatshirt, draw-string pants, palm beach slippers, and half glasses, Jeffrey Epstein sits at the head of the table. He spends most of his day in the dining room, remote from the world, in front of a lap top and beside a row of reading glasses (there are a lot of them in case, apparently, he misplaces a pair, but being quite meticulous he never does) advising, or instructing, a startling collection of the rich and powerful, slotted in on an hourly basis. The apartness of Epstein’s dining room might seem to offer some buffer in this leveled, angry age for a super rich man who attends to even more fabulously rich men. On the other hand, with the paparazzi often posted near by, the outside world seem dangerously close too. (Once I arrived for a visit and found several police cars blocking the street and thought the worst—they’d come for Jeffrey. But it was a security detail for a controversial head of state, also visiting him.) His subject for the morning is “hyper wealth.” His subject is always wealth—how capital should react to the given global political, economic, and cultural moment. The otherwise baronial dining room is disturbed by an ever-present white board, on which he scribbles calculations and notes, conducting perhaps the world’s most rarified economics class, often to many of the world’s most rarefied economists. Epstein’s apartness or parallel life in part reflects much of the other- worldly characteristics of the wealth revolution that began in the late 1970s and that continued through the Wall Street boom of the 80s, the tech boom of the 90s—surviving, to often bitter attack, the banking crisis—and that has now seen the emergence of the international billionaire and oligarch class. Epstein’s way to riches was to become a student of such wealth as it has grown to an unanticipated and disruptive scale. 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. It is, like much of what he does, a conspiracist’s fantasy. The six men at this dinner, all technology entrepreneurs, represented, together, several hundred billion dollars. “In the past, only governments had this kind of money,” says Epstein making something of a pedagogical point, “money of a reality altering scale. 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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022952