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half sister of the Times’ current publisher), tried to recruit Epstein to come to the Times. Epstein recounts a story of riding with Sulzberger in his wood paneled station wagon to the his country estate and Sulzberger talking to the chauffer on a phone from the backseat to the front. In 1976, another Dalton father, asking “wouldn’t you rather be rich than be a teacher?” introduced him to Bear Stern’s chief Ace Greenberg, a conversation Epstein recounts as this: Greenberg: “Everyone tells me you are super smart in math and your Jewish and you’re hungry...so why don’t you start working here tomorrow?” Epstein: “What?” Greenberg: “If your supposed to be so fucking smart why don’t you understand English?” Epstein: “Ok. Count me in.” Hence, Epstein, like many in the late 70s, arrived on Wall Street. As will happen to a generation of others, by the fortuitous luck of being on Wall Street at that point in time, Epstein is transformed by a new, much faster, form of upward mobility. With a facility for getting along with rich men, he transforms at an even faster rate than others being quickly transformed. He moves into a new building at 66" Street and Second Avenue—the Maxwell Plum era when the 60s on Second was the glamour address—a building full of “actresses, models, and super stars.” And yet, the Wolf of Wall Street model may be off here. If on one side of Wall Street there were the salesmen, on the other side there was a new level of acute abstraction and the people who could embrace it. “In the past,” says Epstein, “investing was all about reputations and relationships. You invested in a company on the basis of who was running it. Did they have integrity? Were they married? Good family men? It was a 50’s mentality. But in the mid 70s options started to be traded. In essence, the first formal derivatives. The movement of this instrument is not directly attached to the stock price. The world of investing began turning from relationships to math. In a sense I didn’t really make money as much as I did create it. This was intellectual activity of a fairly high order.” Still, in Wolf of Wall Street-ish fashion, he meets Helen Gurley Brown and she makes him Cosmopolitan Magazine’s Bachelor of the Month in 1980. “What,” I ask, “was your social life like?” “Well, I was a playboy.” “That’s all? Not looking to get married?” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022961