Jeffrey Epstein

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Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal That Undid Him, and All the Justice That Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein by James Patterson, John Connolly, Tim Malloy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, corporate raider, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Murray Gell-Mann, Ponzi scheme, Stephen Hawking, WikiLeaks

For the moment, Epstein was free—free to turn his attention, again, to intellectual pursuits. He launched a website, JeffreyEpsteinScience.com, that featured blog posts such as “Conversations with Jeffrey Epstein,” “The Value of Quantum Computation to Jeffrey Epstein,” “Why Evolutionary Biology Intrigues Jeffrey Epstein,” and “An Understanding of Theoretical Physics from Jeffrey Epstein.” The latter post began: “This is where Jeffrey Epstein takes you to the very cutting edge of the frontiers of knowledge to explore and discuss our basic understanding of the subtle, simple, and hidden [qualities] that lie beneath…our universe.”

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So I am completely aware that never—until the lies were put in a legal pleading at the end of December 2014, it was never alleged that I had any sexual contact with Virginia Roberts. I know that it was alleged that I was a witness to Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged abuse, and that was false. I was never a witness to any of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse. And I wrote that to you, something that you have falsely denied. And I stand on the record. The record is clear that I have categorically denied I was ever a witness to any abuse, that I ever saw Jeffrey Epstein abusing anybody. And—and the very idea that I would stand and talk to Jeffrey Epstein while he was receiving oral sex from Virginia Roberts, which she swore to under oath, is so outrageous, so preposterous, that even David Boies [a prominent lawyer associated with the firm representing Virginia Roberts] said he couldn’t believe it was true. 12:24 p.m.

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Epstein’s Palm Beach property, 358 El Brillo Way (© Chris Bott / Splash News / Corbis) One of the photographs captured on video during the Palm Beach Police Department search warrant walk-through of Epstein’s El Brillo Way residence (Palm Beach Police Department) Jeffrey Epstein’s 1969 high school yearbook photo (Lafayette High School, Brooklyn, New York, 1969) Jeffrey Epstein, Coney Island, circa 1969 (Anonymous) Leslie Wexner, photographed at his home in New York City, 1989 (© Lynn Goldsmith) (L to R) Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Tony Randall, who presided over a November 1991 YIVO Institute event at the Plaza Hotel to honor the late Robert Maxwell (Marina Garnier) (L to R) Deborah Blohm, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Gwendolyn Beck attend a reception at Mar-a-Lago, 1995.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth (New York: Regan Arts, 2016), 125.   5.   Landon Thomas, “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,” New York, October 28, 2002, http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_7912/#.   6.   Shane Croucher, “Jeffrey Epstein Autopsy Finds Hyoid Neck Bone Break, Expert Says It Raises Questions About Strangulation: Report,” Newsweek, August 15, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/jeffrey-epstein-autopsy-neck-hyoid-bone-broken-suicide-homicide-1454457.   7.   Katie Benner and Danielle Ivory, “Jeffrey Epstein Death: 2 Guards Slept Through Checks and Falsified Records,” New York Times, August 13, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-jail-officers.html.   8.   

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Brown and David Smiley, “New Victims Come Forward As Epstein Asks to Be Released from Jail to His Manhattan Mansion,” Miami Herald, July 11, 2019, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article232551882.html. 17.   Paul Lewis and Jon Swaine, “Jeffrey Epstein: Inside the Decade of Scandal Entangling Prince Andrew,” The Guardian, January 10, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/10/jeffrey-epstein-decade-scandal-prince-andrew. 18.   Stephen Rex Brown, “Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Sues Alan Dershowitz as New Sex Trafficking Victim Reveals Herself,” Boston Herald, April 17, 2019, https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/04/17/jeffrey-epstein-accuser-sues-alan-dershowitz-as-new-sex-trafficking-victim-reveals-herself/. 19.   Bridget Read, “Epstein Lawyer Alan Dershowitz Insists He Has a ‘Perfect, Perfect’ Sex Life,” New York, July 19, 2019, https://www.thecut.com/2019/07/epstein-lawyer-alan-dershowitz-says-he-has-perfect-sex-life.html; John Amato, “Dershowitz: ‘I Kept My Underwear On’ During Massage at Epstein’s Mansion,” Crooks and Liars (blog), July 10, 2019, https://crooksandliars.com/2019/07/alan-dershowitz-i-kept-my-underwear-during. 20.   

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Thomas and Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel’s Superspy, 174. 39.   “Jeffrey Epstein v. Bradley Edwards et al.,” https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1509483-exhibits-stm-undisputed-facts-part1.html#document/p606 percent20//. 40.   Ben Schreckinger and Daniel Lippmann, “Meet the Woman Who Ties Jeffrey Epstein to Trump and the Clintons,” Politico Magazine, July 21, 2019, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/21/jeffrey-epstein-trump-clinton-1424120. 41.   Rosie Perper, “The Mysterious Foreign Passport Found in Jeffrey Epstein’s Mansion Was Used to Enter at Least 4 Countries in the 1980s, Prosecutors Say,” Business Insider, July 18, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epstein-saudi-austria-foreign-passport-1980s-2019-7. 42.   

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

Stewart, Matthew Goldstein, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race with His DNA,” New York Times, July 31, 2019, https:// www .nytimes .com /2019 /07 /31 /business /jeffrey -epstein -eugenics .html.   57   Lolita Express : Julia La Roche, “Jeffrey Epstein Attended the ‘Billionaires’ Dinner’ and Now His Presence Has Been Scrubbed,” Yahoo! Finance, July 15, 2019, https:// www .yahoo .com /now /jeffery -epstein -billionaires -dinner -john -brockman -photos -sarah -kellen -173443481 .html.   58   impregnate twenty women at a time : Stewart, Goldstein, and Silver-Greenberg, “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race with His DNA.”   58   freeze his head and penis : Bess Levin, “Jeffrey Epstein Wanted to Have His Penis Frozen and ‘Brought Back to Life in the Future,’ ” Vanity Fair , July 31, 2019, https:// www .vanityfair .com /news /2019 /07 /jeffrey -epstein -transhumanism -cryonics.   58   attributed to : These quotes appear in Bacon’s posthumously published Masculus Partus Temporum , (The Masculine Birth of Time , 1603), which some scholars believe was used or even fabricated by later members of the Royal Society to justify their own misogyny and subjugation of both women and nature.

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CNN Politics, December 3, 2008. https:// www .cnn .com /2008 /POLITICS /12 /03 /sanchez .clinton /index .html. 141   Do just a little reading : Emily Flitter and James B. Stewart, “Bill Gates Met with Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past,” New York Times , October 12, 2019, https:// www .nytimes .com /2019 /10 /12 /business /jeffrey -epstein -bill -gates .html; Tom Sykes, “Prince Andrew Was ‘Given’ ‘Beautiful Young Neurosurgeon’ by Epstein, Says Ex-Housekeeper,” The Daily Beast , November 22, 2019, https:// www .thedailybeast .com /prince -andrew -was -given -beautiful -young -neurosurgeon -by -jeffrey -epstein -says -ex -housekeeper; Kate Briquelet, “Melinda Gates Warned Bill About Jeffrey Epstein,” The Daily Beast , May 7, 2021; Humanity+, “Humanity+ Clarification of Epstein Donation,” accessed August 10, 2021, https:// web .archive .org /web /20210808214020 /https: / /humanityplus .org /humanity -clarification -of -epstein -donation /; “Sustainable Oceans Alliance: Impacting The SGDs,” Clinton Foundation , December 22, 2016, https:// www .clintonfoundation .org /clinton -global -initiative /commitments /sustainable -oceans -alliance -impacting -sgds; Jacob Bernstein, “Whatever Happened to Ghislaine Maxwell’s Plan to Save the Oceans?

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Stewart, “Bill Gates Met with Jeffrey Epstein Many Times, Despite His Past,” New York Times , October 12, 2019, https:// www .nytimes .com /2019 /10 /12 /business /jeffrey -epstein -bill -gates .html; Tom Sykes, “Prince Andrew Was ‘Given’ ‘Beautiful Young Neurosurgeon’ by Epstein, Says Ex-Housekeeper,” The Daily Beast , November 22, 2019, https:// www .thedailybeast .com /prince -andrew -was -given -beautiful -young -neurosurgeon -by -jeffrey -epstein -says -ex -housekeeper; Kate Briquelet, “Melinda Gates Warned Bill About Jeffrey Epstein,” The Daily Beast , May 7, 2021; Humanity+, “Humanity+ Clarification of Epstein Donation,” accessed August 10, 2021, https:// web .archive .org /web /20210808214020 /https: / /humanityplus .org /humanity -clarification -of -epstein -donation /; “Sustainable Oceans Alliance: Impacting The SGDs,” Clinton Foundation , December 22, 2016, https:// www .clintonfoundation .org /clinton -global -initiative /commitments /sustainable -oceans -alliance -impacting -sgds; Jacob Bernstein, “Whatever Happened to Ghislaine Maxwell’s Plan to Save the Oceans?,” The New York Times , August 14, 2019, https:// www .nytimes .com /2019 /08 /14 /style /ghislaine -maxwell -terramar -boats -jeffrey -epstein .html. 141   For this global oligarchy : Amy Julia Harris, Frances Robles, Mike Baker, and William Rashbaum, “How a Ring of Women Allegedly Recruited Girls for Jeffrey Epstein,” New York Times , August 29, 2019, https:// www .nytimes .com /2019 /08 /29 /nyregion /jeffrey -epstein -ghislaine -maxwell .html. 141   Bill Gates has employed this logic : “Bill Gates Buys Big on a Farmland Shopping Spree,” DW , https:// www .dw .com /en /bill -gates -buys -big -on -a -farmland -shopping -spree /a -57134690. 142   “civilizational collapse” : Sissi Cao, “Bill Gates’ Comments On COVID-19 Vaccine Patent Draw Outrage,” Observer , April 27, 2021, https:// observer .com /2021 /04 /bill -gates -oppose -lifting -covid -vaccine -patent -interview /. 142   “despite his cuddly reputation” : Cory Doctorow, “Manufacturing MRNA Vaccines Is Surprisingly Straightforward,” Medium , May 6, 2021, https:// coronavirus .medium .com /manufacturing -mrna -vaccines -is -surprisingly -straightforward -despite -what -bill -gates -thinks -222cffb686ee. 142   Gates argued : Doctorow, “Manufacturing MRNA Vaccines Is Surprisingly Straightforward.” 142   new mRNA vaccines : Kis, Zoltán, Cleo Kontoravdi, Antu K.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

Over the years between 2017 and the present day, as QAnon rose and spread, people across the world watched as an elite continued to get vastly richer even as normal families struggled through first a pandemic and then a global economic crisis. People also saw reports of elite crime rings based on sexual violence. Jeffrey Epstein, one of the leaders of such a criminal enterprise, had an air of credibility having been photographed with the Clintons, Trumps, celebrities and politicians around the world.4 In a turn of events regarded as suspicious by many, he was found dead in his cell of an apparent suicide before he could stand trial.

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Elaborate claims such as these are largely immune to fact-checking due to the impossibility of proving a negative, and the fact that if someone accepts the possibility of such things being true, that requires mistrusting any mainstream source. This means that debunking would require 100 per cent primary sources, which would likely be a lifetime’s work. There is also the challenging truth that elite rings centred around the worst of crimes, such as child abuse, do exist: Jeffrey Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial for running just such a ring,14 while his consort Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on five counts for serving as his facilitator in a sex trafficking conspiracy.15 In other words, conspiracies do exist and happen every day. If a group of three people plan to defraud a fourth, that’s a conspiracy.

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It is not a ridiculous idea that people in power might engage in rape, sexual assault or harassment, or that perpetrators might use their power and connections to escape the consequences of their actions. Harvey Weinstein stayed at the top of Hollywood for many years despite widespread rumours of sexual abuse dating back for decades, only finally being brought down and eventually convicted of rape and sexual assault as a result of the #MeToo movement.1 Jeffrey Epstein, as mentioned earlier, ran an international sex trafficking network that enabled both him and his wealthy friends to sleep with minors – typically teenage girls – for decades, all the while mixing in the public eye with celebrities and top politicians, including both Bill and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It by Daniel Simons, Christopher Chabris

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, Boston Dynamics, butterfly effect, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, ChatGPT, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, financial thriller, forensic accounting, framing effect, George Akerlof, global pandemic, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Jim Simons, John von Neumann, Keith Raniere, Kenneth Rogoff, London Whale, lone genius, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, pattern recognition, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, power law, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart transportation, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systematic bias, TED Talk, transcontinental railway, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Schofield, “The Fake French Minister in a Silicone Mask Who Stole Millions,” BBC News, June 19, 2019 [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48510027]; see also the Persona: The French Deception podcast. 15. D. Mangan and B. Schwartz, “Jeffrey Epstein ‘Misappropriated Vast Sums of Money from Me,’ Les Wexner Says,” CNBC, August 7, 2019 [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/07/jeffrey-epstein-misappropriated-vast-sums-les-wexner-says.html]; G. Sherman, “The Mogul and the Monster: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship with His Biggest Client,” Vanity Fair, July–August 2021 [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-decades-long-relationship-with-his-biggest-client]. 16. Blagojevich was convicted of eighteen felonies and sentenced to fourteen years in prison [https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/iln/chicago/2011/pr1207_01.pdf].

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The rethink prompted by that one outside comment saved the winemaker from joining dozens of wealthy victims who lost about $90 million to the “faux Le Drian.”14 Of course, for the ask-a-friend method to work, you have to be open to changing your opinion in response to the advice you get. Leslie Wexner, the billionaire founder of the L Brands fashion company, admitted in 2019 that the swindler and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had “misappropriated” $46 million from him (a number some observers think is a fraction of the true amount). Before Wexner gave Epstein extensive power over his finances, he was warned by the vice chairman of his own company that Epstein was a con artist, but Wexner chose to trust his gut feelings over the advice of someone with a more objective sense of what was happening.15 WHEN ACCEPTING BEATS CHECKING The last time Chris shopped at a Target store, he was offered an extended warranty on an $8 pair of disposable electric toothbrushes.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Victor Xu, “The Full Letter Read by Brock Turner’s Father at His Sentencing Hearing,” The Stanford Daily, June 8, 2016, https://stanforddaily.com/2016/06/08/the-full-letter-read-by-brock-turners-father-at-his-sentencing-hearing/. 13. Dan Mangan Macias Amanda, “Jury Finds Jeffrey Epstein Friend Ghislaine Maxwell Guilty in Sex Crimes Trial,” CNBC, December 29, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/29/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-ends-jeffrey-epstein-sex-crime-case.html. 14. Emma Ockerman, “The Program That Let Jeffrey Epstein Leave Jail Almost Daily Just Got Scrapped by the Sheriff,” Vice, December 18, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en/article/3a8zvb/the-program-that-let-jeffrey-epstein-leave-jail-almost-daily-just-got-scrapped-by-the-sheriff. Chapter 6: The Exception Factory 1.

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While many states have mandatory minimums for violent crimes and Brock’s convictions in California carried a potential fourteen-year prison sentence, Santa Clara County Superior Court judge Aaron Persky—himself a wealthy white man, Stanford graduate, and college athlete—sentenced Turner to six months at county jail and three years of probation. Turner’s toxic entitlement may have been nurtured in part by his father Dan, who told the court that the verdicts were a “a steep price to pay for twenty minutes of action.”12 Jeffrey Epstein was similarly successful at evading accountability for the extreme sexual violence he perpetrated. In 2008, after years of orchestrating a sex ring composed of underage girls, Epstein avoided federal charges and served just thirteen months in jail.13 During his time in jail, Epstein was permitted to leave the jail for twelve hours a day, six days a week, to work at his office in Florida.14 Only wealthy white men can access such extreme leniency.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

When Isaacson asked if he would use his SpaceX rockets: Ibid. “If there’s some apocalypse scenario”: Ibid. Musk posted his message to Edge.org: Cook, “Elon Musk: You Have No Idea How Close We Are to Killer Robots.” the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein: William K. Rashbaum, Benjamin Weiser, and Michael Gold, “Jeffrey Epstein Dead in Suicide at Jail, Spurring Inquiries,” New York Times, August 10, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-suicide.html. He pointed to DeepMind: Cook, “Elon Musk: You Have No Idea How Close We Are to Killer Robots.” He said danger was five to ten years away: Ibid. Shane Legg described this attitude in his thesis: Shane Legg, “Machine Super Intelligence,” 2008, http://www.vetta.org/documents/Machine_Super_Intelligence.pdf.

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A few weeks later, Musk posted his message to Edge.org, a website overseen by an organization that explored new scientific ideas and hosted an annual gathering called the Billionaires’ Dinner that included such luminaries as Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, and was soon enveloped in controversy after the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, one of its primary financial backers, was arrested for sex trafficking before killing himself in a jail cell. With his message on the Edge Foundation website, Musk was more explicit than he’d been in the past. He pointed to DeepMind as the evidence that the world was racing toward superintelligence.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

There is another aspect to this lack of fairness in the current law enforcement system and that is that rich and powerful people usually do not go to prison unless they have really horrible lawyers. It is not to say that they do not ever get convicted, but when they do it happens in a much different way than with other people. When Bill & Hillary Clinton’s friend Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution and was sentenced to 18 months in prison in a plea deal, of which he served 13, the billionaire was able to spend his days out of prison and at his mansion in West Palm Beach as long as he returned to the prison each night to sleep there.122 Who knew something like that was even an option?

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Perhaps Hillary Clinton lost the election because she had a campaign manager in John Podesta that is suspected of being a pedophile, who had a brother that was a banned lobbyist and collector of pedophilic-related art, she had accepted money and at least six trips on the private jet of a convicted pedophile named Jeffrey Epstein, as had Trump, a trip her husband had also made on 26 different occasions, her right-hand-woman was married to a convicted pedophile in Anthony Weiner, and claimed her favorite pizza place in Washington D.C. is Comet Pizza, a well-known pedophile establishment. Maybe there were too many pedophiles in decision-making roles within her circle of influence for America to feel comfortable with that?

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A company making a play for a lucrative contract with the government might secretly arrange for money to find its way to the politician making the decision in their favor. Or, they might also purchase some incriminating video featuring that same politician from a person running a “Brownstone Operation”, like the one that convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was operating from his private jet called “The Lolita Express”, and his island in the U.S. Virgin Islands called Little Saint James, aka “Orgy Island”.193 Not every high-ranking politician is a pedophile, but everyone is controlled to some degree. People simply do not get to the highest levels without being compromised.

Palace Coup: The Billionaire Brawl Over the Bankrupt Caesars Gaming Empire by Sujeet Indap, Max Frumes

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, data science, deal flow, Donald Trump, family office, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, lockdown, low interest rates, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, NetJets, power law, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, super pumped, Travis Kalanick

However, even that was not free of controversy. Rowan was caught in a frenzy of litigation with the town of Montauk over permits for his lobster shack, Duryea’s. Despite Apollo’s continuing financial success, the headlines had been less kind for Leon Black. Black in 2018 and 2019 had admitted to having ties with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who had been convicted of sex crimes in 2008 and who was later arrested in 2019 on federal charges of sexually abusing girls. Epstein who committed suicide later in 2019 while in custody, had once been a trustee of Black’s family foundation. Epstein had also facilitated Black’s donations to Harvard and MIT.

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“Report Concerning Jeffrey E. Epstein’s Connections to Harvard University,” Harvard internal investigation, May 2020. Indap, Sujeet. “Apollo’s Leon Black seeks to reassure investors over Epstein ties.” Financial Times, August 1, 2019. Goldstein, Matthew and Jessica Silver-Greenberg. “Leon Black Plays Down Ties to Jeffrey Epstein but Is Silent on 2011 Deal.” New York Times, August 1, 2019. Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Russian Interference with 2016 Elections, references to Leon Black. Tett, Gillian. “Distressed-debt players rule the roost in Trump’s White House.” Financial Times, April 27, 2017. Sen, Anirban and Joshua Franklin.

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“Neiman Marcus: How a creditor’s crusade against private equity power went wrong.” Financial Times, October 4, 2020.Bakewell, Sally and Lisa Lee. “Oaktree Deal Crushed a Leveraged Loan and Exposed Market’s Woes.” Bloomberg News, October 7, 2020. “Goldstein, Matthew, Steve Eder and David Enrich. “The Billionaire Who Stood by Jeffrey Epstein.” New York Times, October 12, 2020” “Vandevelde, Mark. “Leon Black on Epstein links: ‘Any suggestion of blackmail is… untrue’” Financial Times, October 29, 2020. About the Authors Sujeet Indap is the US editor of the Lex Column of the Financial Times and contributes stories across the paper.

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

Scannell and Houlder, “US Tax Havens: The New Switzerland.” 54.  One of those who took full advantage of the loosening of American trust law: Jeffrey Epstein. As the New York Times discovered in 2021, “Epstein’s specialty was suggesting ways for wealthy clients to use sophisticated trusts and other investment vehicles.” For more details on Epstein’s use of trusts, see Matthew Goldstein and Steve Elder, “What Jeffrey Epstein Did to Earn $158 Million from Leon Black,” New York Times, 26 January 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/business/jeffrey-epstein-leon-black-apollo.html. 55.  Mider, “Moguls Rent South Dakota Addresses to Dodge Taxes Forever.” 56.  

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

In 2013, they helped: Miriam Gottfried, “Dell Returns to Public Equity Markets,” Wall Street Journal (Dec. 28, 2018), https://www.wsj.com/​articles/​dell-returns-to-public-equity-markets-11546011748. Stewart reached out: James B. Stewart, “The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People,” New York Times (Aug. 12, 2019), https://www.nytimes.com/​2019/​08/​12/​business/​jeffrey-epstein-interview.html. “Epstein, one of the”: Email exchange reviewed by the author. Musk proceeded to self-implode: David Gelles, James B. Stewart, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Kate Kelly, “Elon Musk Details ‘Excruciating’ Personal Toll of Tesla Turmoil,” New York Times (Aug. 16, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/​2018/​08/​16/​business/​elon-musk-interview-tesla.html.

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He concluded that “if and when a final proposal is presented,” the company’s board would consider it and, if approved, shareholders would get a chance to vote. The post only threw Wall Street into greater confusion, sending shares plummeting. Rumors began circulating that Musk might not be able to survive this latest misstep. Influential New York Times business columnist James Stewart heard that Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who had pled guilty to a sex crime involving a teenage girl, was compiling a list of candidates for Tesla chairman, at Musk’s behest. It was a wild claim, in the midst of an unbelievable period. Stewart reached out to Epstein about the rumor, then found himself at the financier’s Manhattan home on August 16 for an interview on the condition it would be “on background,” meaning the information could be reported on but couldn’t be attributed directly to Epstein.

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

For the reader or viewer, what this ends up providing ought to be much more enlightening than the words of any pundit or politician: a sense of real life, the reasons people make the choices they do, and the things that ultimately decide what kind of world we live in. W WOLFF, MICHAEL In July of 2019, after Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest, the journalist Vicky Ward wrote an article for the Daily Beast alleging that Michael Wolff had written a profile on Epstein for New York Magazine which never ran because of concerns over the fact-checking. In Ward’s words, the profile ‘was meant to “rehabilitate” Epstein’s image and would tell of all the billionaires who still, secretly, hung out with Epstein’.

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I was not allowed to call them for comment.’ The lawyers for New York Magazine were wary about making the claims without proof or comment and, according to Yablon, Wolff’s editors weren’t even aware of his arrangement with Epstein. New York Magazine killed the story. In Yablon’s words, this was ‘more of a Michael Wolff story than a Jeffrey Epstein story’. The curious anecdote, which certainly bucks traditional ideas of fact-checking and source verification, tracks with consistent criticism of Michael Wolff (b. 1953) – both his tendency to align himself too closely with powerful figures that he’s ostensibly covering, and his unorthodox relationship with ‘the truth’.

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

Mustafa was in America visiting colleges with his son. The Egyptian was arrested at the Four Seasons Hotel and led away from his family. He was taken to the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the jail that held the Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and would soon hold the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Mustafa wanted to die when he realized where he was going. In London, Arif made his first visit to Westminster Magistrates’ Court from jail and offered £250,000 for bail. He wanted to live at home in South Kensington while he waited for an extradition trial in which a judge would decide whether to send him to the United States.

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Arif was severely depressed and had coronary artery disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, gastritis, sinus tachycardia, sleep apnea, hives, and inflamed nerves, Hugo said. He was still traumatized from his time in Wandsworth Prison, and Fayeeza’s close supervision was keeping her husband alive. A former jail warden from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, where Mustafa had been held and Jeffrey Epstein had died, was called as a witness. Maureen Baird said the jail was dangerously overcrowded, understaffed, and infested with rats, mold, and criminal gangs. It was a gulag, she said. “The facility is so disgusting it’s like a prison in a third-world country,” Ms. Baird said. Suicidal inmates were placed in small single cells with concrete beds surrounded by windows so guards could see them.

Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction by David Enrich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-globalists, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, buy low sell high, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, East Village, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, forensic accounting, high net worth, housing crisis, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Lyft, Mikhail Gorbachev, NetJets, obamacare, offshore financial centre, post-materialism, proprietary trading, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, rolodex, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vision Fund, yield curve

Over the years, McFadden had received a number of internal awards from the bank for her strong performance. But by 2015, she had begun making waves, standing up for what she thought was morally and ethically right. First, she protested that the private bank had created dozens of accounts for and was lending money to Jeffrey Epstein, a politically connected financier who had repeatedly been accused of sexually abusing girls and young women. (Epstein for many years had run his companies out of Henry Villard’s old Madison Avenue mansion.) A few years after being convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor, Epstein had been cut off from his previous bank, JPMorgan, at which point he decamped to Deutsche, as willing as ever to ignore clients’ ugly backgrounds.

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., but It’s Not Mutual,” New York Times, May 24, 2016; transcript of Susanne Craig interview with Donald Trump. “These are guys that shift paper around”: James B. Stewart, “A Tax Loophole for the Rich That Just Won’t Die,” New York Times, November 9, 2017. Epstein at Deutsche: David Enrich and Jo Becker, “Jeffrey Epstein Moved Money Overseas in Transactions His Bank Flagged to U.S.,” New York Times, July 23, 2019. Tammy McFadden: David Enrich, “Deutsche Bank Staff Saw Suspicious Activity in Trump and Kushner Accounts,” New York Times, May 19, 2019. 33. Do Not Utter the Word “Trump” Interviews with Deutsche executives, board members, and consultants.

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business intelligence, Citizen Lab, crowdsourcing, David Strachan, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, forensic accounting, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Live Aid, messenger bag, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype

In early 2016, an anonymous woman—“Katie Johnson” in an initial legal document, “Jane Doe” in a subsequent one—filed a lawsuit against Trump. The plaintiff claimed that, in 1994, when she was thirteen years old and newly arrived in New York City to pursue modeling work, she’d been offered money to attend parties hosted by Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire investor, and attended by Trump. Hair-curling allegations of sexual violence followed: the lawsuit contended that the plaintiff and other minors were forced to perform sex acts on Trump and Epstein, culminating in a “savage sexual attack” by Trump; that Trump had threatened the plaintiff and her family with physical harm should she ever speak; and that both Trump and Epstein were told that the girls involved were underage.

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Epstein, Case 5:16-cv-00797-DMG-KS, United States District Court Central District of California, complaint filed on April 26, 2016 and Jane Doe v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein, Case 1:16-cv-04642, United States District Court Southern District of New York, complaint filed on June 20, 2016. 8 close friends with Donald Trump: Landon Thomas Jr., “Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,” New York, October 28, 2002. 9 widespread allegations that Epstein sexually abused minors: Julie K. Brown, “How a Future Trump Cabinet Member Gave a Serial Sex Abuser the Deal of a Lifetime,” Miami Herald, November 28, 2018. 10 plaintiff’s intermediary in the press: Jon Swaine, “Rape Lawsuits Against Donald Trump Linked to Former TV Producer,” Guardian, July 7, 2016. 11 emerged as doubtful as most journalists: Emily Shugerman, “I Talked to the Woman Accusing Donald Trump of Rape,” Revelist, July 13, 2016. 12 AMI ran several stories shooting down the claims in the lawsuit: “Trump Sued by Teen ‘Sex Slave’ for Alleged ‘Rape’—Donald Blasts ‘Disgusting’ Suit,” RadarOnline.com, April 28, 2016; and “Case Dismissed!

Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable by Joanna Schwartz

Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, George Floyd, Jeffrey Epstein, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, Ronald Reagan

State and local laws, local government politics, defense attorneys’ maneuvering, and plaintiffs’ interests combine to ensure that police officers rarely pay a penny toward financial awards plaintiffs receive. Clay Tiffany died in 2015. One year later, Nick Tartaglione was arrested for murdering four people and burying them in his backyard as part of a drug deal gone wrong. Tartaglione showed up in newspapers again as Jeffrey Epstein’s cellmate; he reportedly cut Epstein down when he first tried to hang himself in the federal jail in New York City. Tartaglione is awaiting trial on charges that could send him to death row. As it turned out, Tiffany was right about Tartaglione being a crooked cop. He was also right to want to know where the money came from.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Nick Tartaglione was arrested: Jonathan Bandler, “Still No Trial Date for Tartaglione Five Years After Orange County Quadruple Homicide,” Journal News, April 9, 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT cut Epstein down: Jonathan Bandler, “Prosecutors: Missing Video of Jeffrey Epstein’s Suicide Found; Why Tartaglione’s Lawyer Wants It,” Journal News, Dec. 19, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT CHAPTER 11. LOCAL GOVERNMENT BUDGETS “Sunday Morning Coming Down”: Cady Drell et al., “40 Saddest Country Songs of All Time,” Rolling Stone, Sept. 17, 2019, www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/40-saddest-country-songs-of-all-time-158907/johnny-cash-sunday-morning-coming-down-42023/.

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

The company zeroed in on three towns beyond the long reach of the Columbus city line along the northern, wealthier arc of the I-270 beltway: Hilliard (“Real People, Real Possibilities”), Dublin (“Where Yesterday Meets Tomorrow”), and New Albany (“America’s Best Suburb”), the last of which the billionaire Les Wexner had created out of the soybean fields with the help of his mysterious consigliere, the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. Amazon laid down its terms, exactly as it was doing with the warehouses it was seeking to build in Ohio and elsewhere. It demanded large incentives: a fifteen-year exemption from property taxes, which, for a standard data center, would be worth about $5.4 million. “Vadata strives to operate its facilities as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible,” the company stated in justifying its demands to New Albany.

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when Amazon chose Ohio: Mark Williams, “Amazon’s Central Ohio Data Centers Now Open,” The Columbus Dispatch, October 18, 2016. “I love that they don’t come”: Orban, Ahead in the Cloud, 7. created out of the soybean fields: Emily Steel, Steve Eder, Sapna Maheshwari, and Matthew Goldstein, “How Jeffrey Epstein Used the Billionaire Behind Victoria’s Secret for Wealth and Women,” The New York Times, July 25, 2019. Amazon laid down its terms: All subsequent correspondence between the three towns and Amazon obtained by public information requests to the towns by the author in April 2019. sales tax exemption … worth $77 million: Mya Frazier, “Amazon Isn’t Paying Its Electric Bills.

Buffett by Roger Lowenstein

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cashless society, collective bargaining, computerized trading, corporate raider, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, index card, index fund, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, Jeffrey Epstein, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, Michael Milken, moral hazard, Paul Samuelson, random walk, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, traveling salesman, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-coupon bond

Simmons, like some of the others, made a pilgrimage to Omaha, a trip that invariably included a steak dinner, a leisurely tour of Buffett’s childhood haunts, and an earful of his wisdom. Buffett didn’t say much during the Post’s board meetings. But occasionally a comment would spark him. At one meeting, Jeffrey Epstein, a young M.B.A. who was scouting for new fields of investment, gave an overview of what consumers were spending in each part of the media and entertainment industry. His figure for home entertainment was $5 billion. Buffett’s bushy eyebrows went up about three feet. “That $5 billion is a pretty interesting number,” he noted.

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Tom Murphy [interview and 1988 management conference]. 7. Dan Burke; Tom Murphy. Dialogue is largely from Buffett, in Goldenson, Beating the Odds, 464–65, supplemented by Auletta, Three Blind Mice, 41–42. 8. Goldenson, Beating the Odds, 465. 9. Ibid. 10. Dan Burke; Tom Murphy. 11. Reconstruction from Dan Burke, Jeffrey Epstein, Ev Erlick, Michael Mallardi, Tom Murphy, Frederick Pierce, and Bruce Wasserstein. 12. Anthony Bianco, “Why Warren Buffett Is Breaking His Own Rules,” Business Week, April 15, 1985. 13. John Greenwald, “High Times for T. Boone Pickens,” Time, March 14, 1985. 14. John C. Coffee, Jr., Louis Lowenstein, and Susan Rose-Ackerman, eds., Knights, Raiders, and Targets: The Impact of the Hostile Takeover (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 22–23. 15.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

In September 2020, a Daily Kos/Civiqs poll reported that over half of the Republicans surveyed believed either partially or mostly in QAnon’s theories . . . at least the theories they were aware of. Because tumble further down the QAnon rabbit hole, and you’ll find Satanic Panic–esque, flagrantly fascist beliefs that not every subscriber even knows about (at least not at first): theories about Jeffrey Epstein co-conspiring with Tom Hanks to molest hordes of minors, Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of children in order to prolong her life, the Rothschilds running a centuries-old ring of Satan worshippers, and beyond. But QAnon quickly grew to encapsulate much more than stereotypical far-right extremists.

Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian by Boyle, Frankie

banking crisis, Boris Johnson, call centre, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, David Attenborough, Dennis Tito, discovery of penicillin, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Etonian, falling living standards, Google Earth, heat death of the universe, high-speed rail, hive mind, Jeffrey Epstein, low interest rates, negative equity, Ocado, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, payday loans, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Red Clydeside, Right to Buy, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, wage slave

I can’t help thinking there’s a twenty-year-old rugby player coming to in a field somewhere, his chest stitched like a 1950s football, barely able to get to his knees with his new nonagenarian heart. I’m being unfair – the royals do pretend to do their bit for the community. Prince Andrew abseiled down the Shard for charity. He didn’t raise as much money as everyone had hoped, as he made it down alive. He had to quit as Trade Envoy due to his links with a convicted paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. A member of the royal family shouldn’t be making us look stupid overseas. That’s clearly the job of the SAS, the MOD and Jordan. The Sun referred to Epstein as the ‘Paedophile Billionaire’, which reminds me of the old children’s rhyme: ‘The grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand friends.

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies by Barry Meier

Airbnb, business intelligence, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, global pandemic, Global Witness, index card, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Londongrad, medical malpractice, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

During his career as a journalist, Glenn Simpson had never won a Pulitzer Prize or even been a finalist for one. But that January, he was celebrating another kind of achievement—he had just planted a negative piece about Donald Trump in the news media. The article, published on the website of Vice News, dealt with Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, a money manager and sexual predator who had admitted as part of a plea deal struck in 2007 that he had hired a young teenage girl to give him sexual massages. The plea deal was back in the news because dozens of other female victims of Epstein were seeking to reopen the case. And with Trump running for the Republican nomination, journalists were interested in his relationship with Epstein.

Work! Consume! Die! by Boyle, Frankie

Boris Johnson, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, heat death of the universe, Jeffrey Epstein, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, millennium bug, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, open immigration, pez dispenser, Piper Alpha, presumed consent, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, the medium is the message, trade route, WikiLeaks

He refused to quit, despite his links with a convicted paedophile. A member of the royal family shouldn’t be making us look stupid overseas. That’s clearly the job of the SAS, the MOD and Jordan. I find the reports about this billionaire paedophile highly upsetting. To think I got palmed off with lousy fruit pastilles. The Sun referred to Jeffrey Epstein as the ‘Paedophile Billionaire’. Is that like a new version of that Channel 4 show, ‘The Secret Millionaire’? Every episode ends with a guy saying, ‘I have to reveal I’m not really a binman. I’m a billionaire and I’d like to offer you this cheque – in exchange for your kids.’ It reminds me of the old children’s rhyme.

The Loop: How Technology Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back by Jacob Ward

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, drone strike, endowment effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, hindsight bias, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeffrey Epstein, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Lyft, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, natural language processing, non-fungible token, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, QAnon, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, smart cities, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Levy, survivorship bias, TikTok, Turing test

In other words, stories by Winston were not being advertised against, making them less directly valuable to the Times. This sort of inadvertent algorithmic blacklisting was happening to Pulitzer finalists and was making coverage of some of the most important stories of the moment a literal money-loser for news outlets. Just think of what these algorithms might make of the Jeffrey Epstein trial, of death in Gaza, of morgues overflowing with coronavirus victims. Nandini Jammi, who runs a brand-safety consultancy for advertisers, explained the problem to me this way: “Instead of actually looking for criminal content, these brand-safety technology vendors have identified keywords such as ‘crime,’ or ‘violence,’ or ‘terrorist.’

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

(Wrong.) QAnon consumed her. She was a researcher, a rabbit-holer, a clicker of links, known in her circle for knowing things, facts and numbers beyond her friends’ measure. She wanted to save the 800,000 children she incorrectly believed disappeared every year. She thought Disney was working with Jeffrey Epstein. Race haunted her so much she pretended it wasn’t there. She scoffed at the notion that Trump’s use of the word lynching evoked anything but a rope that knows no color. When pundits complained about the word, she vowed to say “lynching” herself every day. “FACTS!!!!!!!” she all-capped. “White liberals continue to support a party that tells them that they should regret being white.”

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

his literary agent and the organizer of the proceedings, John Brockman, had written: Here’s some specifics re: the agenda: FRIDAY NIGHT 6pm Cocktails—Mezzanine Level 7pm Dinner—Mezzanine Level—Studio 5 SATURDAY MORNING 7:30 Breakfast Mezzanine Level—Studio 4 8:30 Depart by bus to Space X (about 20–30 minutes) To accommodate Craig Venter who can only arrive at Space X in the afternoon, if possible, I will move Elon Musk’s talk and tour of the facility to 4pm, instead of during the lunch break. 7:30 Dinner—Spago 176 N Canon Dr Beverly Hills, CA 90210 With the blockbuster success of The Black Swan, Taleb had gained entry into one of the most elite intellectual salons in America, Brockman’s Edge Foundation, an informal collection of (mostly male) scientists and thinkers that included Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Danny Kahneman, and Murray Gell-Mann (discoverer of the quark) as well as tycoons such as Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and future disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The idea behind the salon was simple: put a bunch of smart people together in a room, have them talk, and see what comes out on the other end. Sprinkle on some billionaire cash and maybe something big could actually germinate. It was a “forum for big, intriguing and/or disturbing ideas advanced by intellectuals who have a track record of major achievements in their fields,” the Guardian wrote.

The Case for Israel by Alan Dershowitz

affirmative action, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, different worldview, disinformation, facts on the ground, Jeffrey Epstein, Nelson Mandela, one-state solution, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, Yom Kippur War

In writing this book, I have benefited greatly from the research assistance of Owen Alterman, Mara Zusman, Eric Citron, Holly Beth Billington, Natalie Hershlag, and Ayelet Weiss. My assistant, Jane Wagner; my agent, Helen Rees; my editor, Hana Lane; and my temporary assistant, Robin Yeo, have provided invaluable assistance. For perceptive comments on the manuscript, I thank my friends Bernard Beck, Jeffrey Epstein, Steve Kosslyn, Alan Rothfeld, and Michael and Jackie Halbreich. My wife, Carolyn, and my daughter, Ella, inspired me, debated with me, and encouraged me. My sons, Elon and Jamin, my nephew Adam, my nieces Rana and Hannah, my brother Nathan, and my sister-in-law Marilyn all made useful suggestions, which I much appreciate.

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain's Most Notorious Media Baron by John Preston

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, computer age, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, G4S, global village, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, Jeffrey Epstein, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, the market place

I have to believe that something good will come out of this mess. It’s sad for my mother. It’s sad to have lost my dad. It’s sad for my brothers. But I would say we’ll be back. Watch this space.’ Just as she predicted, the world had not heard the last of Ghislaine Maxwell. Following her father’s death, she began dating the millionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein. In 2008, after their affair had ended, Epstein was convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution and sentenced to eighteen months in prison – he served just thirteen. In July 2019, he was rearrested, this time for the sex trafficking of minors. A month later he was found hanging in his prison cell at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Don't Call It a Cult: The Shocking Story of Keith Raniere and the Women of NXIVM by Sarah Berman

Albert Einstein, COVID-19, dark matter, Donald Trump, East Village, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Milgram experiment, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, systems thinking, TED Talk, white picket fence, work culture

Cafritz became a starry-eyed servant for Raniere: she cooked his food, washed his clothes, and drove him to wherever he needed to be. She became known as a “defuser of bombs”—able to soften any conflict and salvage the most damaged relationships. She went on to facilitate many of Raniere’s relationships with young women and girls, as Ghislaine Maxwell is alleged to have done for Jeffrey Epstein. While Gina and Raniere liked to riff on religious and philosophical ideas, Unterreiner got an actuary certification and was seen as the business mind of the group. As long as Heidi knew them, Unterreiner and Raniere planned to launch a business around Raniere’s genius. Friends who knew Raniere at the time say he was always looking for a way to make a lot of money with minimal effort.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

One of Trump’s early ideas was to recruit his friend Tom Barrack—part of his kitchen cabinet of real estate tycoons including Steven Roth and Richard Lefrak—and make him chief of staff. Barrack, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, is a starstruck real estate investor of legendary acumen who owns Michael Jackson’s former oddball paradise, Neverland Ranch. With Jeffrey Epstein—the New York financier who would become a tabloid regular after a guilty plea to one count of soliciting prostitution that sent him to jail in 2008 in Palm Beach for thirteen months—Trump and Barrack were a 1980s and ’90s set of nightlife Musketeers. The founder and CEO of the private equity firm Colony Capital, Barrack became a billionaire making investments in distress debt investments in real estate around the world, including helping to bail out his friend Donald Trump.

Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Potemkin village, Quicken Loans, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

In the high irony department, Jared Kushner, when he was in law school, and before he met Ivanka, identified, in a paper he wrote, possible claims of fraud against the Trump Organization in a particular real estate deal he was studying—a subject now of quite some amusement among his acquaintances at the time. Practically speaking, Trump hid in plain sight, as the prosecutors appeared to be finding. In November 2004, for instance, Jeffrey Epstein, the financier later caught in a scandal involving underage prostitutes, agreed to purchase from bankruptcy a house in Palm Beach, Florida, for $36 million, a property that had been on the market for two years. Epstein and Trump had been close friends—playboys in arms, as it were—for more than a decade, with Trump often seeking Epstein’s help with his chaotic financial affairs.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

For seven days, across three screens, Shteyngart imbibed a steady diet of pro-Putin propaganda, washed down by Four Seasons Wagyu beef. He watched news anchors gleefully play up the ostensible decay of the Western world—a major traffic accident in New Hampshire, Great Britain’s Prince Andrew caught up in the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal—while hailing the successes of Russian separatists in Crimea. By Day 3, Shteyngart was hearing the voices of Russian TV anchors while he took a swim. Day 4 brought nightmares. On Day 5, his psychiatrist came for a visit. The following morning, Shteyngart decided to start drinking after breakfast.

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

Zangrillo had hired one of the most well-respected trial lawyers in Boston. Weinberg had done solely defense since graduating from Harvard Law almost fifty years earlier. Known as fiercely intelligent, he tackled tough white-collar and criminal cases, from political corruption to murder. He’d represented Jeffrey Epstein until the disgraced financier took his own life a few weeks before this hearing. “He made a donation to the school,” Weinberg argued. “That’s not a crime.” Weinberg had already successfully roughed up USC by publicly releasing the collection of internal USC admissions records—including the embarrassing “VIP” list—obtained in discovery.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

And who could blame them for their sensitivity, when this word had been used like a bludgeon in interminable media rants about these kids today—the oldest of whom are hardly kids anymore, this generation born between 1981 and 1996. I had no illusions that their predecessors were any better. It wasn’t a millennial man who had paid me less, or hit me, or worse; those were all baby boomer men. Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore, or Donald Trump himself—were they millennials? So I knew from baby boomer men. In my thirties, I had even married one for the second time—or sort of married him, which I can explain: We met at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery at a meeting of activists organizing the protest against the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

And there is another, related kind of capitalist conspiracy that needs to be surfaced, this one simply flowing from the fact that when a tiny stratum of the population is permitted to grow wealthier than Victorian-era monarchs, as these Shadow Lands have allowed them to, some of the people who breathe that rarified air are going to get the idea that they are above the law. Which is simply to say: I think a great many secrets about powerful men died when Jeffrey Epstein died in prison, and I’m not sure we will ever know their full extent. Do you? Power and wealth conspire to protect themselves. It happens in public, and it happens in private. It happens under the spotlight, and it happens in the shadows. So, in attempting to understand the ludicrous theories swirling in the Mirror World, we should be very careful not to be so reactive that we end up saying that sadism and depravity do not happen, that only a loony conspiracy theorist would believe something so out-there.

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

In Silicon Valley, nearly all of the leaders of companies selling snake oil were men, the great-grandsons of the scientists of Simulmatics, but they believed themselves to be orphans, parentless, fatherless, sui generis self-made geniuses.11 They made no room in their world for women, or family, or knowledge other than the calculations of computers. Places like MIT’s corporate-funded Media Lab cultivated a “hacker ethic,” which meant, in many quarters, no ethics at all. In 2016, the director of the Media Lab accepted $1.7 million from convicted felon Jeffrey Epstein, after he’d registered as a sex offender and pleaded guilty to procuring an underage girl for sex (Epstein helped the lab pull in another $7.5 million from other donors), and announced a “Disobedience Award” to celebrate “responsible, ethical disobedience,” making of heedless audacity a fetish.12 MIT’s Media Lab served as a convenient scapegoat, a distraction from a broader ethical aimlessness not only in Silicon Valley but on college campuses.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

Then he paused for a long time, overcome by emotion. “There were times when I didn’t leave the factory for three or four days—days when I didn’t go outside,” he said. “This has really come at the expense of seeing my kids.” The Times had been told that Musk had worked with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who would later be convicted of child sex-trafficking charges. Musk denied it. Indeed, he had no connections with Epstein, other than the fact that Epstein’s enabler Ghislaine Maxwell, whom Musk didn’t know, had once photo-bombed him by standing behind him at the Met Gala. Gelles asked whether things were improving.