Something interesting about Jeffrey Epstein: the source of his wealth

Every now and then the New York Times takes a break from Trump bad/progressive Democrats good and does some actual journalism. “Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich” (December 16, 2025) answers the only interesting question, in my opinion, about Jeffrey Epstein, i.e., How does a guy who doesn’t seem to be either smart or hard-working get rich enough to operate a Gulfstream?

I know some people who’ve gotten rich by working in finance. All had more advanced educations than Jeffrey Epstein (a college dropout) and none of them had time to party on a private island, with or without a stable of paid females.

How did Epstein get rich, then? According to the NYT, he stole it all. Not the 2 and 20 stealing that a hedge fund might do every year, but grabbing most or all of the principal with which he was entrusted.

In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.

One funny part: in 1980, making $1 million/year was considered successful:

He was regularly flying to Palm Beach, Fla., to visit young women. That summer, Cosmopolitan named Epstein its “bachelor of the month,” describing him as a “dynamo” who “talks only to people who make over a million a year!” The magazine encouraged interested parties to write to Epstein at his work address.

It was easier to steal because the clients themselves were trying to steal from the IRS and, therefore, they couldn’t easily complain to the government that Epstein stole from them before they could steal from the government:

According to Epstein’s friend Bob Gold, Epstein and the Pottingers pitched tax-avoidance strategies to wealthy clients, including some whom Gold believes Epstein met through Bear Stearns.

Bear Stearns, which took down the entire U.S. economy with its 2008 failure, briefly employed Epstein and its managers kept helping him:

In 1982, [Clark Schubach of Bear] introduced Epstein to Michael Stroll, who ran a pinball and video-game company. Stroll trusted Bear Stearns and Schubach. He gave Epstein $450,000 — about 10 percent of his net worth — to invest in a supposed crude-oil deal that Epstein told him he was planning.

Within two years, most of the money had vanished, Stroll later said in an unpublished interview with Thomas Volscho, a professor at the College of Staten Island who has spent years researching Epstein’s early years and shared some of his notes and documents with us. Epstein began dodging Stroll’s phone calls; at one point, he sent Stroll a quart of oil in an attempt to convince him that a deal was, in fact, in the works. The dispute ended up in civil court, with Stroll arguing that Epstein had promised to return his money but never did. In 1993, Epstein prevailed on technical grounds, and a judge ruled that he wasn’t personally liable. Decades later, Stroll remains bitter. “He’s a despicable prick,” he told us.

…

But Epstein’s perfidy ran deeper. Ed Epstein discovered that dozens of the people Epstein recruited to invest in Pennwalt, including Snyder, had written to him demanding that he repay their money. In other words, Epstein had lured investors in, used their money to book big profits and then refused to return their funds. There is no record of Epstein facing any consequences — or repaying the money. A result was that by the end of 1988, he reported being worth about $15 million, according to a previously undisclosed document from a Swiss bank, which Thomas Volscho, the professor, shared with us.

Epstein got a lot of help from “daughters of famous, powerful men”:

Epstein seems to have had a keen sense of which benefactors he could quickly suck dry, leaving them angry and betrayed, and which were worth nurturing for the long haul as sources of connections and prestige. One of those was Sir James Goldsmith — a financier and European politician who was embedded in Manhattan’s upper crust. One evening, he hosted a gathering at his mansion on the Upper East Side. Among the guests was Stuart Pivar, who had amassed a fortune before becoming a renowned art collector. When Pivar arrived, he encountered Epstein playing a Beethoven sonata at a piano in Goldsmith’s spacious entrance hall. Pivar told us he was transfixed: Epstein had an irresistible “magnetism” — especially with “the beautiful daughters of famous, powerful men.”

There are no rewards for being smart and honest:

A fateful flight to Florida that year would launch Epstein from a mere millionaire into a plutocrat with palatial estates, two private islands and luxury aircraft. The transformation came about through a new client: Les Wexner, the billionaire who built brands like the Limited and Victoria’s Secret. The two were introduced by Wexner’s friend Robert Meister, an insurance executive who happened to sit next to Epstein on the plane to Palm Beach. Meister suggested that Wexner get in touch with Epstein for financial advice.

Wexner soon had a financial adviser, Harold Levin, fly to New York to meet Epstein. Levin told us that he spent an hour with Epstein in his office and immediately got a bad vibe. He found a pay phone and called Wexner. “I smell a rat,” Levin reported. “I don’t trust him.”

Wexner apparently didn’t listen. About a year later, he hired Epstein to be Levin’s boss. As far as Levin could tell, Epstein won the billionaire’s confidence by falsely telling him that Levin had been stealing. Levin decided to quit rather than work for Epstein. Before long, Wexner had given Epstein essentially free rein by granting him power of attorney over his finances. Epstein’s name began appearing in government filings as responsible for Wexner’s businesses and charities.

Another price/inflation shocker:

He bought a waterfront mansion in Palm Beach for $2.5 million, about a mile from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

It’s now worth about $40 million, according to Zillow, after a rebuild and address change. (i.e., more than twice as much as the National Historic Landmark of Mar-a-Lago, if we accept the New York judiciary’s finding that Donald Trump’s house had a fair market value of $18 million)

Washington, D.C. was a good place to hunt for the next batch of money to steal.

On a freezing Thursday in February 1993, Epstein and Wexner arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Just weeks earlier, Bill Clinton had been sworn in as the 42nd president. It was the first of many visits Epstein would pay to the Clinton White House.

Epstein had become a political donor — including, later that year, $10,000 to help refurbish the White House, earning him a spot at a reception with the Clintons — and that gave him a certain amount of cachet with the new president. But Epstein had something else going for him as well: a new connection named Lynn Forester.

Forester told us that she met Epstein at a reception for George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, whom Epstein had befriended. Forester was a successful telecommunications executive, but she rose to greater prominence through her marriage to Andrew Stein, the Manhattan politician who in 1993 ran unsuccessfully for New York City mayor. The end of his mayoral campaign coincided with the end of their 10-year marriage. Now Forester and Stein were feuding over how to divvy up millions of dollars, and Epstein apparently convinced Forester that he could protect her from getting ripped off. It was a version of the same tactic he used to get in Wexner’s good graces years earlier.

It was an opportune moment for Epstein to ingratiate himself with Forester, whom Clinton had appointed to a White House advisory commission. On at least one occasion, Forester brought up Epstein in a brief private conversation with the president, according to a letter, first reported by The Daily Beast, that she wrote that mentioned Epstein. He became a regular visitor to the White House, sometimes with a girlfriend in tow, according to records housed at Clinton’s presidential library.

Via this photo, the NYT reminds young readers to enjoy their youth and beauty while it lasts (though maybe using youth/beauty to assist Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t the highest and best use?):

(Why is the man-bites-dog story of an apparently mediocre and lazy person getting rich enough to operate a Gulfstream the most interesting aspect of the Emmanuel Goldstein saga? I don’t understand the fascination with Jeffrey Epstein’s after-hours frolics with a stable of paid young females. The ideas that middle-aged guys would find young females attractive (example study and research summary) or that females would be interested in having sex with rich men and/or men who were paying them are dog-bites-man stories, in my view. There is a linguistic twist in that the female employees of Epstein, who got housing, health care, dental care, transportation, entertainment, cash, etc. on the job and then later got $millions each (from Epstein’s estate and from a JP Morgan settlement), all of it tax-free, are considered “victims”. Even the ones who started their paid work with Epstein at age 18 or older may have received more money than the average American woman could earn in a lifetime of 9-5 toil. Regarding the moral outrage about “underage women”, the most frequently cited victim is Virginia Giuffre and she was turning 17 in mid-2000 when she says she met Epstein for the first time, i.e., older than the Massachusetts age of consent of 16. Epstein was indicted for being involved with females “as young as 14” (justice.gov). That is more shocking to the puritan mind of a Legacy American, but fourteen is the age of consent in a lot of European countries and was the typical age of marriage in Ancient Greece. Fourteen is five years older than Aisha was when her marriage with Muhammad was consummated (according to the Hadiths). Roughly half of Americans support filling the United States with Muslims, all of whom are supposed to follow the Hadiths. Why would the same people then express moral condemnation of Jeffrey Epstein’s harem, none of whose members were anywhere near as young as Aisha? Alternatively, if they reject a culture in which women under 18 can choose to have sex, get married, exchange sex for money, etc. then why would they advocate for continued expansion of Muslim immigration?)

Related:

• Department of American nation-building… “Critics say new bill passed by Iraqi lawmakers opens door to child marriage” (CBC/AP 2025): “New changes in Iraq’s law would allow marriage of girls in early teens or as young as 9, say critics”