Author: philg

A third post about the core topic within House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company …

The company went Full Vegas:

Back when he had visited the United States in the 1990s, Ren Zhengfei had been struck by the grand architecture of Las Vegas, modeled after Roman palaces. He’d remarked that Las Vegas might be the most beautiful city in America. Now in the hinterland to the north of Shenzhen, he began building his own version. Huawei had outgrown its Shenzhen headquarters by 2016, with 180,000 employees globally and counting, and Ren’s team was searching for more space. This was hard to find in Shenzhen, which was a thicket of skyscrapers by now, with soaring property prices. They found what they were looking for in Dongguan, Shenzhen’s up-and-coming northern neighbor, which still had stretches of undeveloped land. Eager to woo the company, Dongguan officials offered Huawei a prime 1.2-square-kilometer tract of verdant land on the south shore of a lake. Ren’s younger brother, Steven Ren, was put in charge of the construction of these new Dongguan R&D grounds, which they called Ox Horn Campus. They hired Japan’s Nikken Sekkei, the world’s second-largest architectural firm, which produced a fever dream of a design: Ox Horn would be built to look like twelve miniature European cities, including Paris, Verona, Bruges, and Oxford. They would re-create some of the greatest hits of Western civilization, including Germany’s Heidelberg Castle and France’s Palace of Versailles. “What is important is not simply to copy certain architectural styles but to make them truly beautiful,” Steven Ren wrote of the project. Huawei would overlook no detail. The architects were proud that none of the roofs of the 108 buildings were identical. Reflecting an eye for historical accuracy, some of the shingles were slate, others terra-cotta or copper. The pitches of the roofs ranged from twenty to ninety degrees. The buildings were faced in a range of materials, including granite, sandstone, limestone, dolomite, brick, and stucco (for Verona and Grenada). There were, of course, some concessions to modernity, such as treating the porous stones to prevent mildew and algae growth. Facial-recognition gates were installed at the entrances.

Huawei hired 150 Russian painters to cover the halls’ ceilings and walls with Renaissance-style murals, with the painters joking that even the Kremlin didn’t have such beautiful corridors. Someone stocked the lake by the castle with black swans—a reference to the financial term for worst-case scenarios that are hard to forecast. Ren so frequently warned his staff to look out for black-swan events that, at some point, the bird became Huawei’s unofficial mascot.

Huawei today makes the world’s best smartphone in terms of camera quality. DXOMARK:

The founder didn’t want to get into this business:

In Huawei’s early days, Ren had been less than enthused at the idea of hawking handsets—which were called “terminals” in Huawei-speak—as he considered it too far afield from the company’s core businesses of switches, routers, and base stations. “Huawei will not make a mobile phone,” Ren once insisted indignantly. “Anyone who talks this nonsense is going to get laid off!” Even after Huawei began pursuing smartphones seriously, Ren feared wasting money on marketing and was often harsh on the company’s head of consumer products, Richard Yu, or Yu Chengdong. “People always say I criticize Yu Chengdong,” Ren remarked to staff. “Actually, my criticism of him is my way of caring for him.”

How tough is it to break into the premium phone market? From 2016:

To close the gap with Samsung would be a formidable challenge: Samsung was pouring $14 billion a year into advertising, more than Iceland’s GDP.[

There is a chapter on Canada holding Meng Wanzhou, the founder’s daughter from his first marriage and Huawei CFO, hostage at the request of the U.S. government, but that’s been extensively covered elsewhere. (The allegations against Huawei had to do with selling equipment to Iran.)

The U.S. also strong-armed the Taiwanese into shutting out Huawei, which merely resulted in the improvement of Chinese domestic capabilities. May 2020:

TSMC had supplied Huawei for years, but now, under the threat of sanctions, it could not risk losing access to US technology to run its own operations. TSMC shut its doors to Huawei. Huawei’s only hope now was for China’s domestic chip foundry, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, to learn how to produce advanced chips at lightning speeds. This was a real Hail Mary: SMIC had been endeavoring for two decades to advance its technologies but still lagged several generations behind global leaders in advanced chipmaking. This second round of US sanctions cut deep. In July 2020, citing the new US sanctions, the UK announced that it was reversing its position on Huawei and would remove all Huawei equipment from the nation’s 5G networks by the end of 2027.

Whoever was running the U.S. during the Biden-Harris was just as hostile to Huawei as Donald Trump had been:

If there had been hopes among Huawei’s executives that Biden would be softer on China than Trump, they were quickly dispelled. The Biden administration was more careful in its rhetoric to avoid fanning anti-Chinese racism. It didn’t use terms like “Clean Network” and “Clean Nations.” But in many ways, it was only picking up where the Trump administration had left off and deepening the efforts to contain China.

Finally, check out the aesthetics on this data center that Huawei built:

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”