Jeffrey Epstein Was The Unofficial Advice Columnist For The Elites

Ever since it was disclosed that financier Leon Black had paid Jeffrey Epstein over $150 million for tax and estate planning in 2014, six years after the latter pleaded guilty to child prostitution charges, I have been fascinated by the notion that the disgraced sex offender, who made little outward intellectual contribution to the world, had all these highly valuable forms of expertise. Many powerful people have claimed that Epstein was some sort of charismatic polymath.

Legal scholar Alan Dershowitz once said that Epstein had a "probing, inquiring mind." He also relayed that Larry Summers—the economist who over his career ran the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury, and Harvard—admired Epstein's economic thinking. A spokesman for former President Bill Clinton said in 2002 that the former president admired Epstein's "keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science." Of his former employee Epstein, then-Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne said in that same article, "He is a very smart guy."