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HOW THE ELITE BEHAVE WHEN NO ONE IS WATCHING: INSIDE THE EPSTEIN
EMAILS  
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Anand Giridharada
November 23, 2025
The New York Times
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_ As journalists comb through the Epstein emails, surfacing the name
of one fawning luminary after another, there is a collective whisper
of “How could they?” How could such eminent people, belonging to
such prestigious institutions, succumb to this? _

Photo illustration by Celina Pereira; Photographs by Getty Images,
Source photographs by Cynthia Johnson, Tim Sloan, William Philpott,
Charles Ommanney, Win McNamee, Wally McNamee, Bill Olive, Rick
Friedman and Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

 

A close read of the thousands of messages makes it less surprising.
When Jeffrey Epstein, a financier turned convicted sex offender,
needed friends to rehabilitate him, he knew where to turn: a power
elite practiced at disregarding pain.

At the dark heart of this story is a sex criminal and his victims —
and his enmeshment with President Trump. But it is also a tale about a
powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew,
were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away
from so much other abuse and suffering: the financial meltdowns some
in the network helped trigger, the misbegotten wars some in the
network pushed, the overdose crisis some of them enabled, the
monopolies they defended, the inequality they turbocharged, the
housing crisis they milked, the technologies they failed to protect
people against.

The Epstein story is resonating with a broader swath of the public
than most stories now do, and some in the establishment worry. When
Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, speaks
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of an “Epstein class,” isn’t that dangerous? Isn’t that class
warfare?

But the intuitions of the public are right. People are right to sense
that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private
merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business,
lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and
media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common
good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances
for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of
first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard,
whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced
— or, yes, raped.

It is no accident that this was the social milieu that took Mr.
Epstein in. His reinvention, after he pleaded guilty to
prostitution-related charges in Florida in 2008, would never have been
possible without this often anti-democratic, self-congratulatory
elite, which, even when it didn’t traffic people, took the world for
a ride.

The emails, in my view, together sketch a devastating epistolary
portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that
isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.

THE IDEA OF AN EPSTEIN CLASS is helpful because one can be misled by
the range of people to whom Mr. Epstein ingratiated himself.
Republicans. Democrats. Businesspeople. Diplomats. Philanthropists.
Healers. Professors
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Royals. Superlawyers. A person he emailed at one moment was often at
war with the ideas of another correspondent — a Lawrence Summers to
a Steve Bannon, a Deepak Chopra to a scientist skeptical of all
spirituality, a Peter Thiel to a Noam Chomsky. This diversity masked a
deeper solidarity.

What his correspondents tended to share was membership in a distinctly
modern elite: a ruling class in which 40,000-foot nomadism, world
citizenship and having just landed back from Dubai lend the glow that
deep roots once provided; in which academic intellect is prized the
way pedigree once was; in which ancient caste boundaries have melted
to allow rotation among, or simultaneous pursuit of, governing,
profiting, thinking and giving back. Some members, like Mr. Summers
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are embedded in all aspects of it; others, less so.

If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood, it may
be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a
noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite;
it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good
intentions. If it’s a jet set, it’s a carbon-offset-private-jet
set. After all, flying commercial won’t get you from your Davos
breakfast on empowering African girls with credit cards to your
crypto-for-good dinner in Aspen.

 
MANY OF THE EPSTEIN emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the
more I read, took on greater meaning: the whereabouts update and
inquiry. In the Epstein class, emails often begin and end with pings
of echolocation. “Just got to New York — love to meet,
brainstorm,” the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein. “i’m
in wed, fri. edelman?” Mr. Epstein wrote to the billionaire Thomas
Pritzker (it is unclear if he meant a person, corporation or
convening). To Lawrence Krauss, a physicist in Arizona: “noam is
going to tucson on the 7th. will you be around.” Mr. Chopra wrote to
say he would be in New York, first speaking, then going “for
silence.” Gino Yu, a game developer, announced travel plans
involving Tulum, Davos and the D.L.D. (Digital Life Design) conference
— an Epstein-class hat trick.

Landings and takeoffs, comings and goings, speaking engagements and
silent retreats — members of this group relentlessly track one
another’s passages through JFK, LHR, NRT and airports you’ve never
even heard of. Whereabouts are the pheromones of this elite. They
occasion the connection-making and information barter that are its
lifeblood. If “Have you eaten?” was a traditional Chinese
greeting, “Where are you today?” is the Epstein-class query.

Their loyalty, it appears, is less downward to people and communities
than horizontal to fellow members of their borderless network. Back in
2016, Theresa May, then the prime minister of Britain, seemed to
capture their essence: “If you believe you are a citizen of the
world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” Mr. Epstein’s correspondents
come alive far from home, freed from obligations, in the air, ready to
connect.

And the payoff can be real. Maintain, as Mr. Epstein did, a
grandmother-like radar of what a thousand people are doing tomorrow
and where, and you can introduce a correspondent needing a lending
partner to someone you’re seeing today. Or let Ehud Barak know a
Rothschild has the flu. Or offer someone else a jet ride back to New
York and reward the journalist who tipped you off by setting him up to
meet a Saudi royal.

But the whereabouts missive is just the first flush of connection.
Motion is the flirtation; actual information, the consummation.

HOW DID MR. EPSTEIN MANAGE TO PULL SO MANY STRANGERS CLOSE? The emails
reveal a barter economy of nonpublic information that was a big draw.
This is not a world where you bring a bottle of wine to dinner and
that’s it. You bring what financiers call “edge” — proprietary
insight, inside information, a unique takeaway from a conference, a
counterintuitive prediction about A.I., a snippet of conversation with
a lawmaker, a foretaste of tomorrow’s news.

What the Epstein class understands is that the more accessible
information becomes, the more precious nonpublic information is. The
more everybody insta-broadcasts opinions, the dearer is the closely
held take. The emails are a private, bilateral social media for people
who can’t or won’t post: an archipelago of single-subscriber
Substacks. And in the need to maintain relevance by offering edge, a
reader detects thirst and swagger, desperateness and swanning.

“Saw Matt C with DJT at golf tournament I know why he was there,”
Nicholas Ribis, a former Trump Hotel executive, wrote to Mr. Epstein,
making what couples therapists call a bid for attention. Jes Staley,
then a top banking executive, casually mentioned a dinner with George
Tenet, the former Central Intelligence Agency director, and got the
reaction he probably hoped for: “how was tenet.” Mr. Summers laid
bait by mentioning meetings with people at SoftBank and Saudi
Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Mr. Epstein nibbled: “anyone stand
out?” Then Mr. Summers could offer proprietary intel. On it went:
What are people saying? Who are you hearing for F.B.I. director?
Should I drop your name to Bill Clinton?

Sometimes these people give the impression that their minds would be
blown by a newspaper. Mr. Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein: “Love to get
your sense of Trump’s administration, policies.” And while it may
seem strange to rely on Mr. Epstein for political analysis when you
can visit any number of websites, for this class, insight’s value
varies inversely with the number of recipients. And the ultimate flex
is getting insider intel and shrugging: “Nthg revolutionary
really,” the French banker Ariane de Rothschild wrote during a
meeting with Portugal’s prime minister.

NOMADIC BAT SIGNALS GET things going, and edge keeps them flowing,
while underneath a deeper exchange is at work. The smart need money;
the rich want to seem smart; the staid seek adjacency to what Mr.
Summers called “life among the lucrative and louche”; and Mr.
Epstein needed to wash his name using blue-chip people who could be
forgiving about infractions against the less powerful. Each has some
form of capital and seeks to trade. The business is laundering capital
— money into prestige, prestige into fun, fun into intel, intel into
money.

Mr. Summers wrote to Mr. Epstein: “U r wall st tough guy w
intellectual curiosity.” Mr. Epstein replied: “And you an
interllectual with a Wall Street curiosity.”

In another email, Mr. Epstein offered typo-strewn and false musings on
climate science to Mr. Krauss, including that Canada perhaps favored
global warming, since it’s cold (it doesn’t), and that the South
Pole is actually getting colder (it’s melting rapidly). Mr. Krauss
let Mr. Epstein indulge in his rich-man theorizing while offering a
tactful correction and a hint that more research funding would help.

For this modern elite, seeming smart is what inheriting land used to
be: a guarantor of opened doors. A shared hyperlink can’t stand
alone; your unique spin must be applied. Mr. Krauss sends his New
Yorker article on militant atheism; Mr. Chomsky sends a multiparagraph
reply; Mr. Epstein dashes off: “I think religion plays a major
positive role in many lives. . i dont like fanaticism on either side.
. sorry.” This somehow leads to a suggestion that Mr. Krauss bring
the actor Johnny Depp to Mr. Epstein’s private island.

Again and again, scholarly types lower themselves to offer previews of
their research or inquiries into Mr. Epstein’s “ideas.” “Maybe
climate change is a good way of dealing with overpopulation,” muses
Joscha Bach, a German cognitive scientist.

The nature of this omnidirectional capital exchange comes into special
focus in the triangle of emails among Mr. Epstein, Mr. Summers and his
wife, Elisa New. Mr. Summers seemingly benefited from Mr. Epstein’s
hosting, tip-offs, semi-insight into Trumpworld and, most grossly,
dating advice many years into his marriage.

Ms. New sought Mr. Epstein’s help contacting Woody Allen and
revising her emails to invite people on her televised poetry show. Mr.
Epstein tutored her in elite mores and motives: Don’t say, _Come on
my show_; say, _Join Serena Williams, Bill Clinton and Shaq_ _in_
_coming on my show_. Mr. Epstein reaped the benefits of smarts by
association in hanging around them, of the reputation cleanse of
affiliation with Harvard professors and a former Treasury secretary,
and of getting to cosplay as statesman, once sending an unsolicited
intro email to Mr. Summers and a Senegalese politician, Karim Wade,
who, Mr. Epstein informed Mr. Summers, is “the most charismatic and
rational of all the africans and has there respect.” There are 1.5
billion people and 54 countries in Africa.

THIS CLASS HAS its status games. One is, when getting a tip, to block
the blessing by saying you already know. Another is to apologize for
busyness by invoking centrality — “trump related issues occupying
my time.” When an intro is offered, the coldest reply is “no.”
The ultimate power move is from Mohamed Waheed Hassan of the Maldives,
whose emails ended: “Sent from President’s iPad.”

If you were an alien landing on Earth and the first thing you saw was
the Epstein emails, you could gauge status by spelling, grammar,
punctuation. Usage is inversely related to power in this network. The
earnest scientists and scholars type neatly. The wealthy and powerful
reply tersely, with misspellings, erratic spacing, stray commas.

The status games belie a truth, though: These people are on the same
team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some
in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are
doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to
their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles
conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.

Mr. Epstein may despise what Mr. Trump is doing, but he still hangs
with Steve Bannon, the Trump whisperer and attack dog, seeking help on
crypto regulation. Michael Wolff is a journalist, but that doesn’t
stop him from advising
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Mr. Epstein on his public image. Kenneth Starr, who once doggedly
pursued sexual misconduct allegations against Mr. Clinton, reinvented
himself as a defender of Mr. Epstein. These are permanent survivors
who will profit when things are going this way and then profit again
when they turn.

“What team are you pulling for?” Linda Stone, a retired Microsoft
executive, asked Mr. Epstein just before the 2016 election.

“none,” he replied.

In one email, he commiserates with Mr. Wolff about Mr. Bannon’s
rhetoric; in another, he invites Mr. Bannon over and suggests an
additional guest — Kathryn Ruemmler, who served as President Barack
Obama’s White House counsel.

His exchanges with Ms. Ruemmler are especially striking — not for
the level of horridness, but for how they portray this network at its
most shape-shiftingly self-preservational, and most indifferent to the
human beings below.

Like so many, she had gone from Obama-era public service to private
legal practice, eventually becoming the chief lawyer
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for Goldman Sachs. That people move from representing the presidency
to representing banks is so normal that we forget the costs: the
private job done with the savvy to outfox one’s former public-sector
colleagues, the public job done gently to keep open doors.

In some exchanges in 2014, Ms. Ruemmler appears to be contemplating a
job offer: attorney general of the United States, according to
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contemporary reports. And who does she seek advice from? A convicted
sex offender.

In another email, Mr. Epstein asks a legal question about whether Mr.
Trump can declare a national emergency to build a border wall. She
responds that a prospective employer has offered her a $2 million
signing bonus. The glide from tyranny to bonus distills a core truth:
Regardless of what happens, the members of this social network will be
fine.

Ms. Ruemmler told Mr. Epstein she was going to New York one day. “I
will then stop to pee and get gas at a rest stop on the New Jersey
Turnpike, will observe all of the people there who are at least 100
pounds overweight, will have a mild panic attack as a result of the
observation, and will then decide that I am not eating another bite of
food for the rest of my life out of fear that I will end up like one
of these people,” she wrote in 2015.

But in the class of permanent survivors, today’s jump scare may
yield to tomorrow’s opportunity. A few years after she joined the
company, Goldman Sachs declared
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anti-obesity drugs a “$100 billion opportunity.”

GENERALLY, YOU CAN’T READ other people’s emails. Powerful people
have private servers, I.T. staffs, lawyers. When you get a rare
glimpse into how they actually think and view the world, what they
actually are after, heed Maya Angelou: Believe them.

American democracy today is in a dangerous place. The Epstein emails
are a kind of prequel to the present. This is what these powerful
people, in this mesh of institutions and communities, were thinking
and doing — taking care of one another instead of the general
welfare — before it got really bad.

This era has seen a surge in belief in conspiracy theories, including
about Mr. Epstein, because of an underlying intuition people have that
is, in fact, correct: The country often seems to be run not for the
benefit of most of us.

Shaming the public as rubes for succumbing to conspiracy theories
misses what people are trying to tell us: They no longer feel included
in the work of choosing their future. On matters small and big, from
the price of eggs to whether the sexual abuse of children matters,
what they sense is a sneering indifference. And a knack for looking
away.

Now the people who capitalized on the revolt against an indifferent
American elite are in power, and, shock of all shocks, they are even
more indifferent than anyone who came before them. The clubby
deal-making and moral racketeering of the Epstein class is now the
United States’ governing philosophy.

In spite of that, the unfathomably brave survivors who have come
forward to testify to their abuse have landed the first real punch
against Mr. Trump. In their solidarity, their devotion to the truth
and their insistence on a country that listens when people on the
wrong end of power cry for help, they shame the great indifference
from above. They point us to other ways of relating.

_[MR. GIRIDHARADAS is the author of “__Winners Take All: The Elite
Charade of Changing the World_
[//www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/539747/winners-take-all-by-anand-giridharadas/]_”
and the publisher of the newsletter __The.Ink_
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* Jeffrey Epstein
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* Epstein files
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* President Trump
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* Donald Trump
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* Bill Clinton
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* Sex Offender
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* pedophilia
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* misogyny
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* sex criminal
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* Mossad
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* rich and famous
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* power elite
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* class warfare
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* philanthropy
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* high finance
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* morality
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* moral racketeering
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