The Epstein Class Needs to Make Amends

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1:33Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. The sense of growing hostility toward business leaders and others empowers everywhere you look. It's in polls that show sinking opinions of large companies, universities, the media, churches, and virtually every major institution. We talk about this a lot. We do. Like, people have lost faith. Well, it's coincided with dueling populist political movements. You've got on the right, President Trump's attacks on a shadowy global elite. On the left, by Zohar and Mamdani's broadside against billionaires.

2:09The question that Max Chafkin writes, he's Bloomberg Businessweek senior reporter, how did business leaders get so crosswise with the public? There are a lot of reasons, including the sense that our business leaders themselves, Max writes, are part of the problem. Max Chafkin is co-host of the Everybody's Business podcast. He's the author of The Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power. He joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio. What I read from that entire sort of first portion of your piece does not include the name Jeffrey Epstein. But the connection that you make is this is illustrated in the Justice Department's release of the Epstein files.

2:47Make that connection for us.

2:48Max Chafkin:Yeah, I think that there was already in the background, just as you said, Tim, a lot of hostility towards quote-unquote elites, towards business people, not just business people, but people in the media and so on. And then you filter this scandal on top of it. And sort of some of the unique contours, one of which is it matches with an existing conspiracy theory, which is that there were already a lot of people on the Internet primed to believe that there was a global cabal of pedophiles. You have this thing that it's not exactly that, of course, but it does have some contours there. Jeffrey Epstein, of course, was accused of trafficking teenagers.

3:28Max Chafkin:So there's that aspect of it. And then on top of that, you just have this massive data dump. For better or worse, there are now 3.5 million documents that anyone can go look, and you can see some of the wealthiest and most respected people in the world sort of bickering and doing things that are very, very embarrassing. And that is a thing that I think we're going to be talking about for years, if not decades. This is like a bomb going off in the relationship that Americans and people all around the world have with their business leaders. And it's going to take a long time for business leaders and not just business leaders, politicians and so on, to rebuild trust.

4:13Max Chafkin:And you have this ongoing conspiracy theorizing politicians are using. It's going to be a thing we're going to be talking about for a long time. Is it really a bomb going off? And I just think about certainly for the people who are cited in these files. Like, I think that's something that it's kind of wild, interesting to watch. And we've talked about what's happened in the UK with some officials. It was a joke at the Academy Awards about, you know, UK officials get taken down. And, you know, you don't necessarily see the mighty falling. You do a little bit, but you do wonder, are they ostracized from society?

4:46Do they lose their wealth? In other countries, you see them fall. In the US, it's kind of like... Not so much.

4:51Max Chafkin:I mean, that's one of the things that I would argue is making this bad is that there is a sense of a lack of accountability. Right. A bunch of the people. There are some people who have resigned from their jobs. Larry Summers stepped down from Harvard. Kathy Rumler has said she's stepping down from Goldman Sachs at the end of June, although she's still in her job. And Goldman Sachs would have been it seemed like would have been fine if she stayed. That's that's the. I mean, it's hard. It's hard to know what's going on behind the scenes, but they had definitely supported her, said she wasn't doing anything professionally inappropriate.

5:18Bill Gates is still a very wealthy individual.

5:21Max Chafkin:is still connected to Microsoft. Reid Hoffman, who's also a Microsoft board member, is all over these files. So there is a sense that, I think, from critics of a lack of accountability. What I would just say is, I think we're at the very early stages of this process. And it's easy to say that there's been no accountability six weeks after this document dump happened. But we will see. I mean, because ultimately, voters and consumers have a say in this. And they are going to start to make their voices heard. And we're seeing that in sort of subtle ways already. The company LifeTouch, which is a school photography company, no real connection to Jeffrey Epstein.

6:00Max Chafkin:They were bought by Apollo, which is connected to Epstein via Leon Black. After Epstein had died, they're dealing with boycotts. So you're seeing places where there isn't even a really close connection to Epstein where companies are suffering. And it's going to be this kind of like background thing. You know, there's a lot of in terms of our politics right now in the primary. Epstein is coming up, I think, more than people realize with voters. This is going to be like one of these things where when we look at populist electoral results, you know, at the end of this midterm, two years from now, I think it'll be one of the things people point to.

6:37How do you connect it to the way that people view the structure of society right now? Like the way people view elites, the way people view capitalism or the system that we have?

6:46Max Chafkin:I mean, what's so damaging about these files is you see it's not only the alleged crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, as I mentioned, accused of sex trafficking, also pled guilty to a sex crime in 2008. It's the sense of this little private club and a little clique and people who seem only interested in maneuvering within that clique in ways that are just embarrassing. And I mean, this sounds kind of small, but you read some of these emails, they're not grammatical, they're venal, they're all the things that people are when they're speaking in private. it. It's just you layer that on this very upsetting sex scandal, and then you layer on a wealth gap, like a massive, massive discontent that has been bubbling really since the great financial crisis.

7:36Max Chafkin:And that becomes a stew that I think could lead to some significant social changes. I also think, right, you know, we always talk about gaps in the economy, K-shaped economy, inequalities, and so on and so forth. But you have these individuals who say, well, I didn't really know him or like we didn't really have that close a relationship. But you go through those emails and they seem very, very familiar. And so like once again, you're like, well, wait a minute. These folks get a pass somehow. And how did they not know, especially when you look at the timing of the emails, how did they not know what this guy was about?

8:10Yeah.

8:10Max Chafkin:And I should say, you know, being in these files doesn't mean you were complicit with Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. It doesn't even necessarily mean that these people knew everything that was going on. But it does show an incredible lack of judgment. And we're talking about people who are supposed to be professional judges of, you know, professional allocators of capital, you know, professional technology prognosticators. And, you know, a lot of moral code. Yeah. And, you know, you look at, for instance, polling around how people feel about AI. There's this huge gap right now between the way like Americans and people all around the world talk about AI and executives.

8:47Max Chafkin:And I think that you're seeing the impact of that lack of trust. A lot of people are really down on this technology. And we're like, why are they down on it? Well, they're down on it because they don't trust it and they don't trust the people who are running it. And that's going to create problems for businesses down the road for this year, next year, and so forth. But apart from voting, the people who have this discontent or who maybe even tell pollsters that they're unhappy with the system as is, what power do they have? I mean, they have power as consumers. And I think that, I mean, we don't know how, again, AI companies have yet to really turn a profit selling these chatbots, right?

9:26Max Chafkin:They're going to need to ultimately to sell products to people. And I think that is going to, you know, this is going to be a thing that hangs over any company that has an Epstein connection. And I think it will continue to hang there for a long time because there are all these redactions in the Epstein files. We're going to have hearings. Some of these people that I've mentioned are going to testify in Congress. Bill Gates has said he would testify in Congress. So this is just going to be a sort of story that goes on essentially forever. There was probably an opportunity years ago to kind of create a sense of finality and justice.

10:01Max Chafkin:And because it was dragged out for such a long time between, you know, wrangling over the Epstein files and so on, it feels like that opportunity has basically passed. You know, you end and you talk about some of these, well, as you say, you know, there's a code of elite silence. There's an Epstein class. But you kind of write saying that, you know, maybe what we start to need to see from these tarnished leaders is making real amends. And, like, do we need to have that? Like, do we need to say, yeah, I kind of screwed up? I think that the people who are able to navigate, who will be able to move past this are going to be the ones that confront it head on.

10:40Max Chafkin:And because what we have seen instead from most of these people is a sort of shifting story that is tailored to suit whatever information has already been released. And we've seen that with people saying, oh, well, I only met him or I only met him once or whatever. And it turns out it's more times than that. Or you have somebody like Elon Musk saying, I didn't go to the island, which leaves out the fact that you can look up this email where he may have not gone to the island, but he was certainly sending Jeffrey Epstein emails like asking to go to the island. And so I think it's technically not wrong.

11:11No, no, no.

11:12Max Chafkin:Factual, but it feels like it's not the whole story. And I think at some point, again, being in this group doesn't necessarily mean you did anything criminal or even necessarily wrong. But I think that at some point people are going to have to confront it head on rather than trying to sort of get around it with these kind of evasive statements and so on. You know, I'm pulling up another story that your story reminded me of, and it's a story that came out for Bloomberg Businessweek, Courtney Rubin and Dina Shanker about Peter Atiyah, the doctor and the Epstein revelation that is upending his longevity empire.

11:46And your two pieces really got me thinking, Max, what in your view drew people to him even after he served prison time?

11:56Max Chafkin:Well, I think if you're being charitable, I mean, you could just say a lack of a moral compass or something like that. These people just didn't care. Maybe if you wanted to be more charitable, I think you would say access and money. So in the case of Peter Attia, he was trying to build this wellness empire. And from the emails and from the story that Courtney and Dina wrote, you can see him sort of trying to use Epstein as an entree into that world. That is how Epstein promoted himself. and somewhere along the way, Peter Atiyah became friends with Jeffrey Epstein. At least he's denied that they were friend friends, but you see a relationship.

12:34Max Chafkin:And I think that happened in a lot of cases. Listen, it's kind of how the world often works, right? Power and being close to it in relationships and so on and so forth. It's a brilliant read and a brilliant write. Max Chafkin, co-host of the Everybody's Business podcast and the author of The Contrarian. He is, of course, part of the Bloomberg Businessweek team. He's senior reporter.

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