What an Epstein recording reveals about how elites get jobs

0:01Cardiff Garcia:NPR.

0:11Stacey Vanek Smith:We all know the saying, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And so for career advancement and business success, what matters more, honing our skills or building our network?

0:23Cardiff Garcia:Well, it depends. But the recently released Epstein files have shown in unprecedented detail how elite politicians, business leaders and celebrities profit from connections. Case in point, Jeffrey Epstein giving former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak advice on how to make money after leaving political office. They will know more about what you can do for them than you can guess.

0:49Stacey Vanek Smith:In other words, private companies will know how they want to use ex-politicians for their reputations or for the doors they can open. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Darian Woods.

1:01Cardiff Garcia:And I'm Adrian Ma. Today on the show, elite power brokering. The Epstein files have revealed extraordinary details about how many top business people and politicians operate inside an economy of favors and implicit debts. We'll learn just how much personal networks are valued compared to competency. And we'll hear more of that conversation between Epstein and Ehud Barak.

1:25Stacey Vanek Smith:In government, there's a concept called the revolving door. That's when people in the private sector go to work for the government, maybe as a regulator. Later, they go back to work for the industry they were just regulating. The door revolves around and around. Looking through the Epstein files, one thing that was striking was just how blended the networks of elite decision makers were between the public and private sectors.

1:50Cardiff Garcia:And this revolving door has some problems, of course. It could mean that regulators go soft on the industry if they're hoping to later get hired by them. At the same time, it means that people in the government have industry expertise. Matilda Bombardini is an economics professor at UC Berkeley. Is this true expertise or is it just really because you know people in the right places and you can just direct the firm that hires you to knock on the right doors, even though maybe for society this is not a benefit?

2:23Stacey Vanek Smith:Matilda started her research, basically agnostic about whether former public servants were providing useful advice or were just exploiting their connections.

2:32Cardiff Garcia:Of course, again, this is hard to disentangle. And so that's why we look at the data. We look at the aggregate data.

2:41Stacey Vanek Smith:Matilda's research gives her an expert lens into what was happening in the Epstein files. So we invited her to listen in on this remarkable recording, which is a conversation between former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Jeffrey Epstein in 2013.

2:57Cardiff Garcia:Epstein is giving Barack advice on how to use his power and connections to make money as a politician about to leave politics. We started by showing Matilda a clip of Epstein talking to Barack. And in this one, Epstein is repeating a mutual friend's advice. He thought you should make a list of who has IOUs to you. This person owes me a favor. This person owes me his life. This person owes me his job. This person owes me... Yeah, okay. So sort of like a log of people who are in your debt.

3:33Stacey Vanek Smith:Yeah, here's Matilda's reaction.

3:35Cardiff Garcia:My first reaction is that this is not necessarily emphasizing the expertise from truly knowledge point of view. So that's one point for connections, zero for expertise as being valuable here. It's really just sort of emphasizing the people that are indebted to Barack. So this, to me, points more to there's not a lot of expertise that he's bringing other than just the connection to specific people. So in the sort of balance of whom you know or what you know here points to the whom.

4:09Stacey Vanek Smith:Even as a researcher on lobbying, Matilda hadn't heard people say these kinds of words so explicitly until she listened to this tape.

4:17Cardiff Garcia:This is really the first time I could hear it with my ears. Now, if that clip suggested Barack would mostly use his connections to make money, the next clip has Epstein shouting it. So let's listen to that one. What is your real advantage for them? The fact that you know rich people and the fact that you have open access? I can open the door. I can access. I can be there. I can.

4:42Stacey Vanek Smith:So in this clip, Epstein is asking Barack what he brings to the table. They're talking in the context of Swiss banks, sovereign wealth funds, and Silicon Valley companies.

5:16Stacey Vanek Smith:You were smiling a bit there.

5:19Cardiff Garcia:I was smiling because the word opening a door was actually mentioned. So I didn't do it on purpose. I mean, this is just the language that we use. Epstein seems to be assuring Barack that even if his only role is a door opener, that will still be very valuable to companies. And this is actually consistent with Matilda's research. She studied payments to lobbyists who had personal connections to a lawmaker. It turned out those connected lobbyists could get paid about 9 % more than others, substantially more than lobbyists who are actually experts on the topic at hand.

5:52Stacey Vanek Smith:Barack found plenty of opportunities to capitalize on that value. A few months after this conversation, he joined the Swiss bank Julius Baer as a special consultant. At the time, industry press said he would help the bank establish ties with wealthy Israelis.

6:08Cardiff Garcia:Two years later, Barack became chairman of a public safety tech startup called Carbine. That year, he joined the board of a biometric startup, too. He later became chairman of a medical cannabis company and co-founded a cybersecurity and surveillance company called Toka.

6:24Stacey Vanek Smith:Now, Barack has defended his expertise. We reached out to Barack, and a spokesperson from his office told us on his behalf that Barack has a deep background in science and technology. He has a master's degree from Stanford in economic and engineering systems and multiple decades in the military and in politics.

6:41Cardiff Garcia:Epstein, though, was emphasizing personal connections. Like, in that conversation, Vladimir Putin comes up. Barack knows the Russian president personally, and so Epstein encourages Barack to take advantage of that as he leaves office. I would send a note to Putin. I'm going to leave government in March 14th. I'm going to be in Scandinavia or I plan to be in northern Europe. We should have dinner. Putin for dinner.

7:20Cardiff Garcia:Matilda suspects that underneath this conversation, Epstein's also thinking about how Barack's connections could be useful to him. This looks more like Epstein trying to use this conversation to increase this network that seems to be pretty wide-reaching. And we are seeing just how wide that reach was. Epstein's network crossed traditional political divides from right-wing strategist Steve Bannon to linguist and author Noam Chomsky. There have been waves of resignations over Epstein connections, from the chairman of Hyatt Hotels, to a leader of an elite law firm, to the CEO of a Dubai port operator.

8:02Stacey Vanek Smith:There have also been arrests. The former prime minister of Norway was charged with gross corruption. Former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. On Monday, UK's former US ambassador, Lord Peter Mandelson, was arrested with police using the same language.

8:20Cardiff Garcia:Ehud Barak's office told us that Barak's business activities were always within the law. And they added many people tried to give Barak informal advice about what he could do after leaving office, including Epstein.

8:33Stacey Vanek Smith:The connections that Epstein promised would be so valuable have turned toxic in the sunlight. Yes, it's not what you know, but who you know. But now an addendum has become painfully apparent. Be careful who that person is.

8:50Stacey Vanek Smith:This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Sina Lafredo It was fact-checked by Vito Emanuel Kate Kincannon edits the show The Indicator is a production of NPR