The release last Friday by the Department of Justice of roughly 3 million documents relating to the investigation of the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has created a bizarre blame game among billionaires. Epstein was able to commit unspeakable crimes on a mass scale for decades with only a slap-on-the-wrist punishment because he was rich and well-connected. The new files help flesh out our sense of his social world, which was top-heavy with plutocrats such as the current commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick (who had earlier lied about the extent of his relationship with Epstein), Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates (whose marriage to his former wife Melinda was destroyed in large part by his relationship with Epstein), PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (who, like Lutnick, had been deceptive about how often he interacted with Epstein).

These men all had relationships with Epstein after his 2008 conviction and jailing for sex trafficking minors; some also had deep business or philanthropic ties to Epstein. Now that these sordid ties are finally coming back to haunt them, oligarchs are franctically throwing Epstein-related stones at each other from within their respective glass houses. When Hoffman posted on X (the social-media site owned by Musk), “We should focus on prosecuting those who committed crimes and finally getting justice for the victims.” Musk sarcastically responded, “While you’re at it, maybe you can help OJ ‘find the real killer’.” Hoffman shot back with a screenshot of a 2012 e-mail where Musk asked Epstein about visiting his private island, a missive that included this query: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”

The tawdry exchange between Hoffman and Musk has all the emotional maturity of kindergarten kids accusing each other of having the cooties. In truth, none of those in Epstein’s social circle should escape culpability, since, even if they committed no crimes themselves, they were, at the very least, tolerant of Epstein’s vileness.

The Epstein files are a window into the world of the financial and political elite. What emerges from this window is an ugly sight. Epstein’s coterie transcended normal political divides. Gates and Hoffman are centrist liberals who tend to support Democrats, while Thiel, Lutnick, and Musk are all ardent right-wingers. But their seeming partisan differences were as nothing compared to their common membership in the ruling class. After all, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were both close Epstein associates.

The files also show Epstein to be a true nihilist, one who thrilled not just in sexual predation but also in unleashing chaos for his profit. A 2016 exchange between Epstein and Thiel is revelatory:

Epstein: brexit, just the beginning.

Thiel: Of what?

Epstein: return to tribalism, counter to globalization. Amazing new alliances. You and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain

In a 2014 e-mail to a banking executive, Epstein reflected, “ukraine upheaval should provide many opportunities, many.” That same year, Epstein wrote to his business partner former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, “with civil unrest exploding in ukraine syria, somolia [sic], libya, and the desperation of those in power, isn’t this perfect for you.”

Current Issue

July/August 2026 Issue

As I’ve argued in a previous column, Epstein was a modern-day warlord, and a practitioner of “the shock doctrine” (a term usefully popularized by Naomi Klein). He thrived on fomenting upheaval—something that made him akin to the richest people in the world, who derive great profit from human misery.

Some public figures are correctly tying Epstein’s crimes to the broader sins of the billionaire class. Speaking on CNN on Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders gave a compelling analysis of the scandal: “There is a growing sense that you have a small number of elite, of very, very rich people who hang out with each other, who really see themselves as above the law.”

Sanders’s bracing class warfare is not for everyone, however. There is a significant faction of the Democratic Party that resists naming the enemy in these terms. One of the leading pundits of this faction, Matt Yglesias, offered the case against class warfare last December in a Substack essay titled, “Let’s All Practice Billionaire Positivity.” Yglesias argued that anti-billionaire sentiment is “emotionally and intellectually unhealthy” because they are creating great companies such as Amazon and Tesla. Further, some billionaires give money to charity or are Democrats and willing to accept taxation. On the charitable front, Yglesias cited Republican billionaire Bruce Kovner, who gives money to “Success Academy, which is a very good charter-school network, and also things like Juilliard and Lincoln Center and other uncontroversial arts stuff.”

“Many billionaires are doing great things,” Yglesias enthused.

This celebration of good billionaires falls flat on a number of fronts. First of all, if Amazon and Tesla are great companies, that is not just because of their plutocratic owners but also their workers, who deserve a piece of the company’s gains and a decent standard of employment. A fairer sharing of the pie doesn’t happen because of noblesse oblige from the top. It requires an organized working class and politicians willing to defy the wishes of the wealthy.

Further, a benevolent billionaire is a positive force only as long as they want to be. Treating billionaires as discrete individuals ignores the massive, distorting economic and political power that they possess as a class—power that allows them to entrench economic inequality and rig the rules of the global game for themselves. Their charity is a matter of caprice, as against the democratic sharing of resources provided by the welfare state, which rests on the will of the people. For proof of this, you have only to look at the case of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, currently worth over $250 billion. Bezos was heralded as a public benefactor when he first bought The Washington Post in 2013. It can fairly be said that, for the better part of a decade, he operated it mostly as a public trust, using his vast wealth to support strong journalism. But more recently, Bezos decided that pleasing Donald Trump is more important than running a good newspaper. So, earlier this week, he chose to gut the Post, laying off nearly a third of its staff. What is gratuitously given can be arbitrarily taken away. A billionaire is always a billionaire first and a citizen second. Whatever good they do is a matter of whim. Those of us who are not billionaires need to create strong guardrails to limit the power of plutocrats. The alternative is to live at the mercy of Jeffrey Epstein and his friends.