Given what has been recently revealed about her behavior at meta, larry and sheryl probably had a "quid pro quo," if you know what I mean (wink wink).

really cringe dating advice about pursuing an affair with a student almost 40 years younger than he is

it's way beyond cringe

Epstein seemed to be a power broker and a political fixer. If so, naturally many high-profile people would have interacted with him and even have confided in him. It does not mean everyone associated with him knew or participated in his criminal activities, right?

Not enough, if you ask me. He should be publicly shamed and humiliated. Truly one of the most evil maniacs of our time.

MIT and NYT need to get back on it, too. Lots of people still not feeling any consequences, much like Epstein during life. The girls were threatened more than he ever was (and still are.)

It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.

It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."

The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-claimed-cellmat...

Nicholas Tartaglione

https://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/2019/09/23/feds-how-n...

[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]

I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.

Wow. That text is wild! Another excerpt:

  I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.

And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.

He also famously gave a speech declaring that one of the reasons women were underrepresented in science and engineering faculty positions was "issues of intrinsic aptitude". - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/science-jan-june05-summ...

It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."

To me that memo is pretty clearly a sacarstic version of reductio ad absurdum.

it's the good old eleventh commandment, "thou shalt not get caught"

most of what we know today we knew years ago, too

I understand you want to highlight this, but you don’t have to begin your sentence with "It's interesting that..." because this is not interesting or novel in the slightest.

The tax paying class of the world just have to watch all this horseshit go on, watch the institutions and the law enforcement agencies protect these people with our hard earned money, meanwhile if we break a single law, there are consequences for us, sometimes massive.

It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?

It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?

Title as interpreted by me: "Larry Summers was on the OpenAI board this whole time"

It might have gotten flagged as political content if the full title was used.

Reid Hoffman already resigned so I guess, kudos to him for getting ahead of the curve!

> how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?

I think about things like this...

Some people enjoy watching horror movies, and some people don't. Some people enjoy watching game of thrones, and others don't.

And I know a lot of smart people disengage from politics because it is a big mess.

In the same way, I think lots of people on and around the ladder disengage in the same way, and these people rise (and feel empowered).

I also remember reading how steve jobs would figure out if someone was a good employee. He would go to their coworkers and say "I hear xxx is shit". If people would defend xxx, then maybe he was ok, while if they didn't say much, maybe xxx was shit.

so... this might be the pattern.

Telling people in power what they want to hear.

I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.

> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?

I think ladder climbing is its own skill only loosely correlated with intelligence.

Someone (maybe Charlie Munger) said that the presence of a woman he has lust for reduces a man's IQ by 20 points.

Seems anecdotally true.

The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard.

They know they above the law from the minute that reach a certain level of status, they don't care about the emails and if people see them, they know there will be next to zero repercussions for them.

> Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart?

"Funnily", if you read Epstein's contributions to a lot of his emails, he also gives off that same vibe.

What do you mean? I assumed he was cozied up to by the likes of Epstein because he had already ascended the ladder.

I see, because you think he's "not smart"… Yeah, I think "smart" and "makes smart choices" are two different things.

> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?

The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.

He's a pretty terrible asshole, but being dumb isn't the same thing as being wrong about economics. I'm not dumb, but I shouldn't be trusted to make economy-level decisions. Humility is underrated.

Game's gone.

What has the world come to , bowing down to children ....

*if you’re a democrat

You dropped this

/s

You should really Google some of the emails he wrote to Epstein. Summers wasn't just friends with Epstein, he was Epstein's padawan.

That's a charitable take. It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship. Also the woman's dad is the founding president of some major Chinese bank (AIIB) that he was cozying up to.

Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.

Reading about the case, you get the sense that this is the general disposition from these abusers. They know what they're doing is wrong, and they understand the power imbalance, but they sort of excuse it and justify it by softly believing that the women actually want them. That they are actually sexy. And that they are helping the women, somehow.

It's quite disgusting, but also totally believable. Importantly, the soft explanations don't excuse the behavior.

Alternatively, there is no justice, and even the truth is lost to partisan politics. I have a strange feeling this benefits foreign intelligence, not harms it. Mossad, for example, knows who slipped through the cracks. Knows how much worse the "truth" is beyond the code names and vague emails. Now they have more power, not less.

Well it's a good thing that the DOJ and FBI have highly qualified and totally non-partisan bosses that will see to it that justice will be done /s

The likely most damning/embaressing thing that has led to Summers resignations -- being a powerful 65-year-old man trying to pressure a 37-year-old mentee into having sex/relationship with you -- is considered (by me too) icky and unethical and an abuse of power, undoubtedly a violation of many ethics codes and depending on how it's done possibly some laws -- but is not actually anything to do with pedophilia or child abuse at all.

i know we like expanding the categories of all sins and then only refering to things by category name without the specifics, but.

I don't know what you tell you if the systematic abuse of hundreds (some reporting does suggest more than 1000) children doesn't rile you up. The fact that it is nearly exclusively rich and powerful people who participated only amplifies the effect. Most of us are absolutely fed up with the two-tier justice system, where the rich, powerful, and connected get to do whatever they want, while regular folk continually have their rights eroded. The powerful are often able to divert our attention from the injustice of the rich/powerful by dividing the people with propaganda, pitting one side against the other. Turns out the Epstein situation is one of the rare cases where nearly everyone agrees. You should expect it to receive increasingly large amounts of attention until we actually receive the real info and heads roll.

I'm not as alarmed that one of the most influential economists in America is a potential sex trafficker. I'm alarmed about to what degree the most influential people in America are being blackmailed.

Why is it such a big deal that many of our leaders (including Numero Uno) are likely rapists and pedophiles?

I don’t even know how to answer that question.

The story goes way beyond the abuse itself, they were videotaping everything to black mail other rich people and even world leaders... it's one of the biggest scandals in American history and it's about more than Epstein alone.

I think it depends on how they got rich. From the outside to me it looks like the ones who sacrifice their 20's to the grind and getting rich never get that shit out of their system like the rest of us do and end up as emotionally stunted adults trying to recapture their lost youth.

Money and power have been seen as corrupting influences since the dawn of humanity.

Those who seek those things -- money for money's sake, power for power's sake -- often tend to see their success as somehow making them "above" others. They derive perverse pleasure in seeing just how much they can flaunt society's rules. 'The rules don't apply to me' is like a drug in itself.

>This guy Epstein modus operandi of cozying up and becoming wingman to powerful people confirms that he was some kind of spy

Ah yes, no one else has ever tried to ingratiate themselves into the world of the rich and famous. It's spies all the way down!

I really think there is so much variance to how people live. Looking at some of the Epstein emails I'm floored by the behavior. It really seems like middle schoolers. And the racist chats that came out from the Young Republican group earlier this year -- I can't imagine ever being a part of a chat group like that. I would literally think I was being pranked or they were genuinely crazy racists, but they were actual early leaders of one of our two major political parties.

The thing that perplexes me is that these people aren't in poverty or victims of some violent trauma. They are among the elites of the country -- and yet this is still how they behave -- are these people a niche group or am I?

He was killed in maximum security custody, so an Intel operation.

High school never ends.

I think you mean forever trying to be cooler than he was(n't) in high school.

A thing to remember is that Chamath Palihapitiya is a billionaire but spends his time on Twitter trying to convince people he has a big dick[0].

> i'll bet your entire net worth x 10. the anaconda is the worst kept secret of silicon valley...

I think the truth is probably that insecurity does not prevent success. Some argue that it might be the source of it. But probably the truth is there are secure billionaires and insecure billionaires and the latter are very obviously insecure because despite their success they do things like this.

0: https://x.com/chamath/status/1931039584672186651?s=20

In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.

We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.

Now that the moral posturing of the west is unraveling, the question is really what comes next. Fukuyama talked about western liberal democracy being the "end of history", but it is more and more evident that this is a system ripe for disruption.

And, to be less coy, how is the opposition party the one that treats Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman? It's somehow Epstein all the way down. Glad I'm a left-wing Chomskyite, cynical about all of those corrupt, elite institutions. Wait...