How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching

23/11/2025, 14:43
Opinion | How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails - The New York Times
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/opinion/meaning-epstein-emails.html
How the Elite Behave When No One
Is Watching: Inside the Epstein
Emails
Nov. 23, 2025
Photo illustration by Celina Pereira; Photographs by Getty Images
By Anand Giridharadas

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Mr. Giridharadas is the author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of
Changing the World” and publisher of The.Ink newsletter.
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?
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 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

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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. 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, 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-

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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 J.F.K., L.H.R., N.R.T. 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.” Epstein’s correspondents come alive far from home, freed from
obligations, in the air, ready to connect.

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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

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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

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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 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

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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 tout 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 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.

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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 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
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 anti-obesity drugs a “$100 billion opportunity.”

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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.

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