It’s an absurdly vast house, among the largest in Manhattan, but the dining room is windowless, creating a hermetic or stop-time sense, broken only by the household staff ferrying in time-of-day-appropriate foods and beverages. In sweatshirt, draw-string pants, palm beach slippers, and half glasses, Jeffrey Epstein sits at the head of the table. He spends most of his day in the dining room in front of a laptop and beside a row of reading glasses (there are a lot of them in case, apparently, he misplaces a pair, but being quite meticulous he never does) advising or instructing a startling collection of the rich and powerful, who are slotted in on an hourly basis. The apartness of Epstein’s dining room might seem to offer some buffer for a super rich man who attends to even more fabulously rich men (and the occasional extremely rich woman). But with the paparazzi often posted near by, the outside world seems dangerously close too. Once I arrived for a visit and found several police cars blocking the street and thought the worst—they’d come for Jeffrey. But it was a security detail for a controversial head of state who was visiting him. His subject, on this morning in early November during a set of interviews he’s agreed to have with me about his life and views, is “hyper wealth.” His subject is always wealth—how capital should react to the given global political, economic, and cultural moment. The baronial quality of the dining room is disturbed only by an ever-present white board, whereon he scribbles calculations and notes, a tool he uses to conduct one of the world’s most rarified economics class, attended often by the world’s finance ministers and foremost economists. His stock in trade is not precisely the making of money, but the issues that arise when money, at a heretofore unimaginable rate, makes itself, altering many basic economic, social, and personal calculations. He recounts a dinner he had two nights before. The scene is, like much of what he does, a conspiracy theorist’s fantasy. The six men at this dinner, all technology entrepreneurs, represented, together, several hundred billion dollars and they are deciding how to use it to alter the world to their liking. “In the past, only governments had this kind of money, money of a reality altering scale,” says Epstein conversationally, but making a pedagogical point. “In fact, it used to be that the rich, reaching a certain point of philanthropy, merely hoped to help make the world a better place, now they want to change the world. Rockefeller and Carnegie were, as examples of social-engineering philanthropy, unique. They alone had such resources and will. Now you have legions of people who have to give away vastly larger fortunes than Rockefeller or Carnegie had at their disposal, or might even have imagined. “Except that it’s actually hard to give away this kind of wealth, without unintended consequences that can cause more problems than you’r e solving.”