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 is 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 faux-baronial quality of the dining room is disturbed by an ever-present white board, where he scribbles calculations and notes, conducting the world’s most rarified economics class, often attended by many of 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, representing, together, several hundred billion dollars and now trying to figure out how to use it to shape the world to their liking. “In the past, only governments had this kind of money, money of a reality altering scale,” says Epstein in a chipper and smoothed-out Brooklynese. “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’re solving.” Epstein’s long-time business thesis is that the rich know very little about money. They may know about their own businesses, but the great sums that are the result are ultimately an afterthought and demand an entirely different sort of intellectual discipline. The Forbes 400, says Epstein, not immune to an amount of wonder, increased their wealth by $500 billion last year, meaning, in effect, that on average every Forbes-list billionaire makes more than another billion every year. And, points out the 62-year-old Epstein, they will almost all be dead in 40 years, most well before that, meaning $4.2 trillion, compounding everyday, will have to be given away. “So, to understand the future, what you have to begin to do is follow the money, not in Watergate-like terms backwards, as in who has gotten it, but forwards to where it will go and who will get it.”