World Financial Review

For nearly six years after Jeffrey Epstein’s death, one deceptively simple question has refused to go away: how did he actually make his money? The number that tends to anchor the discussion is $577 million, the estimated value of the assets detailed in the will Epstein signed just two days before his death in August 2019. That figure alone would make him one of the wealthiest private financiers of his generation, yet unlike his peers, Epstein left behind no transparent record of business success, no clearly verifiable investment track record, no large firm with dozens of analysts and traders, and no obvious product that justified the extraordinary fees he claimed to command. What remains instead is a financial life defined by opacity, offshore entities, and relationships with some of the richest and most powerful people in the world, a combination that has made following the money extraordinarily difficult and deeply unsettling. Epstein was most often described in public as a financia...

For most of the past decade, Silicon Valley has been driven by a simple assumption: if you build enough computing power, intelligence will inevitably emerge. Bigger data centers, more GPUs, larger models, and more money poured into the system have become the industry’s default response to every competitive threat. Yet nowhere is this assumption being tested more aggressively—or more expensively—than at Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg has committed what may ultimately exceed six hundred billion dollars to an all-in pursuit of artificial intelligence that currently produces little direct revenue and no clear path to commercial payoff. Over the past three years, Big Tech as a whole has spent hundreds of billions of dollars expanding AI infrastructure. For companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Oracle, the logic is straightforward. They are cloud providers. They build enormous data centers, fill them with NVIDIA GPUs, and rent that computing power to customers ranging from startups to g...