https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neoteny#section-over...
It's conjectured that a lot of humanity's advanced intelligence & culture has been achieved with the help of our species' extended retention of juvenile learning-capacity & neural plasticity:
(Of course, if there's evidence Epstein was involved at its founding, I'd change my mind about this.)
Wikipedia must be skipping over some important details, but it describes him as a two-time college dropout, a nightclub manager in Japan, (EDIT: nevermind, mystery solved! His MIT bio says he was the founder of Japan's Digital Garage and CEO of its first ISP [1]), then he's the president of MIT Media Lab, visiting Harvard Law School professor, on several boards of directors, and runs a VC fund.
I'm not implying he got his money by nefarious means, just that it's interesting to see people who find success (and in this case, downfall) within these institutions despite their unconventional backgrounds.
Probably netted him enough to set the rest in motion. Still, landing professorships at MIT and Harvard without a college degree is pretty wild.
and/or a lottery ticket
and/or employment from multiple sources and picking stocks
and/or a particularly lucrative real estate holding
and/or it probably wasn't linear at all just like your wealth probably doesn't materialize linearly either
so doesn't that make this whole discussion rather odd and clickbaity? I saw similar articles regarding Epstein and thought "thats not how any of this works?"
if I was ever put under similar analysis nobody would know anything accurate, they would just google me and see a big crowdsale I was on the executive team of and saw that it collected several million dollars and assume "thats how I made my money" even though they have zero transparency on who was paid what and how, or how the organizations made its revenues or not, or the investing patterns and homeruns and leveraged losses I had - which resulted in a useful exemption from capital gains tax on my next homerun, and would have zero information about what partnerships I'm part of, what hedge funds I'm invested in, how any of those things perform, etc.
https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2006/03/13/leadership-in-w.html
I'd guess by this point, he'd already made some money as a tech founder and CEO in Japan. He was apparently an early investor in Twitter, which was founded eight days after he wrote this blog post.
Could you elaborate here / further reading? That aspect of Joi’s background interests me.
That said maintaining the connection with Epstein in spite of repeated warnings was unconscionable. Joi Ito needs to step down and think hard about what he's doing. Not every rule is meant to be broken.