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Comment by VagueMag | Hacker News Reader

At this point it's beginning to look as though meeting with Jeffrey Epstein was some sort of prerequisite to joining the club.

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They are/were both financiers. Lots of people will have met with Epstein. Probably a good proportion of people he entertained on his island never were involved in his sexual endeavors. While I'm not a Thiel fan in any way, just meeting a dude seems like thin gruel, a way to say "seems suspicious" without any reason for suspicion at this point. It's not like Thiel and Epstein were fishing in the same pond.

Maybe the story really is that Epstein met with Thiel.

What evidence is there that Epstein was a financier, other than that the press keeps dutifully repeating the claim? The few reporters who tried to look into it weren't able to find any traders or brokers who knew of Epstein or had done any business with him.

There is little question that after he left teqching math he became a money person. He got his money from somewhere, there are questions around how. According to Bloomberg (reasonably reputable) he was a great trader at Bear Stearns and then a money manager. Trader, money manager, and giver of donations to finance stuff. How far away from financier is that in your book?

I think his primary business was always sex trafficking. He seemed to have some kind of hold (e.g. blackmail) over

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Wexner

and if his ill-gotten gains were sufficient he could have started his own private office which is not hard to do at all if you have the money, which then establishes him as a "financier" who would have cover for all sorts of things (nobody cares to look into what you are doing if you run a private office.)

He certainly did financial things for people like help Noam Chomsky move some money around, but again, it's not hard at all to set up to do that. Once you've got a reputation as a "financier", philanthropist, etc. it certainly opens doors for you.

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