The Epstein Class Needs to Make Amends

Summary

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Bloomberg Businessweek: "The Epstein Class Needs to Make Amends"

Date: March 20, 2026
Hosts: Carol Massar & Tim Stenovec
Guest: Max Chaffkin, Senior Reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek

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Overview

This episode delves into the fallout from the recently released Jeffrey Epstein files and their profound impact on public trust in business and societal elites. Hosts Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec, with guest Max Chaffkin, explore the growing hostility toward major institutions, the emergent "Epstein class," and the urgent need for accountability and amends from implicated leaders. They discuss the broader psychological and societal consequences, consumer power, and why this scandal is likely to affect perceptions of leadership and capitalism for years to come.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Erosion of Trust in Elites and Institutions

• Main Theme:
  • There is a marked decline in public confidence in business leaders and other societal elites, as evidenced by polls and increasing populist rhetoric from both political wings.
  • Quote:
    • “The sense of growing hostility toward business leaders and others in powers everywhere you look, it’s in polls that show sinking opinions of large companies, universities, the media, churches, and virtually every major institution.” — Carol Massar (01:44)
• Populist Movements:
  • Hostility comes from both left and right populist angles, exacerbating distrust.

2. The Epstein Files: A Bombshell for the Elite Class

• Scandal's Uniqueness:
  • The Epstein files align with existing conspiracy theories about a global elite, fueling even more suspicion among the public.
  • The files’ breadth—over 3 million documents—exposes embarrassing and incriminating behavior among some of the world’s wealthiest and most respected figures.
  • Quote:
    • “This is like a bomb going off in the relationship that Americans and people all around the world have with their business leaders.” — Max Chaffkin (03:44)
• Long-Term Impact:
  • The scandal will have lingering effects on trust and accountability, possibly for decades.

3. (Lack of) Accountability and Elite Resilience

• Ostracism & Real Consequences:
  • High-profile resignations (e.g., Larry Summers, Kathy Ruemler) are exceptions; many maintain their positions or retain support despite links to Epstein.
  • Quote:
    • "There is a sense of a lack of accountability... Some people have resigned... but you still have people like Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman maintaining their roles." — Max Chaffkin (05:19)
• U.S. Perspective vs. Global:
  • Unlike in some countries where scandals lead to real falls from power, in the U.S. the consequences are muted.

4. Contagion Effect & Lingering Suspicion

• Boycotts & Consumer Sentiment:
  • The scandal affects consumer loyalty and can lead to boycotts, even for companies only loosely linked to Epstein.
  • Example: LifeTouch (owned by Apollo, which had a connection to Epstein) faced boycotts despite a distant link.
  • Quote:
    • “You’re seeing places where there isn’t even a really close connection to Epstein, where companies are suffering.” — Max Chaffkin (05:54)
• Ongoing Relevance:
  • The Epstein saga influences voter attitudes and is likely to shape future populist electoral results.

5. The Social Structure and the “Epstein Class”

• Perceived “Club” and Moral Decay:
  • The files conveyed an image of a closed, elitist club focused on self-interest and internal maneuvering—deepening disenchantment with the system.
  • Quote:
    • "What’s so damaging... is not only the alleged crimes, but the sense of this little private club and people... only interested in maneuvering within that clique." — Max Chaffkin (06:46)
• Wider Societal Discontent:
  • The scandal intersects with pre-existing anger over inequality, the wealth gap, and perceived lack of justice post-Great Financial Crisis.

6. Professional Judgment and Morality

• Failures of Leadership:
  • Many of those implicated are meant to be professional judges of character, capital, and societal vision, raising questions about their suitability.
  • Quote:
    • “It does show an incredible lack of judgment... from people supposed to be professional judges...” — Max Chaffkin (08:10)
• Trust Gap in Technology:
  • The AI industry is cited as suffering from distrust rooted in broader skepticism of elite motives and competence.

7. Public Power: Beyond the Ballot

• Consumer Influence:
  • Voters may feel limited by the political system, but have power as consumers, potentially shaping companies’ fortunes through collective action.
  • Ongoing investigations and upcoming congressional testimonies (including hints at Bill Gates possibly testifying) signal that the story is far from over.
  • Quote:
    • “It will continue to hang there for a long time because there are all these redactions in the Epstein files... Some of these people... are going to testify in Congress.” — Max Chaffkin (09:24)

8. The Call for Genuine Amends

• Acknowledging Failure:
  • Chaffkin argues that true redemption for implicated leaders requires direct confrontation and honest acknowledgment of their actions, as opposed to evasive PR responses.
  • “What we’ve seen instead... is a shifting story tailored to suit whatever information has already been released.” — Max Chaffkin (10:32)
  • Example: Elon Musk’s public denials leave out clear evidence from the files, illustrating the problem of incomplete admissions.
  • Quote:
    • “The people who will be able to move past this are going to be the ones that confront it head on... rather than trying to get around it with these kind of evasive statements...” — Max Chaffkin (10:32)

9. Why Did So Many Still Seek Out Epstein?

• Motivation: Power and Access:
  • Even after Epstein served prison time, prominent individuals sought him out for their own ambitions and networking.
  • “You could just say a lack of a moral compass... If you wanted to be more charitable, I think you would say access and money.” — Max Chaffkin (11:56)
  • Example: Dr. Peter Attia viewed Epstein as a conduit to build his business profile.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "This is like a bomb going off in the relationship that Americans and people all around the world have with their business leaders."
  — Max Chaffkin [03:44]

• "You layer that on this very upsetting sex scandal, and then you layer on a wealth gap... that becomes a stew that I think could lead to some significant social changes."
  — Max Chaffkin [07:03]

• "Being in these files doesn't mean you were complicit... but it does show an incredible lack of judgment."
  — Max Chaffkin [08:10]

• "The people who will be able to move past this are going to be the ones that confront it head on."
  — Max Chaffkin [10:32]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:44] — Discussion of declining public trust in institutions
• [02:47] — How the Epstein scandal amplifies elite distrust
• [04:19] — Is the fallout truly consequential for the elite class?
• [05:06] — Notable resignations and the limits of accountability
• [05:54] — Impact on businesses tangentially tied to Epstein
• [06:46] — The damaging optics of the "Epstein class" and social discontent
• [08:10] — Failures of professional judgment
• [09:24] — Ongoing investigation, persistent story
• [10:32] — Genuine amends and the need for honesty from leaders
• [11:56] — Why so many courted Epstein, even post-scandal

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Conclusion

The episode paints a vivid portrait of a society grappling with leadership crises and the challenge of restoring trust in the wake of scandal. The hosts and guest lay out a road map for how business leaders might begin to make amends—not through PR maneuvers, but with honest self-reflection and public accountability. The implications stretch far beyond the Epstein case, promising to shape debates on power and trust for years to come.

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Transcript

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[Tim Stenovec]

Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio news.

[Howie Mandel]

You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

[Carol Massar]

The sense of growing hostility toward business leaders and others in powers everywhere you look, it's in polls that show sinking opinions of large companies, universities, the media, churches, and virtually every major institution.

[Tim Stenovec]

We talk about this a lot.

[Carol Massar]

We do.

[Tim Stenovec]

Like people have lost faith.

[Carol Massar]

Well, it's coincided with dueling populist political movements. You've got on the right President Trump's attacks on a shadowy global elite on the left by Zora and Mamdani's broadside against billionaires. The question that Max Chaffkin writes he's Bloomberg businessweek senior reporter. How did business leaders get so crosswise with the public? There are a lot of reasons, including the sense that our business leaders themselves, Max writes, are part of the problem. Max Chavkin is co host of the Everybody's Business Podcast. He's the author of the Contrarian, Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power. He joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio. What I Read from. That entire sort of first portion of your piece does not include the name Jeffrey Epstein. But the connection that you make is this is illustrated in the Justice Department's release of the Epstein files. Make that connection for us.

[Max Chaffkin]

Yeah, I think that there was already in the background, as, just as you said, Tim, a lot of hostility towards, quote, unquote, elites, towards business people, not just business people, but people in the media and so on. And then you. You filter this scandal on top of it and sort of some of the unique contours, one of which is it matches with an existing conspiracy theory, which is that there were already a lot of people on the Internet primed to believe that there was a global cabal of pedophiles. You have this thing that. It's not exactly that, of course, but it does have some contours there. Jeffrey Epstein, of course, was accused of trafficking teenagers. So there's that aspect of it. And then on top of that, you just have this massive data dump. For better or worse, there are now 3 million, 3.5 million documents that anyone can go look. And you can see some of the wealthiest and most respected people in the world sort of bickering and doing things that are very, very embarrassing. And that is a thing that I think we're gonna be talking about for years, if not decades. This is like a bomb going off in the relationship that. That Americans and people all around the world have with their business leaders. And it's gonna take a long time for business leaders, and not just business leaders, politicians and so on to rebuild trust. And you have this ongoing, you know, conspiracy theorizing politicians are using. It's going to be a thing we're going to be talking about for a long time.

[Tim Stenovec]

Is it really a bomb going off? And I just think about, certainly for the people who are cited in these files, like, I think that's something that it's kind of wild. Interesting to watch. And we've talked about what's happened in the UK with some officials. It was a joke at the Academy. Aw. About, you know, UK officials get taken down and, you know, you don't necessarily see the mighty falling. You do a little bit, but you do wonder, are they ostracized from society? Do they lose their wealth?

[Carol Massar]

And other countries, you see them fall in the U.S. it's kind of like

[Tim Stenovec]

not so much so, like, I mean,

[Max Chaffkin]

that's one of the things that I would argue is making this bad is that there is a sense of a lack of accountability. Right. For a bunch of the people there are Some people who have resigned from their jobs. So Larry Summers stepped down from Harvard. Kathy Ruemler has said she's stepping down from Goldman Sachs at the end of June. They're still in her job.

[Carol Massar]

And Goldman Sachs would have been, it seemed like, would have been fine if she stayed.

[Max Chaffkin]

That's.

[Carol Massar]

That's the.

[Max Chaffkin]

I mean, it's hard. It's hard to know what's going on behind the scenes. But they had definitely supported her, said she wasn't doing anything professionally inappropriate.

[Tim Stenovec]

Bill Gates is still a very.

[Max Chaffkin]

Well, Gates is still connected to Microsoft. Reid Hoffman, who's also Microsoft board member, is all over these files. So. So there is a sense that of, I think from. From critics of a lack of accountability. What I would just say is I think we're at the very early stages of this process, and it's easy to say that there's been no accountability six weeks after this document dump happened, but we will see because ultimately voters and consumers have a say in this and they are gonna start to make their voices heard. And we're seeing that in sort of subtle ways already. The company LifeTouch, which is a school photography company, no real connection to Jeffrey Epstein. They were bought by Apollo, which is connected to Epstein via Leon after Epstein had died. They're dealing with boycotts. So you're seeing places where there isn't even a really close connection to Epstein, where companies are suffering. And it's going to be this kind of like, background thing. You know, there's a lot of. In terms of our politics right now in the primary. Epstein is coming up, I think more than people realize with voters. This is gonna be like one of these things where when we look at populist electoral results, you know, at the end of this midterm two years from now, I think it'll be one of the things people point to.

[Carol Massar]

How do you connect it to the way that people view the structure of society right now? Like the way people view elites, the way people view capitalism or the system that we have?

[Max Chaffkin]

I mean, what's.

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[Max Chaffkin]

What's so damaging about these files is, you see, it's not only that. It's not only the alleged crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, as I mentioned, accused of sex trafficking, also pled guilty to a sex crime in 2008. It's the sense of this little private club and a little clique and people who seem only interested in maneuvering within that clique in ways that are just embarrassing. And I mean, this sounds kind of small, but you read some of these emails. They're not Grammatical, they're venal, they're all the things that people are when they're speaking in private. It's just you layer that on this very upsetting sex scandal, and then you layer on a wealth gap, like a massive, a massive discontent that has been bubbling really since the great financial crisis. And that becomes a stew that I think could lead to some significant social changes.

[Tim Stenovec]

I also think, Right. You know, we always talk about gaps in the economy, K shaped economy inequalities and so on and so forth. But you have these individuals who say, well, I didn't really know him, or like, we didn't really have that close a relationship. But you go through those emails and they seem very, very familiar. And so, like, once again, you're like, well, wait a minute, these folks get a pass somehow. And how did they not know? Especially when you look at the timing of the emails, how did they not know what this guy was about?

[Max Chaffkin]

Yeah. And I should say, you know, being in these files doesn't mean you were complicit with Jeffrey Epstein's crimes. It doesn't even necessarily mean that these people knew everything that was going on. But it does show an incredible lack of judgment. And we're talking about people who are supposed to be professional judges of, you know, professional allocators of capital, you know, professional technology prognosticators and, you know, a

[Tim Stenovec]

lot of moral code.

[Max Chaffkin]

Yeah. And, you know, you look at, for instance, polling around how people feel about AI. There's this huge gap right now between the way, like, Americans and people all around the world talk about AI and executives. And I think that you're seeing the impact of that lack of trust. A lot of people are really down on this technology and we're like, why are they down on it? Well, they're down on it because they don't trust it and they don't trust the people who are running it. And that's going to create problems for businesses, you know, down the road for this year, next year and so forth.

[Carol Massar]

But apart from voting, the people who have this discontent or who maybe even tell pollsters that they're unhappy with the system as, as is, what power do they have?

[Max Chaffkin]

I mean, they're, they have power as consumers. And I think that, I mean, we don't, we don't know how, again, AI companies have yet to really turn a profit selling these, selling these chatbots. Right. They're going to need to sell ultimately to sell products to people. And I think that is going to, you know, this is going to be a thing that hangs over any company that has an Epstein connection. And I think it will continue to hang there for a long time because there are all these redactions in the Epstein files. We're going to have hearings. Some of these people that I've mentioned are going to testify in Congress. Bill Gates has said he would testify in Congress. So this is just going to be a sort of story that goes on essentially forever. There was probably an opportunity years ago to kind of create a sense of finality and justice and that. And because it was dragged out for such a long time between, you know, wrangling over the Epstein files and so on, that it feels like that that opportunity has. Is basically passed.

[Tim Stenovec]

You know, you end and you talk about some of these. Well, as you say, you know, there's a code of elite silence, there's an Epstein class. But you kind of write saying that, you know, maybe what we start to need to see from these tarnished leaders is making real amends. And, like, do we need to have that? Like, do we need to say, yeah, I kind of. I kind of screwed up.

[Max Chaffkin]

I don't think that the people who are able to. Who navigate, who will. Who will be able to move past this are going to be the ones that confront it head on. And because what we have seen instead from most of these people is a sort of shifting story that is tailored to suit whatever information has already been released. And we've seen that with people saying, oh, well, I didn't. I only met him, or I only met him once, or whatever. And turns out it's more times than that. Or you have somebody like Elon Musk saying, I didn't go to the island. Which leaves out the fact that you can look up this email where he may have not gone to the island, but he was certainly sending Jeffrey Epstein emails, like, asking to go to the island. So I think it's technically not wrong. No, no, no. Factual. But it feels like it's not the whole story. And I think at some point, again, being in this group doesn't necessarily mean you did anything criminal or even necessarily wrong. But I think that at some point, people are gonna have to confront it head on rather than trying to sort of get around it with these kind of evasive statements and so on.

[Carol Massar]

You know, I'm pulling up another story that your story reminded me of, and it's a story that came out for Bloomberg Business by Courtney Rubin and Dina Shanker about Peter Attia, the doctor and the Epstein revelation that is upending his longevity empire. And your two pieces really got me thinking, Max, what in your view drew people to him even after he served prison time?

[Max Chaffkin]

Well, I think it's, I think if you're being, I mean, you could just say a lack of a moral compass or something like that. These people just didn't care. That would maybe if you wanted to be more charitable, I think you would say access and money. So in the case of Peter Attia, he was trying to build this wellness empire. And from the emails and from the story that Courtney and Dina wrote, you can see him sort of trying to use Epstein as an entree into that world. That is how Epstein promoted himself. And somewhere along the way, Peter Attia became friends with Jeffrey Epstein. At least he's denied that they were friend friends. But, but you know, you see a relationship and I think that happened in a lot of cases.

[Tim Stenovec]

Listen, it's kind of how the world often works, right? Power and being close to it in relationships and so on and so forth. It's a brilliant read and a brilliant right. Max Chaffkin, co host of the Everybody's Business podcast and the author of the Contrarian, is of course part of the Bloomberg Business Week team.

[Max Chaffkin]

He's Senior Report.

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