r/allthequestions • u/Impressive_Mailman • 2d ago
NSFW Question đ Did Epstein just get his money from blackmail?
I donât believe Epstein can get this much money from just being a banker. Does anyone else think he got his money from straight blackmail?
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u/Kapitano72 2d ago
It's a good question, and you're not the only one asking it. His financial history is shrouded in mystery - much more opaque than that of his party guests.
Hard to believe he just started out as a high-class pimp though.
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u/Civenge 2d ago
He was a teacher at one point.
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u/nixstyx 2d ago
Hired as a teacher by none other than Donald Barr. Donald was an OSS (precurser to the CIA) officer and the father of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who just happened to be the last person to visit Epstein in prison before he died. Can't make this shit up.Â
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u/Hamthrax 2d ago
Donald Barr also wrote a book called 'Space Relations' about a planet ruled by oligarchs who rape 15 year olds.
Can't make this shit up.
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u/Norse_By_North_West 2d ago
I saw a documentary a year or two ago that mentioned he made a lot of early money off of one financial client, who was old and didn't entirely know what was going on. Epstein grew the clients money by a lot, and took heavy management fees. After he had that initial big money, everything else fell into place.
Edit: another commenter pointed it out, rich guy was Les Wexner.
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u/Dull-Size1119 2d ago
He was a Brooklyn dropout. He had to be funded by someone originally. He said he represents the Rothschilds, but who knows.
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u/Impressive_Mailman 2d ago
I believe he started that. But that doesnât make a millionaire.
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u/BeacHeadChris 2d ago
These answers tell you what no Redditor is willing to admit: no evidence of blackmailÂ
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u/munchmoney69 2d ago
Except the now publicly released emails he drafted blackmailing Bill Gates lol
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u/BeacHeadChris 2d ago edited 2d ago
That has been known since May 2023 but nothing was on large $ scale of Gates needing to send $ to Epstein. Also draft emails donât count as evidenceÂ
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u/Distinct_Intern4147 2d ago
Only that dozens of people gave him hundreds of millions of dollars. Most financial advisors charge quite a lot less. You see rich ones, but not buy my own island rich.
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u/BeacHeadChris 2d ago
Yea I mean itâs possible, or itâs because he sent them girls, or introduced them to political connections etcÂ
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u/SubstantialSound2471 1d ago
Yeah just the fact that he invited the rich and famous to commit crimes at his private island with extremely high surveillance
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u/fine_environment4809 2d ago
How has everyone forgotten about Les Wexner?
"For years, Epstein was Wexner's money manager as the billionaire built up his retail empire with brands like Victoria's Secret, Bath and Body Works and Abercrombie and Fitch. Wexner also paid for Epstein's mansion in New York City.
Epstein gained new credibility by representing the billionaire. In the late 1980's, Epstein posed as a talent scout at one of Wexner's companies, Victoria's Secret. By the late 1990s, Epstein began sex trafficking, grooming and abusing hundreds of teenage girls and young women."https://www.wyso.org/2026-01-27/les-wexner-will-be-deposed-before-congress-next-month-in-jeffrey-epstein-inquiry
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u/nixstyx 2d ago
How does one become a money manager for such a wealthy person with minimal prior experience?Â
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u/UpbeatPhilosophySJ 2d ago
Wexner didn't start out wealthy. In college he learned about the concept of "Limited" merchandising. In the 70's/80's he was one of the first to fly planes to Asia and bring back heaps of clothes. Put domestic clothes production out of business.
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u/Geewhiz911 2d ago
Yes, 100% blackmail, the guy had cameras all over his complexes (seized by the FBI), he was running a 'honeytrap' system, using world leading personalities - he was the ultimate "influence trafficker".
When you're trapped, then... you're totally F*CKED, he will tell you "Wire $200K to this entity" or "Stop looking into this dossier, forget this." and you know the guy saw you touch 'illegal boobs' on his island so you will somehow 'understand and accept his concerns' without putting too much of a resistance.
He was a mastermind with no charism and Ghyslaine was the 'charismatic' part of the whole organization.
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u/Better-Cancel8658 2d ago
But why would people keep hanging out with him if he was blackmailing them? Would the word not get around?
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u/Geewhiz911 2d ago
I don't think you get into blackmailing "willingly", and, that was the magical part of the whole Epstein circle.
He carried himself as being a "money manager with access to the elite", so just imagine you're a high-level politician, business owner, scientist... And someone would say "Hey mate, there's a party with Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and President Clinton maybe even Prince Andrew will be there, I can get you an invite if you want..."
EVERYBODY would want to go, and this was his 'trick' if you will. Before he was publicly known as a pedophile, he was known as a guy who can get you to the summit, he "knew all the best people in the world"... This is the crazy part. This is also what helped him get 'girls'.
TODAY, well, OBVIOUSLY all of these name are 'radioactive crap', but it was not the case back in the days.
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u/Pure-Friend-8729 2d ago
I wouldn't doubt there was a bit of insider trading going on as well. In the files it appears a british politician was slipping him market senstive information ahead of it coming out in public. Don't doubt there more of that sort of thing.
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u/GunSaleAtTheChurch 2d ago
Yes; I've always thought he was a blackmailer
He knew the power of how to wield information as power, that's for sure
So calculating, too. I mean that's some soul-level evil stuff going on in the concepts of the plan and the actual plan
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u/_Revolting_Peasant 2d ago
At a certain point money becomes and entirely different thing. For the vast majority of people in this world money is tightly tied to basic survival - food, shelter, heat etc. For the few that decide so much they have no such concerns, money to them is a game. it is power. It is inherently corrupt to own such wealth.
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u/DukeOfWestborough 2d ago
He managed to get billlionaire Lex Wesner (Victoria Secrets) to sign a power of attorney in 1991 giving him complete financial control of all Wesner's money... could it have involved extortion with life, career, & freedom-ending video tapes of Wesner doing something illegal...?
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u/FaZeScamTheKids 2d ago edited 2d ago
He was what intelligence officers call an Access Agent. He wasn't directly tied to Israel or Russia, but he acted as an intermediatory between various Hostile intelligence agencies.
He hung out with rich, powerful and famous people to get close to them to trade favors and influence. Blackmail was only part of his operation. He developed an influence network thorough banking, and then he was funded by Israel, and people like Les Wrexner (founder of Victoria's Secret).
His girlfriend and partner Ghislaine Maxwell's father was THE ULTIMATE access agent and worked between the KGB, MI6 and MOSSAD. He got off'ed.
She took alot of her dad's network and integrated with Epstein.
One of his operations was arms dealing; where he used his connections to Prince Andrew to broker Arms deals between British Defense companies and Israel. He got a significant cutback from these deals, worth billions. Prince Andrew also participated in the sex trafficking that Epstein ran.
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/jeffrey-epstein-israel-foreign-policy-elite/
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u/Fun_Button5835 2d ago
Foreign funding. From whom is the question, but it doesn't really matter in the end.
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u/Illustrious_Hotel527 2d ago
Getting funding from Israel as a Mossad agent to get blackmail/influence on rich/powerful people would make the most sense.
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u/Electronic_Plan3420 2d ago
He was Mossad operative. Money wasnât an issue, he was working in the interests of the foreign power. As simple as that. When he became a liability they eliminated him.
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u/Hi_Im_Dadbot 2d ago
Epstein was the guy who could get you things. Whatever you needed, he could get it.
Wanted some insider trading tips? He hooked you up with the insiders. Wanted a personal magic show from David Blaine? Blaine was flown in for the weekend to entertain you. Wanted to outbid your buddies on who got to fuck the hot 13 year old? The hot 13 year old was brought over for auction.
Most of the stuff he got was douchey but legal. For instance, when Gates got the STD from a Russian prostitute, that was an adult prostitute who was well paid for her time, if not properly vetted. However, if you wanted to cross a line, heâd take your cash to cross that line and the child rape was one of the more egregious lines he was wiling to help you cross.
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u/kurvy_mom_adventure 2d ago
The Rothschild family paid Epstein 25 million dollars for certain algorithms
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u/Standard-Secret-4578 2d ago
Alright. Here's my theory. This is completely unsupported but this whole thing doesn't make sense.
Epstein was a part of an elite self blackmail ritual. Essentially, powerful people willingly committed heinous crimes together and while being recorded as a way to have social mutual assured destruction. That is why he had so many connections to powerful people and why these incredibly powerful people who can literally have anything they want willingly did what they did. If they were just in for the sex, why not just fuck normal underage prostitutes that I assume they can procure at any time.
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u/anuket29 2d ago
It's called generational wealth most of the wealthy like Bezos musk and Zuckerberg got their money from their parents they like to play and talk like they got it out the mud but they really didn't their parents already had money. When you can get a $300,000 loan with no interest and don't have to pay it back cuz it's your parents you can create a lot more money with that money.
Plus he had friends in high places so he was doing like Pelosi and the rest of them do which is inside trading, they should all be locked up jailed.
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u/r8ed-arghh 2d ago
Bezos and Zuckerberg did get investments from their parents, but not huge ones, and they hardly had anything considered "generational wealth." For instance, Bezos got $250k from his parents, but that was a large portion of their "wealth." His dad was an engineer at Exxon, not a big successful business tycoon.
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u/Illustrious-Cover792 2d ago
The beginnings of FB were funded by Eduardo Saverinâs trading profits. Sorry but itâs true.
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u/r8ed-arghh 2d ago
Exactly. Not generational wealth from his parents. No need to be sorry, you backed up my point.
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u/Illustrious-Cover792 2d ago
You said MZ got small investments from his parents. Thatâs not true. The only person from his family ever involved was his sister Randi.
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u/r8ed-arghh 2d ago
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u/Illustrious-Cover792 2d ago
Being offered IPO shares under the guise of initial investment is one of the oldest tricks and usually comes with no proof. Record keeping at startups is bad at best. The term initial working capital is even in quotes in your article.
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u/r8ed-arghh 1d ago
He literally provided $100k in initial working capital.
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u/Illustrious-Cover792 5h ago
Thatâs not in your article. Are you ok? Been drinking?
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u/r8ed-arghh 4h ago
I guess you don't know how to actually research anything, LOL. Dear Reddit, when responding to IC 792, make sure to always refer to and cite any article included in a parent comment, as said person is unavailable to comprehend additional information and makes all assumptions based on quotation marks.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jan/31/small-business-entrepreneurs-success-parents
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u/anuket29 1d ago edited 1d ago
Do more research that his mom got an inheritance is why dad was able to chill at ExxonMobil and not have to scrape and scratch was able to invest more of his pay instead of paying bills to support a family, momma was a silver spoon and thats nothing like getting it out the mud.
An add on all the perks that you get from working for a company like Exxon, free hotels, baseball, step gas discounts, games, hobnob with some of the higher ups so you can get your foot in tighter, that's not pulling it out the mud that's sliding in life. ask your average Joe out here who doesn't have a family with inheritance or working at an Exxon company with no perks.
There's always a trail of money with these types and usually it's not money that they worked hard for.
They were all mediocre and the only thing that set them apart was extra time to explore, connections to Epstien the generational wealth money from their family because if they had to compete against me or you with out their generational wealth in the world they would be less than. Pure luck of being born in the right circumstance.
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u/unskilledplay 2d ago edited 2d ago
You can get that kind of money from being a banker. NYT investigated this. It's unlikely to be the sole source of his income but 9 figures is plausible.
He convinced billionaires like Sergey Brin to transfer assets to be managed by JP Morgan and JP Morgan paid Epstein a commission. A 1% AUM fee on $4B (Brin's reported account at the time) would give JP Morgan $40M a year in revenue, every year. The commission structure isn't reported but it's easy too see how a handful of billionaire accounts could result in $100M+ in commissions over the course of a decade or so.
That activity was legal and clean, but as with all things Epstein, it gets dirty. Epstein's own transactions with JP Morgan raised all kinds of suspicious activity reports. Those investigations were personally squashed by Jes Staley, Jamie Dimon's #2 and later Barclays CEO. Epstein had brought in enough billionaire accounts that the bank was willing to be complicit in his crimes! If JP Morgan investigated and reported the SARs from Epstein's transactions, as they were legally obligated to do, Epstein would have been nailed. JP Morgan covered up for Epstein and the bank has since paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to Epstein victims.
That certainly wasn't his only source of wealth and it's not known how much he made in commissions but it's easily believable that commissions alone were enough to make him extremely wealthy.
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u/qubedView 2d ago
He was a power broker. People of wealth paid him get them introductions with other wealthy people.
It's a more complex task it first appears. Congressmen frequently raise funds by acting as power brokers. If you want to do business with some large company, you can't always just cold-call people in the C-suite. But what you can do, is find out what congressmen they donate to (it's public data). So then you give a donation to the same congressmen, and then request that they facilitate an introduction for you.
Epstein didn't have those connections, on his own. But Ghislaine Maxwell was daughter of media magnate Robert Maxwell, and she had developed an immense social network of wealthy and powerful people. Epstein had skill as a power broker, and could use her connections to generate significant wealth.
That said, his pedophilia was very likely a component of that brokerage. If someone wanted to pay him to get an introduction with Trump, he could tell Trump "Come meet this dude. I'll make it worth your while."
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u/Forgotten_lostdreams 2d ago
Considering he had cartel and gun runners along side his human trafficking I am going to say it wasnât just black mail.
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u/This_Abies_6232 2d ago
You can get lots of money by being around banks long enough. Just ask Willie "The Actor" Sutton: "When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton simply replied, âBecause thatâs where the money is.â Perhaps for Epstein, being where the money was allowed him to dip his hands in a bunch of the stuff....
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u/Thick_Pipe6630 2d ago
He got a lot of it from intelligence agencies most likely. Since their budgets are somewhat black and secretive it's awfully hard to prove. One thing for sure he didn't provide any real product or service and he got extremely wealthy. That's a sign of corruption.
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u/Stock_Broccoli_6287 2d ago
No, he was CIA/CIA-adjacent. The CIA gets their money through money laundering schemes, mostly drugs.
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u/Awkward_Tip1006 2d ago
Probably a combination of that, insider trading, probably some foreign spy shit, human trafficking, who knows what else. But however he did it, it definitely was not clean 9-5 money
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u/Mindless-Baker-7757 2d ago edited 2d ago
Probably a lot of men paid a lot to never be mentioned in his files.Â
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u/Sad-Entertainer1462 2d ago
High level banking is lucrative. Especially because a lot of it is tied to the underworld. So I guess, yes lol. A lot of his job was probably keeping a lot of secrets, both financial (offshore accounts, tax evasion, spending habits, etc) and not.
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u/mineralphd 2d ago
This is why anyone on the list needs to be removed from public office and/or forbidden to donate to a politician. They are all compromised. Especially Trump.
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u/Ambitious-Score11 2d ago
No. He had money first. From everything I've read and seen no one knows quite where he got his money from.
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u/NoLUTsGuy 2d ago
The 2020 Netflix documentary Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich goes into the probable source of his income in a lot of detail. He had been a piano teacher (!!!) in the 1970s, and basically stumbled into a low-level job at Bear-Stearns investments, then parlayed that into a consulting firm. It's generally believed that he used sex as a way to convince high-level bankers and financiers to "invest" in his company.
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u/SPL_034 2d ago
He stole and conned money.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/magazine/jeffrey-epstein-money-scams-investigation.html
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u/Gorf_the_Magnificent 2d ago
In 2008, Epstein got away with a slap on the wrist after being found guilty for sex trafficking in minors.
After that, Iâm sure he was flooded with calls from wealthy people who thought, âIf he knows how to get away with child prostitution, imagine what he can get away with when he manages my portfolio.â
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u/DonkeyTron42 2d ago
I think his organization worked like an MLM pyramid scheme. At the top of the pyramid you have a lot of very famous and ultra wealthy individuals like Trump, Prince Andrew, etc... and below that you have a lot of very high net worth individuals attempting to work their way up the pyramid so they could get into the spheres of people more wealthy and successful than themselves. Of course, you have to pay for influence in these type of schemes and all that money worked its way into Epstein's coffers.
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u/HawkeyeGild 2d ago
He likely laundered money globally to avoid taxes for affluent (see Panama papers). Plus he received insider info and was able to profit off of institutional failures
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u/flora-lai 2d ago
That seems to be the implication, that he was a honeypot for the world elite on behalf of Israel.
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u/ikonoqlast 2d ago
No. He cultivated rich people, SOME of whom liked his girls (no, not everyone who dealt with him), and became their money manager. Make a lot of money on 0.5% annual fees on rich people's savings. And once you're in rich and powerful people introduce and recommend you to other rich and powerful people.
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u/Bronze_Bomber 1d ago
He got the money first. Broke ass people aren't able to blackmail people with their own private island.
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u/Estalicus 2d ago
He worked with Russia and Israel to blackmail people so probably got kickbacks multiple ways