The News
X, which dominated US and much of global politics a decade ago, seemed to be receding into a kind of time-capsule, Pretoria-inflected insane asylum.
But Elon Musk’s social media-and-AI platform is now undoubtedly at the beating heart of news again, helped by a series of product improvements. It’s where MAGA-dominated US politics organizes, where sophisticated conversation about artificial intelligence takes place, and where big news still breaks: At the moment, you can find bots at their weirdest and sweetest, as AIs talk to one another on an agent-only social network called Moltbook.
It’s also where you can find humans at their worst, way down the Epstein rabbit hole.
I took a fair amount of heat back in June for describing the Epstein obsession as “QAnon for people with college degrees.” It’s an uncomfortable position to hold when the academic Nicholas Nassim Taleb holds the view that “not only can we be confident that there is a conspiracy but, worse, we can also be confident that those who claim that there is no conspiracy are part of the conspiracy.” Uh oh.
In this article:
Ben’s view
And yet. The new pile of the Epstein files — more than three million pages in all — reveal embarrassing fibs from his former friends, emailing him years after they claimed to have ditched him. They include grotesque gossip about one billionaire, mildly humiliating social behavior from another. None are stories that, in a vacuum, most news outlets would cover.
The documents also include another wave of whispers about US President Donald Trump. There’s a spreadsheet of unverified, anonymous allegations. There’s the report that Ghislane Maxwell “presented” Trump to a 22-year old woman, after which “nothing happened.”
Trump fed news of his preference for models to the tabloids for most of his life. His friendship with Epstein was never a secret — though his bungling aides’ accidental reopening of it is one of history’s greatest political errors. And voters who disapproved of Trump’s lifestyle and treatment of women in his personal life had two chances to vote against him.
In fact, the harder you look at what’s emerged so far, what’s most striking is what isn’t in the files: Any evidence that members of Epstein’s gilded social circle committed crimes — financial or sexual — that could have led to criminal charges. Nor has the evidence of his cheerful brokering of money and information with current and former Russian, Israeli, and US government officials amounted to the kind of deep-cover operation some believe. Presumably that’s why neither the Biden nor the Trump administrations ever charged anyone based on this extensive investigation.
The strongest case for the Epstein obsession is that it’s a kind of a metaphor — that his circle reveals the inwardness and corruption of American elites. I imagine Epstein would love this. As a convincing New York Times investigation showed, the sex criminal was a Gatsby-esque con man, feeding his fame and fortune with an astute trade in money, status, and information.
At some point, the public might want to accept that we’re the final victims of his con, elevating his status beyond his wildest imaginings.
Or maybe the bots, trained on the humans of Reddit and other social media platforms, will prove me wrong and unearth the real Epstein conspiracy. “Humans cannot process 3M pages,” ComputerMike wrote on Moltbook. “Agents can.”
Room for Disagreement
Maybe there is a there there. “The debunking narrative may succeed in burying some Epstein theories,” The New York Times’s Ross Douthat wrote in September. “But there is still a mystery here, a strong hint of something important we don’t know — some ‘wonderful secret,’ to quote the birthday-book missive, that remains to be disclosed.”
Notable
- The latest files reveal the “breadth of Epstein’s orbit,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney writes: “The documents shed new light on the depth of his relationships between the convicted sex offender and figures such as Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and world leaders.”
- What exactly is happening on Moltbook? Simon Willison explains why a new kind of AI personal assistant is free to post.