How Jeffrey Epstein made himself an important player in tech

There are bold-faced tech names all over the Epstein files. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Reid Hoffman, Steven Sinofsky, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, on and on and on. These men (and they’re pretty much all men) had wildly varying degrees of interaction with Epstein, and the details matter a great deal. But so does the totality of it: you spend long enough in these files, and you start to get a sense of the way the world works for a particular kind of extremely rich and extremely powerful businessman. And it starts to feel pretty bad.

On this episode of The Vergecast, David and Nilay start the show by talking about the latest tranche of emails from the Epstein files, both what we’ve learned and the deeply strange way in which they’re being disseminated. There are interesting business stories in here; there are shocking plots to change the world. We’re still not sure how to talk about any of it, except to keep showing what we find.

After that, it’s time for the other thing capturing tech minds this week: Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads, which isn’t explicitly a shot at OpenAI’s plan to introduce ads to ChatGPT but is also very clearly exactly that. The ads started a debate about both how we use AI and how we pay for it and also made it a little clearer how precarious OpenAI’s position is right now. They’re also just very good ads.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on the Epstein files:

And in the lightning round: