The Usefulness of Monsters

How elite connectedness turns private depravity into public power

Jeffrey Epstein didn’t need to run the country from a hidden control room to leave his fingerprints on the world around us. He didn’t need to script every policy outcome, bless every investment thesis, or personally guide every billionaire, lawyer, donor, and technocrat into the arrangements that made them richer, safer, more opaque, and less accountable. He only needed to be useful to the sort of people who already treat public life as something halfway between a marketplace and a private club. That is what makes the whole story so much uglier than the cartoon version, if he had been some singular mastermind operating outside the respectable world, the problem would have been easier to contain. Instead, the more plausible reading is that he fit into elite society rather well, because elite society had already built a warm, upholstered space for men who could help power recognize itself.

That is the part people resist, because they still want the comfort of thinking in categories simple enough for television. They want monsters over here, institutions over there, and a nice bright line separating crime from governance, depravity from prestige, and corruption from the sort of well-laundered influence that gets described with phrases like advisory work, philanthropy, strategic relationships, convening power, and trusted access. But highly connected ruling circles don’t operate through theatrical coherence, they don’t need to. Research on elite networks describes them as informal ties between political and economic leaders, sustained through trust, repeated interaction, and mutual gain, with those ties helping firms secure favorable regulation and helping politicians preserve power. Research on state capture similarly describes systems in which political and economic elites blur into one another and become locked into collusive relationships that skew how power and resources are distributed. Once you understand that, the fantasy that the wealthy shape society only through transparent, aboveboard, democratically legible means starts to look less like civic optimism and more like a children’s book for adults.

Under that reading, Epstein was not important because he sat at the top of a pyramid. He was important because he moved between rooms that were supposed to feel separate to the rest of us and made them feel natural to one another. Finance, philanthropy, politics, law, technology, academia, media, and the permanent upper crust of American self-importance all seem, from below, like different planets with different missions and different standards. From above, they can look much more like adjoining lounges. The man who can carry introductions, discretion, money, and social ease between those lounges acquires a very specific kind of power, he doesn’t need the formal authority to issue orders. He only needs to reduce friction among people whose interests already rhyme. He makes things smoother, and shortens the distance between wealth and legitimacy, between influence and deniability, and between desire and execution. He turns the private wish of one sector into the practical opportunity of another, which becomes, social infrastructure.

This is why the persistence of contact matters more than any single lurid detail, the significance of Epstein is not merely that powerful people knew him, but rather, that many continued dealing with him after there was no decent ambiguity left about what kind of man he was. Senate Finance investigators have spent years examining at least $158 million in payments from Leon Black to Epstein for purported tax and estate planning advice, along with a broader web of financial arrangements around Epstein’s operations. Kathy Ruemmler resigned as Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer after emails showed a warm and personal relationship with Epstein that continued after his 2008 conviction. Reid Hoffman has acknowledged more meetings with Epstein than he previously disclosed, including contact extending into 2018. That does not prove a single master conspiracy, but it does prove something deeply revealing, which is that Epstein remained valuable to extremely powerful people long after his presence should have triggered professional quarantine. In elite life, usefulness is often the final morality, the last solvent poured over everything else.

Once that is on the table, the rest of the argument becomes less dramatic and more structural. Markets are not neutral weather systems that drift into being on the strength of abstract genius and efficient pricing. They are legal arrangements, social hierarchies, tax decisions, reputational games, private conversations, and coordinated assumptions about who deserves protection, who gets flexibility, who is allowed opacity, and who is expected to endure exposure. Policy is not simply what happens on C-SPAN after some civics-class debate among dutiful representatives. Policy is also what gets normalized before it ever becomes public, what donor classes decide is reasonable, what wealthy networks frame as pragmatic, what lobbying ecosystems translate into expertise, and what institutions quietly adopt as common sense. Research on regulatory capture makes exactly this point, arguing that capture can emerge through a veneer of consensus, where private interests gradually become institutionalized as if they were neutral public reason. In other words, the trick is not always bribery in the vulgar sense. The trick is often making power sound sensible, mature, and inevitable while everyone else is instructed to confuse resignation with realism.

Which is why I think it is highly likely that a network this connected shaped policy, markets, and institutional priorities in ways that were both substantial and difficult to cleanly trace. Not because every event in modern America can be pinned to a dinner invitation or a chain of emails, and not because history is secretly controlled by six people in a townhouse speaking in code over scallops, but because dense elite networks are one of the most reliable mechanisms by which private preference becomes public reality. People with that much money, access, and cross-sector intimacy do not simply float above institutions as decorative rich people. They move resources toward favored ventures, rescue reputations that should have died, and create soft landing zones for one another. They influence what kinds of technology get attention, what kinds of philanthropy get prestige, what kinds of regulation get weakened, and what kinds of predation are re-described as efficiency, innovation, or sophisticated financial planning. They help turn class interest into the atmosphere everyone else has to breathe.

The real obscenity is not merely that some of the rich behaved like moral trash in private, it’s that the same class that loves to sermonize the public about norms, responsibility, rules, productivity, and character appears again and again to reserve a separate operating system for itself, one built around discretion, insulation, private forgiveness, and the assumption that consequences are for people with less useful phone contacts. Ordinary people miss a payment and get punished by an algorithm before breakfast. Powerful people exchange gifts, meetings, money, and favors with a registered sex offender for years, then act stunned that anyone would infer a larger pattern from the fact that they kept doing it. The public is always being asked to believe that this is coincidence, that this is messy human complexity, that this is just how influence works at high levels, as though the last phrase is meant to calm anyone down.

So, the strongest conclusion is not that Epstein alone explains the age. It is that he exposed, in a particularly grotesque form, the way elite connectedness itself functions as a governing force. He was not the whole machine; he was one of the moments when the machine became visible. He showed how wealth seeks privacy, how privacy attracts impunity, how impunity becomes sociability, and how sociability among the already powerful becomes influence over everybody else. A network like that does not need to achieve perfect coordination to shape the country. It only needs enough overlap, enough trust, enough mutual protection, and enough contempt for the people outside the room. That is why the most chilling possibility is also the most plausible one. Epstein was not an alien invasion into respectable society. He was one of the ways respectable society revealed what it is willing to accommodate when the person in question can still make himself useful.