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palace on 71st Street—though his business, naturally, is located on a 70-acre private
island in the Virgin Islands—was humiliated this summer when his lifestyle was made
public. Epstein was known to be a womanizer: He usually travels with three women, who
are "strictly not of our class, darling," says a friend. They serve his guests dinner on his
private 727, and are also there for touching.
But it seems that he was also interested in oun er women: Over the past few years, a
then-17-year-old brought at least five high-school
girls between the ages of 14 and 16 over to Epstein's house in Palm Beach to "massage"
him, which meant watching him masturbate and even allegedly having sex. Epstein's
defense seems to be that he didn't know the girls were minors, and that he is "very
passionate about massage," as one of his lawyers says.
Those who know Epstein say he's unfazed by his travails. "He's totally open about his
life: His life is about making money and living an erotic life, and his escape isn't alcohol
or drugs-it's sex," says a friend. "I was talking to him the other day, and he said to me
that he was doing well and working steadily—between massages."
In books, the billionaire has become a symbol of ultimate power and freedom—they're
Gatsbys, yes, but they own the light at the end of the dock. In Michael Tolkin's The
Return of the Player, the player tries to make a fortune working for a $750,000,000 man
(a pauper) and the billionaire who pulls his strings. The billionaire tells the player: "You
don't know what a few extra decimal places taste like. There are wines—my God, you
don't know what they do for you—from vineyards that stopped selling to the public about
forty popes ago ... The provenance of this [Rembrandt] is without blemish, and the
painting has never been publicly catalogued, like a lot of the most amazing pieces in the
world, and I paid for it using the interest of the interest of the interest. A hundred and
twenty-five million dollars. I had more money an hour after I signed the check than I did
when I bought it."
But art falls short when describing the lives of billionaires. Steve Wynn is free enough to
afford to buy a Picasso, even when his eyesight is famously challenged, and to rip a hole
in that Picasso with his elbow while distractedly showing the painting before he closed
the deal with hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen to buy it for $139 million, which would
have been the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Convinced that the elbow gaffe
was fate, Wynn decided to keep the picture—what's $139 million, after all, to a man like
him?
A billionaire has the wherewithal to match his moral vanity: While the rest of us struggle
to keep our heads above water, billionaires are saving the world. There's Branson's
pledge to invest the next ten years of profit from his Virgin Group's airline and train
businesses in renewable-energy initiatives, worth $3 billion. Bing, along with Burkle and
others, has pledged $1 billion to do the same. In June, Warren Buffett, the thrifty bridge
player with the five-bedroom house in Nebraska, donated $31 billion to the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation for education and global development. Buffett plans to give
away 70 percent of his fortune. "If I wanted to," he has said, "I could hire 10,000 people
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