Mashadipati: Epstein and the crisis of elites

In Remarks for the April issue of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, senior reporter Max Chafkin (who's also co-host of the Everybody's Business podcast) writes about why the Epstein files fallout just keeps growing. Today's newsletter features an excerpt, and you can read the full story free here. Plus: Is ChatGPT ready to do your taxes? And FCC Chair Brendan Carr is pointing his MAGA flamethrower at the American news media.

If this newsletter was forwarded to you, click here to sign up.

Early last year, Bill Gates embarked on a book tour to promote his memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings. It was an awkward moment for the billionaire philanthropist. Months earlier, Gates had made a poorly timed political bet, donating $50 million to a group supporting Kamala Harris. He was now watching Donald Trump elevate some of the fiercest Gates critics to positions of power.

To lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who'd spuriously claimed that Gates was implanting harmful microchips under the guise of vaccine campaigns. Elon Musk, the head of the new administration's government efficiency effort, had mocked the Microsoft co-founder for years while promoting election-related conspiracies that centered on the Gates Foundation. Now, Musk was attempting to shut down the foreign aid apparatus he'd spent decades trying to supplement.

Jeffrey Friedman. Photo illustration: Allison DeBritz; Photographer: Rick Friedman/Getty Images — Jeffrey Epstein.

"The world is not logical now," an exasperated Gates told the Times of London in an interview published the week of Trump's second inauguration. "You have to accept that you might be treated as the Antichrist for trying to help." Gates wasn't the only one to notice public opinion had moved against people like himself, those perceived as members of the establishment. He wasn't even the only person who invoked the Book of Revelation in trying to define it. Last year investor Peter Thiel—who represents, along with Trump and Musk, the counterclass of billionaires supposedly challenging the status quo—delivered a lecture series titled The Antichrist, in which he complained that influential and wealthy people have the "illusion of power and autonomy, but you have this sense it could be taken away at any moment."

The sense of growing hostility toward business leaders and others in power is everywhere you look. It's in polls that show sinking opinions of large companies, universities, the media, churches and virtually every other major institution. And it's coincided with dueling populist political movements, embodied on the right by Trump's attacks on a shadowy global elite and on the left by Zohran Mamdani's broadsides against billionaires. Both men were initially treated as a joke by most every serious businessperson in America. Last summer, JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon dismissed Mamdani as a Marxist and said his supporters were "idiots" who "do not understand how the real world works." Dimon wound up looking like the one who was out of touch. Mamdani won the race for New York mayor easily and is now one of the most popular political figures in the US, according to polling from YouGov.

How did business leaders get so crosswise with the public? On Night 1 of his book tour, Gates blamed diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which he said had gone "too far." Dimon has suggested the real problems are wealth inequality and residual anger from the 2008 financial crisis. Thiel has blamed high real estate prices driving up the cost of living. Reid Hoffman, Thiel's former PayPal colleague and a prominent Democrat, has pinned it on Trump's demagoguery. All these factors surely help explain voters' anger. They also feel staggeringly incomplete.

Yes, it's the economy and inflation and lingering cultural resentment. Anxiety over artificial intelligence is surely playing a role. But there's also a sense that our business leaders themselves are part of the problem. In other words, guys, it's you. And this, more than almost anything, is the takeaway from the 3 million documents released by the Department of Justice in late January, the documents that much of the world has been poring over ever since.

Read the story

Related: Peter Attia built his longevity empire on trust and credibility. The revelation of a yearslong relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has upended that.

Peter Attia. Photo Illustration: Allison Debritz; Photos: Alamy; Getty Images; Oura — Peter Attia.

In Brief

Latest on the conflict in the Middle East: Iran warned countries around the Persian Gulf that a number of energy assets are now "legitimate targets" after Israel attacked its giant South Pars gas field, sending further shock waves through oil and gas markets.
Pressure is growing for the Supreme Court to end "emergency wins" for President Trump in immigration cases.
Autonomous vehicles from companies like Waymo and Zoox are set to trigger an increase in car usage that clogs urban streets. Cities should prepare now.

AI for Taxes

Martijn Lancee has an accountant, but he still hates doing his taxes. They're complicated: He and his wife have a mortgage on a home in the Bay Area, she owns a small business, and he makes money consulting for companies on artificial intelligence. Each year his tax adviser sends him a long list of tedious requests for information on business expenses, bank statements, bills. In February, Lancee had an idea. "Hey," he typed into Claude Code, "how can you help me file my taxes?"

At the chatbot's instruction, Lancee downloaded a bunch of his tax documents as PDFs on his computer and dropped them into a folder on the desktop for Claude. He asked it to create a spreadsheet organized with several tabs the way his accountant likes. Lancee checked the work, sent the file to his adviser and then spent the rest of his night playing Mario Kart with his kids. He didn't tell his adviser the file was AI-generated. "I'm sure he noticed," Lancee says, "because the output was a lot better than last year."

Ben Steverman and Charlie Wells interviewed more than a dozen tax professionals who say this is the year AI has come for tax prep. The problem, according to tax pros, is that the chatbots keep messing up: People Are Using Claude to Do Their Taxes (But Maybe They Shouldn't)

Border Bonanza

$8 billion

That's how much Fisher Sand & Gravel has won in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security since July to build segments of Trump's long-touted wall on the southern border. By embracing the MAGA agenda, the Fishers have become the first known billionaire family born out of the Trump administration's immigration policy.

Trump's Media Brawler

Not long ago a group of Georgetown University alumni found themselves obsessing over a curious bit of Washington gossip. Brendan Carr, President Donald Trump's head of the Federal Communications Commission, was claiming to be a fellow member of the class of 2001. Lately, Carr had been everywhere in the news, butting heads with Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, and appearing in feverish cable news segments. Yet no one in the alumni group remembered meeting him or even hearing about the guy back on Georgetown's small, chatty campus.

To solve the mystery, they pulled out their senior yearbook and started flipping through. Among the sections devoted to Georgetown's many political groups and student activities, there was no sign of Carr. But eventually they found what they were looking for. Toward the back of the book, in a slightly sorrowful list of unpictured students, was a single mention of his name. Sure enough, Carr had graduated by their side, largely unnotable and unnoticed.

The finding only piqued their interest further. How could such an attention-shy, seemingly apolitical person have morphed into the strident and outspoken frontman for the political upheaval rocking DC?

Kelcee Griffis traces Carr's path to sudden notoriety: How a Deep State Bureaucrat Became Trump's 'Fake News' Enforcer

Election Results

"Lieutenant Governor Stratton having been his governing partner for eight years is a great thing to introduce yourself to black voters."

Alvin Tillery Jr.

Political science professor and director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University

Illinois' Juliana Stratton won the Democratic nomination for the state's US Senate seat on Tuesday, beating a rival who far outspent her and handing a victory to her boss and potential 2028 presidential candidate, Governor JB Pritzker.

Play Alphadots!

Our daily word puzzle with a plot twist.

Today's clue: Library of congress?

Play now!