J. Epstein & Company (1988–2019)
In 1988, while Epstein was still consulting for Hoffenberg, he founded his financial management firm, J. Epstein & Company. According to Epstein, the company managed the assets of clients with more than US$1 billion in net worth, although others have expressed skepticism about that number, as he was secretive of the clients that he took.
The only publicly known billionaire client of Epstein was Leslie Wexner, chairman and CEO of L Brands (formerly The Limited, Inc.) and Victoria's Secret. In 1986, Epstein met Wexner through their mutual acquaintances, insurance executive Robert Meister and his wife, in Palm Beach. A year later, Epstein became Wexner's financial adviser and served as his right-hand man. Within the year, Epstein had sorted out Wexner's entangled finances. In July 1991, Wexner granted Epstein full power of attorney over his affairs. The power of attorney allowed Epstein to hire people, sign checks, buy and sell properties, borrow money, and do anything else of a legally binding nature on Wexner's behalf. Epstein managed Wexner's wealth and various projects such as the building of his yacht, the Limitless. It was during this time that Southern Air Transport relocated its headquarters to service Wexner's brands, and that Epstein dated models like Stacey Williams. Epstein represented himself as a global talent scout for Victoria's Secret during this time and used this powerful position to sexually manipulate young women.
By 1995, Epstein was a director of the Wexner Foundation and Wexner Heritage Foundation. He was also the president of Wexner's Property, which developed part of the town of New Albany outside Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner lived. Epstein made millions in fees by managing Wexner's financial affairs. Epstein often attended Victoria's Secret fashion shows, and hosted the models at his New York City home, as well as helping aspiring models get work with the company. In 1996, Epstein changed the name of his firm to the Financial Trust Company and, for tax advantages, based it on the island of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. By relocating to the U.S. Virgin Islands, Epstein was able to reduce federal income taxes by 90 percent. The U.S. Virgin Islands acted as an offshore tax haven, while at the same time offering the advantages of being part of the U.S. banking system; Epstein, who capitalized on his relation with Jes Staley while the latter was employed by JP Morgan, maintained close relations with that bank's subsidiary in the USVI.
In 2002, as reported by the New York magazine, his financial-administrative staff numbered 150 employees (among whom 20 accountants) across three sites: Villard House in Manhattan, the Wexner operation in Columbus, and St Thomas USVI. Although it took 12 years to deliver the story, as Matthew Goldstein of the New York Times tells it, JP Morgan banker Jes Staley and CEO Jamie Dimon had a falling-out over Staley's client Epstein sometime around 2012, after the general counsel of the bank, Stephen Cutler, complained to Staley and others that Epstein was "not an honorable person in any way. He should not be a client." Despite facing increased pressure from federal regulators, the bank did not discard Epstein until 2013, coincidentally the year of Staley's departure from the bank. Epstein thereafter moved his trade to the American affiliate of Deutsche Bank.
According to Forbes in 2025, Financial Trust Company (FTC) and Southern Trust Company, Epstein's two main businesses, received revenue of over $800 million between 1999 and 2018, consisting of $490 million in fees (most of that from two billionaires, Leslie Wexner, $200 million, and Leon Black, $170 million) and $310 million from investment returns. Due to the U.S. Virgin Islands' tax exemptions, his corporations saved $300 million in taxes and paid an effective tax rate of 4%, even though the top marginal tax rate was 38.5%. In the course of his life, Epstein engaged with no fewer than 75 lawyers, including Alan Dershowitz, Kenneth Starr, Roy Black and Jay Lefkowitz. Senator Ron Wyden said in Congress that the U.S. Treasury Department file on Epstein detailed from one account no less than 4,725 wire transfers that totaled $1.1 billion, and that he had extensive financial correspondence from Russian banks over his sex trafficking activities. Another report from Forbes says that between four banks (JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Bank of New York Mellon and Bank of America) the transfers totaled more than $1.9 billion.
Epstein was the president of the Bermuda-incorporated company Liquid Funding Ltd. between 2000 and 2007. The company was a pioneer in expanding the kind of debt that could be accepted on repurchase, or the repo market, which involves a lender giving money to a borrower in exchange for securities that the borrower then agrees to buy back at an agreed-upon later time and price. The innovation of Liquid Funding, and other early companies, was that instead of having stocks and bonds as the underlying securities, it had commercial mortgages and investment-grade residential mortgages bundled into complex securities as the underlying security. Liquid Funding was initially 40 percent owned by Bear Stearns. Through the help of credit rating agencies, the new bundled securities were created for companies so they received an AAA rating. The implosion of complex securities, because of their inaccurate ratings, led to the collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008, the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession. If Liquid Funding were left holding large amounts of such securities as collateral, it could have lost large amounts of money.
In April 2007, the fund had a leverage ratio of 17:1, which meant for every dollar invested there were 17 dollars of borrowed funds; therefore, the redemption of this investment would have been equivalent to removing $1 billion from the thinly traded CDO market. The selling of CDO assets to meet the redemptions that month began a repricing process and freeze in the CDO market. The repricing of the CDO assets caused the collapse of the fund three months later in July, and the collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008. Losses to investors in the two Bear Stearns funds were $1.6 billion. By the time the Bear Stearns fund began to fail in May 2007, Epstein had begun to negotiate a plea deal with the U.S. Attorney's Office concerning imminent charges for sex with minors. In August 2007, a month after the fund collapsed, Alexander Acosta, the U.S. attorney in Miami, entered into discussions about the plea agreement. Acosta brokered a lenient deal.
As part of the negotiations, the Miami Herald reported that Epstein provided "unspecified information" to the Florida federal prosecutors for a more lenient sentence and was supposedly "Unnamed investor #1" for the New York federal prosecutors in their unsuccessful June 2008 criminal case against Cioffi and Tannen, two managers of the failed Bear Stearns fund. Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein's attorneys in the 2008 criminal case, told Fox Business Network in 2019, "We would have been touting that if he had [cooperated]. The idea that Epstein helped in any prosecution is news to me." Moody's reported that on April 18, 2008 "all outstanding rated liabilities" of Liquid Funding were "paid in full". At the time, the liquidator had not yet sold the beleaguered fund to its new owner as of May 1: JP Morgan.
In 2003, New York Daily News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman partnered with Epstein, advertising executive Donny Deutsch, and investor Nelson Peltz in a bid to acquire New York magazine. The ultimate buyer was Bruce Wasserstein, a longtime Wall Street investment banker, who paid US$55 million, over US$10 million above the offer from Zuckerman, Epstein, Deutsch, and Peltz. In 2004, Epstein and Zuckerman committed up to US$25 million to finance Radar, a celebrity and pop culture magazine founded by Maer Roshan. Epstein and Zuckerman were equal partners in the venture. Roshan, as its editor-in-chief, retained a small ownership stake. It folded after three issues as a print publication and became exclusively an online one. Also in 2004, Epstein was an early adopter of then "invite only" social network ASmallWorld, this social network also included users such as Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Prince Pavlos of Greece and many other public figures.
During the period of 2003, Epstein had provided a cheque of $100,000 to the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research's "TIFR String Theory Travel Fund", Andrew Strominger had facilitated the gift, saying that the string theory team had "the highest intellectual output per dollar of any such group in the world".
Between 2002 and 2005, Epstein invested $80 million in the D.B. Zwirn Special Opportunities Fund, a hedge fund that invested in illiquid debt securities. In November 2006, Epstein attempted to redeem his investment after he was informed of accounting irregularities in the fund. By this time, his investment had grown to $140 million. The D.B. Zwirn fund refused to redeem the illiquid investment. The fund was closed in 2008, and its remaining assets of approximately $2 billion, including Epstein's investment, were transferred to Fortress Investment Group when that firm bought the assets in 2009. Epstein later went to arbitration with Fortress over his redemption attempt. The outcome of that arbitration is not publicly known.
After his first arrest, Epstein began an interest in the surveillance industry. Epstein maintained a close relationship with former Israeli prime minister and defense minister Ehud Barak, exchanging private emails with him and meeting more than 30 times between 2013 and 2017. He also facilitated Barak's interactions with prominent figures, including Peter Thiel, as well as Sergey Belyakov and Viktor Vekselberg, who were connected to Vladimir Putin's circle. These interactions are documented in the leaked Barak–Epstein emails released by the Handala hacker group, whose authenticity has been partially corroborated by independent reporting, including The Sunday Times.
In business, Epstein leveraged his relationship with Barak to get access to Thiel. In 2015, Epstein invested in Reporty Homeland Security (later rebranded as Carbyne), a startup headed by Barak which developed advanced emergency communication technologies. The company's leadership included CEO Amir Elihai, a former special forces officer, and director Pinchas Bukhris, a former defense ministry director general and commander of the IDF cyber unit 8200. In many years, Epstein's acquaintances had repeatedly encouraged Thiel to meet him. Reid Hoffman, Thiel's friend from the PayPal Mafia, directly introduced the two and joined some meetings.
Epstein pitched Reporty to Thiel-founded Valar Ventures in 2016; although the firm declined, Valar partner Andrew McCormack indicated they might revisit the venture once the company matured. Epstein had previously invested US$40 million into funds managed by Valar in 2015 and 2016. In 2018, another Thiel co-founded firm, Founders Fund, participated in Carbyne's $15 million Series B funding round (non-leading role). Between 2014 and 2016, Thiel had half a dozen scheduled meetings with Epstein at his townhouse, including with other people such as Woody Allen and Kathryn Ruemmler. There is no record of Thiel's social visits to one of Epstein's homes or flights on his private jet.
Epstein participated in funding rounds for the crypto ventures Coinbase and Blockstream, giving the former $3 million and the latter $500,000 in 2014. Epstein's donation to Coinbase was brokered by Brock Pierce, the co-founder of Tether, while his donation to Blockstream was brokered by Joichi Ito, who was the director of MIT's Media Lab at the time. Barak discussed with Epstein in the leaked Barak–Epstein emails about meeting Putin's ally Viktor Vekselberg on the June 6 and 8, 2014. An email sent in April 2015 showed that Barak had asked Epstein for his opinion on Vekselberg-backed Fifth Dimension, a startup which would later be shut down after being sanctioned in 2018 by the United States for alleged election interference. In August 2018, Epstein said in a New York Times interview that he was helping Elon Musk find a new chairman for Tesla after Musk was in trouble with the SEC over comments that he would privatize the car manufacturer.
