> trying to set up a philanthropic fund that he hoped would include the billionaire as an anchor donor

haha yes, I'm sure this was the sum total of the influence Epstein was exerting.

The article says nothing about any affair except that unnamed people said that Epstein unsuccessfully applied pressure based on a threat to expose an affair. No evidence about dates or location of affair are presented.

Extreme hearsay.

How would we know if Epstein had been successful?

I don't understand why Gates would care. He was well known within Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for constantly going after female subordinates. Why would this one affair be the straw that broke the camel's back?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/16/business/bill-melinda-gat...

Why would an affair linked to a known pedophile pimp be different than going after subordinates? Your guess is as good as mine. (To be clear, Epstein was in fact a known pedophile pimp at this point in time)

How is the affair "linked" to Epstein? As far as I can tell, Epstein merely learned of it and tried to use it as leverage.

Besides, how could Epstein use his own crimes to blackmail someone? If he did somehow procure this woman for Gates, he couldn't reveal that fact without revealing himself as a sex trafficker. That would be a suicide bombing at best.

My theory, it's a leak from gates himself to help distance himself from Epstein and position himself as a victim. Most don't care about his past relationships and the one who probably did the most divorced him. He had little to lose and some to gain from this getting out.

So much has been said about this guy as he was playing some 5-D chess with Govt. , CIA, NSA, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

In reality he was just trying to make money by doing as little real work he possibly could and his preferred tactic was to either become a provider of vices for people richer than him or failing that investigate a billionaire life in order to uncover something and use it as a blackmail weapon.

And all the stuff that emerged up to now indicate that he managed to get in the proximity but never quite made it to the big leagues or score a big blackmail payment.

Because at the end of the day billionaires are not politicians, they don't care about their reputation and they never did.

So maybe only Bill Clinton paid him some millions.

How would you know? Harvard University got $6.5 million in 2003 from Epstein. He had assets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, when a few years before was just a college math professor on a meager salary. He presented himself as having made the money on Wall Street, but there no single forensic track of anybody in Wall Street ever trading with him.

Have you even seen how much money Les Wexner alone gifted to Epstein, on top of the [checks notes] largest townhouse in Manhattan?

It wasn't just gifts... Epstein managed his money!

> “Our documents show that Mr. Gates met with Norwegian officials to discuss the security situation in Afghanistan as part of Mr. Gates’ work on polio eradication,” said the Gates spokeswoman. “Mr. Gates has never been focused on or campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize, or any other prize.” Jagland didn’t respond to requests for comment. He has previously said the prize wasn’t a topic for discussion during the Strasbourg meeting.

That's interesting, this seems to have been not long after the CIA was caught using the polio vaccines to gather DNA in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

How is that in any way interesting? You conspiracy nuts will draw connections anywhere.

You don't find it interesting that Gates was intimately involved in pushing vaccines which were used by the CIA to gather DNA? And then went on to be a figurehead for the largest mass vaccination drive in human history? And had close dealings with a man Alex Acosta was told to give a sweetheart deal because he "belonged to intelligence"? An application of the barest minimum of pattern recognition raises some interesting questions.