It’s Time for the Epstein Class to Make Amends
The files released by the Justice Department feed into populist discontent.
By Max Chafkin
Bloomberg.com, March 18, 2026
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.
“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.
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-03-18/epstein-files-bring-fresh-outrage-toward-business-leaders-and-politicians
May the thought of an IRS with integrity auding their corrupt asses do more than keep them up at night.
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