Gates, Lutnick, Wexner: why billionaires don’t see child abuse as a deal breaker in business
By Camaron Stevenson, National Correspondent
The House Oversight Committee on Wednesday interviewed a third billionaire as part of its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal enterprise, providing further clarity into the world of wealth and privilege that fostered his trafficking operation.
Tech billionaire Bill Gates sat with congressional investigators for over four hours, answering questions about his relationship with Epstein and responding to accusations made against him. Like fast-fashion mogul Les Wexner, Gates chalked up the relationship to poor judgement, allowing business interests to trump any ethical concerns. And like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Gates denied having a personal relationship with Epstein, despite evidence from both of their wives at the time to the contrary.
While the trio’s answers to the committee were fairly sanitized, filtered through high-profile lawyers and exceptionally poor memories, Oversight Committee member Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ), said the broad similarities revealed an austere mentality collectively held by our country’s wealthiest elites.
“Ultimately, what this shows to be is this culture in the Epstein Class that exists in the billionaire class in this country, of legitimizing people even when they have committed crimes,” said Ansari. “It’s not just about Bill Gates, but all of the other rich and powerful people who surrounded Jeffrey Epstein and continued to engage with him and meet with him and hang out with him. That is what allowed Jeffrey Epstein to continue the crimes and to continue abusing countless other women, even after 2008 until 2019, when he was finally arrested.”
Nearly every person interviewed by the committee who wasn’t a survivor of Epstein’s depravity has been adamant that, despite their proximity to him, they were completely unaware of his multibillion-dollar international criminal enterprise that claimed over 1,000 victims. Even the financial institutions that facilitated and documented Epstein’s money laundering deny any knowledge of wrongdoing, despite paying more than $1 billion in civil lawsuit settlements to keep cases against them from going to trial.
For Gates, Wexner, Lutnick, and Wall Street billionaire Leon Black — one of Epstein’s primary bankrollers, who is scheduled to testify June 26 — Epstein’s criminal history and rumors surrounding his sexual abuse seemed to warrant such little consideration that it didn’t even register as part of standard business due diligence. Gates, who built his fortune by carefully analyzing Microsoft’s startup competitors and crushing them by way of illegal monopolization, claims he “didn’t take the time to “fully understand the extent of the crimes [Epstein] committed” when he sought to leverage billions from the disgraced financier for his philanthropic endeavors.
“It’s obviously really, really troubling, and I’m somebody who believes that Bill Gates has done extraordinary philanthropic work around the world and truly life-saving work,” committee member Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.), told Politico. “But we obviously have to separate our feelings about that from this investigation, and those two things co-exist.”
While Gates sought money from Epstein’s network, Wexner and Black entrusted their own wealth to him, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Wexner went so far as to grant Epstein power of attorney over his personal finances, and Black admitted in 2023 that he helped fund operations on Epstein’s islands in the US Virgin Islands.
Fellow billionaire and Epstein associate President Donald Trump similarly maintained a relationship with the deceased sex trafficker, though his association was primarily social. The pair were known to spend significant time together, and it was revealed in 2025 that Epstein used Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort as a recruiting ground, grooming young female employees and luring them to his neighboring mansion, where he sexually abused them.
Ansari says it’s simply not believable that men who had climbed to such high positions of power could have been completely unaware of the risks that came with associating with Epstein. The freshman congresswoman was in high school when Epstein was first arrested and remembers stories about Epstein’s pedophilia and evasion of justice percolating amongst her teenage social circles.
“I was a child in 2008 when Jeffrey Epstein got this crazy sweetheart deal, when he was accused of abusing girls, children, and then ultimately was prosecuted,” Ansari said. “Everybody knew about Jeffrey Epstein, at least about accusations against him, even if you didn’t believe the accusations.”
