Epstein’s alleged interaction with Google founders and media‑acquisition attempts

smile, was an attentive host, soliciting every guest’s story and views. (One more thing about this trip: Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with their company still in its infancy, came out to see the plane on the Monterey tarmac and, with a few other Googlers, literally ran whooping from one end of the plane to the other. Then they described for Epstein, in what I cannot now remember was a put-on or entrepreneurial brainstorm, a brand extension in which they would market a line of Google bras with the Os as convenient cups. In fact, the name Google, they said, was invented out of the belief that men would focus on a word with two Os in it.) Not long after this trip, Epstein’s assistant called to invite me for tea at his house in New York, where Epstein, with what seemed to me little understanding of the subject, began to ask me about media—the upside, downside, and nature of media coverage. (Epstein’s flirtation with the media would result in his backing an unsuccessful effort, of which I was a part, to buy New York Magazine in 2004, and then later, with Mort Zuckerman, backing the launch of Radar magazine.) New York magazine was then soliciting him for a profile, as was Vanity Fair, who had assigned the British journalist, Vicki Ward, to the job. Both profiles—New York’s by Landon Thomas—pivot on the Clinton connection and detail the same quandary, how a man without clear institutional bona fides nevertheless achieved such wealth and influence. Epstein, sensing HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022917