How Epstein became a tech influencer

Feb 06, 2026 09:24 PM - 3 months ago 93690

David Pierce

is editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host pinch complete a decade of acquisition covering user tech. Previously, astatine Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

There are bold-faced tech names each complete the Epstein files. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Reid Hoffman, Steven Sinofsky, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, connected and connected and on. These men (and they’re beautiful overmuch each men) had wildly varying degrees of relationship pinch Epstein, and the specifications matter a awesome deal. But truthful does the totality of it: you walk agelong capable successful these files, and you commencement to get a consciousness of the measurement the world useful for a peculiar benignant of highly rich | and highly powerful businessman. And it starts to consciousness beautiful bad.

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On this section of The Vergecast, David and Nilay commencement the show by talking astir the latest tranche of emails from the Epstein files, some what we’ve learned and the profoundly unusual measurement successful which they’re being disseminated. There are interesting business stories successful here; location are shocking land to alteration the world. We’re still not judge really to talk astir immoderate of it, isolated from to support showing what we find.

After that, it’s clip for the different point capturing tech minds this week: Anthropic’s Super Bowl ads, which isn’t explicitly a changeable astatine OpenAI’s scheme to present ads to ChatGPT but is besides very intelligibly precisely that. The ads started a debate astir some really we usage AI and really we salary for it and besides made it a small clearer how precarious OpenAI’s position is correct now. They’re besides conscionable very bully ads.

Then it’s clip for immoderate streaming talk, including the utterly bizarre speech astir Netflix’s expected wokeness and the hit caller streaming box you tin bargain astatine a farmers market. Finally, successful the lightning round, we do a information of Brendan Carr is simply a Dummy, observe Google Home’s fastener support, and wonderment erstwhile we’ll ever beryllium capable to buy gadgets again.

If you want to cognize much astir everything we talk successful this episode, present are immoderate links to get you started, first connected the Epstein files:

And successful AI ads spats:

And successful streaming:

And successful the lightning round:

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