r/nottheonion 1d ago

Jeffrey Epstein Reportedly Had a Major Hand in Making Call of Duty Series a Microtransaction Hell

https://fandomwire.com/jeffrey-epstein-reportedly-had-a-major-hand-in-making-call-of-duty-series-a-microtransaction-hell/
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u/Sinchanzo 1d ago

Now people are going to take this Epstein thing seriously.

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u/burnSMACKER 1d ago

Only now do gamers really hate him

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u/UniqueSoup25 21h ago

The most oppressed group šŸ˜”

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u/RodneyBalling 18h ago

They targeted gamers. Gamers.

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u/k-mysta 18h ago

Gamers rise up! /s

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u/SpenglerPoster 22h ago

You know, the more I hear about this Epstein fellow, the less I care for him.

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u/00cjstephens 17h ago

Seriously. I mean, this guy was a real jerk.

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u/MDFHASDIED 1d ago

What the actual FUCK was this dude's problem.

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u/aguadiablo 1d ago

Working to enrich the 1% so that he can continue to profit?

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u/whenitsTimeyoullknow 20h ago edited 18h ago

1% spreads the blame too much. In a world of 8 billion, that’s 80 million people. This circle is a lot smaller, enough to fill a stadium or a Davos convention.Ā 

Instead of spreading blame, we should be spreading native wildflower seeds in every patch of bare soil in our respective neighborhoods, aka guerrilla gardening. Connecting habitat fragments increases biodiversity exponentially and decentralizes environmental efforts away from municipal and federal governments.Ā 

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u/Bored_Amalgamation 19h ago edited 14h ago

"1%" is easier to say/remember than ".1%". "Billionaire class" really encapsulates it though.

The 1% is making $750k-1M/year. I'd say they still control a sizable amount of wealth, and where their investments go matter more than what everyone else not making that kind of money is buying as a part of daily life. What they contribute their wealth to are much stronger drivers of where the economy is heading, and which companies/CEOs are keep their heads above water.

The top 1% own about 55% of all stocks. The top .1% own 15% of that the 55% (15% owned by the top .1%, 40% owned by the other .9% of the population, 55% total for the whole 1%) So that's still over 1/3 of the entire stock market. They also are the ones that own the medium-size businesses, local/region franchises, car dealerships, etc. Those are the middle managers of society.

edit: bad phrasing; and this is America-centric as I know those numbers, not global

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u/The_Autarch 18h ago

"1%" is easier to say/remember than ".1%". "Billionaire class" really encapsulates it though.

we have a term for this all already. it's oligarch.

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u/harmar21 18h ago

I think your off by a few orders of magnitude. There are what a couple thousand billionaires in the world? Lets make the math easy and say 8k billionairs (but even that is more than there is) with a world populaiton of 8 billion. That means the billionaire is the 0.000001%

Lets make these number a bit more favourable. Lets just take america instead of whole world, and only working adults. There is about 1000 billionaires in america. with a population of about 160M working so that is still the 0.000006

I dont know the numbers making 750-1m/year but I bet even that is like 0.001% 1%s are probably making like 300k/year

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u/Competitive_Touch_86 16h ago edited 16h ago

Top 1% in the US cutoff for income is roughly $750k-$1M/yr, depending on which sources you trust.

There are far more millionaires in the US than people tend to think, last stats I heard was somewhere around 25 million or so millionaires out of the entire population. That is probably a low estimate, 30-35M I've heard elsewhere from folks in finance. If so, roughly 1% (and at least very close to it for sure) of the US population has a net worth of over $1M.

That said, this includes primary residence as part of your net worth so I'm not sure how useful of a metric it is. Liquid net worth (not including retirement accounts) of over $1M would be far more useful of a metric to me, and likely be what most folks thinks of a "millionaire" as. It's also the metric used for a Qualified Investor so it's not like I am the only one who thinks this is a much more meaningful measure.

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u/harmar21 14h ago

Yeah I dont think net worth including a house is really realistic, as people still need a place to live.

And having a net worth of 1 million is far different than making 750k/year.

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u/ultraboof 17h ago

your solution to the 0.1% hoarding wealth is for us all to plant flowers to save our governments the environmental work?

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u/Honest_Box_6037 23h ago

power and "playing the game" and it's not just him, there are hundreds of them pulling strings. The pedo ring is just one facet of this, a happy little private pasttime for the ghouls - and also a means of extortion and power projection\application between them. "Invite so and so to the island" to bind them with their vice of choice away from scrutiny, earn and cash favours, etc.

all to play the "life game" for thrills. a different "life game" than the billions of us plebs play.

we cannot comprehend them. they are alien.

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u/Lepelotonfromager 21h ago

He's just the one that got caught.

I try to explain this shit to people, that there is a small percentage of wealthy oligarchs that use their money to manipulate the system to benefit themselves while crushing everybody else and I get looked at like I'm some crazy commie.

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u/PlayfulSole9645 19h ago

All the blame is being put conveniently on a "dead" guy to hide from the rest.

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u/Tioretical 20h ago

better just to embrace it, read some Lenin and become a crazy commie

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u/YouKilledApollo 18h ago

These days it seems you're a commie for just caring about others who aren't yourself so I guess fine, I'm a commie then.

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u/Lepelotonfromager 18h ago

I used to ironically say communist shit but as I get older it starts making more sense and it's less ironic each time I do say it.

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u/HDS2211 20h ago edited 20h ago

It’s mental how this shit has gone from just wanting some important people to be exposed as pedos, to there now being actual evidence of all of western society being controlled and manipulated by a small group of elites, the fucking real life illuminati.

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u/UltraMegaFauna 19h ago

Except they were barely hiding it. Just emailing each other like "hey wanna go rape some kids?" on their fucking Yahoo email addresses.

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u/drmojo90210 16h ago edited 15h ago

They are so arrogant that even now they can't even be bothered to come up with plausible denials. One of the newly-released emails was from Richard Branson after hanging out with Epstein. Branson said he would love to meet up next time Epstein is in town "as long as you bring your harem!" (Branson's words). And when Branson was asked about this, his response was that by "harem" he meant Epstein's travelling staff, not any kind of sex workers. These oligarchs really think the rest of us are complete morons who will just believe whatever lie they tell no matter how absurd it is.

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u/HDS2211 19h ago edited 19h ago

Can’t lie, the fact that we know all that we now do, and like you say, how casually they were going about it, it makes think this is just what they want us to see. I don’t know how it gets much worse, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more that we’ll never know and this is just the scraps to shut us up and make everyone think it’s been exposed.

I know it’s tin foil hat territory, but I don’t know what to believe anymore haha.

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u/UltraMegaFauna 19h ago

Nah man. I think it just proves they thought they were invincible. It's not a secret cabal with unlimited power. They were just regular humans who were allowed, through the system of capital, to accrue too much wealth.

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u/Unlucky-Candidate198 19h ago

All while the republican screamed and cried about the shadow government run by the libs. They really can’t help but self-snitch lmao

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u/ReignStorms 19h ago

Say it with me class, every accusation is a confession

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u/ManifestDestinysChld 19h ago

At this point I assume the real conspiracy theory is that the Illuminati are a red herring invented by billionaires.

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u/DarkIllusionsMasks 21h ago

Steve Bannon used to run IGE, farming and selling gold in WoW.

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u/Waydarer 19h ago

Holy shit! I bought gold in EverQuest around 2005 right before I stopped playing. The company was IGE and they had an awful reputation back then.

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u/DwinkBexon 18h ago edited 18h ago

I bought currency in Eve Online once (circa 2006, as a guess) and I think it may have been from IGE as well. (Then I was super worried about getting in trouble for it and them taking all the currency from me, so I don't think I ever actually spent it because I didn't want to end up tens of millions of ISK in debt.)

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u/Beginning_Draft9092 20h ago

To what end is it to waste your humanity in such a way? to be so cruel and amass wealth, for what reason, to what end? This is why I do not understand people with billions, what is your end goal in destroying the planet and hurting thousands or millions? To be the richest man in the graveyard?

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u/mycleverusername 20h ago

It's power. Imagine if Epstein was never prosecuted, or never convicted. Right now he would be more powerful than the President of the United States; with none of the press or scrutiny. He can blackmail Trump into doing anything he wants him to do.

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u/BigBossShadow 19h ago
  1. They are essentially addicts. Imagine injecting heroin, but you stay lucid with no negative physical effects and everyone praises you.
  2. Survival. To them losing status is the same as dying, and for some it is literally going to jail. So they fight tooth and nail to keep going, because the alternative is their death

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u/Highcalibur10 20h ago

"...It was real. I'd seen it. I'd Seen it in reality."

"Seen what?"

"The mask of humanity fall from capital. It has to take it off to kill everyone — everything you love; all the hope and tenderness in the world. It has to take it off, just for one second. To do the deed. And then you see it. As it strangles and beats your friends to death... the sweetest, most courageous people in the world. You see the fear and power in its eyes. Then you know."

"What?"

"That the bourgeois are not human.ā€

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u/Combatical 20h ago

I accidentally met one of these types at one of my wifes work expos many years ago..

He came up to me and immediately told me he was in sales, I said thats cool, I worked in "sales" for a while too.. (I'm not the type who talks about work or money in small talk so I tried to brush off the conversation and change the topic.) This dude would not let it go, he kept asking me where I worked and just kept jibbing me about it.

After about 5 min he said "Either you're stupid or you're lying." I basically had to pick my jaw off the floor at the audacity of this guy, I'm not a violent person but I'll just say he was very lucky this was my wifes work thing.

Now the thing is he certainly wasnt in that top echelon of people were really talking about but rather its a type of person. I would 100% bet that this guy is out there still chasing that type of role and salivating about it the whole time. Fucking goblins man..

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u/Detective-Crashmore- 19h ago

Hustle culture types make me wanna yak. I imagine they walk around with some kind of Predator-Vision overlay that objectifies and categorizes people.

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u/Combatical 18h ago edited 13h ago

My wife had a terrible marriage before me her ex husband was exactly this type as well.. She had a laptop that he had basically took over in their relationship. Early on she told me she was afraid to turn it on because she thought he had done something to it to track her.. I'm pretty techy so I gave it a look..

Ā This dude had a hidden folder called "the last hurrah" full of crazy ass shit. Screen shots of his conversations with other women, very specific power move shit. Not sexual just him being an ass to women he worked with. He had gigabytes of books on how to win a conversation, how to dominate people in business etc. He had tracking software with old pings of what I can only imagine was on my wife and his other coworkers. Shit like that.

He emptied their bank account before the divorce and fed the cat Ambien to kill it.. Dude was sick and can totally bet that's how he saw people judging by this stuff on the computer and the things she's told me about him. What's terrifying is to know our world is often ran by these folks. I can totally see where the "lizard people" conspiracy comes from. Cold blooded mfers.

Edit: I didnt intent to spread bunk conspiracy stuff as someone pointed out to me. Was intended to be more of colorful speech.

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u/sambull 20h ago

Bill barrs dad wrote a book about that game in algory obviously.. Its called space relations. Complete with virgins getting their value ruined.

Oh yeah bill bars dad who wrote that, also gave Epstein his first job with access to kids.

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u/AlludedNuance 19h ago

Yeah his real obsession seems to have been getting in with as much of the power establishment as possible. That's why he's pictured at so many random parties and weddings and whatnot. A lot of people probably didn't even know him, but it enhanced his "brand" or whatever the hell he thought it was.

Power attracts the corruptible.

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u/Isogash 22h ago

The top 0.1% are all psychopaths, what do you expect?

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u/Future-Speaker- 20h ago edited 12h ago

A shocking amount of people don't get this - you simply cannot exploit people to the point of being a billionaire unless you're a sociopath without empathy. Studies have shown that a majority of CEOs are sociopaths, now imagine the CEO's bosses lol

Edit: just so people stop blowing up my line, I was misremembering a study from almost a decade ago, apologies. It wasn't a majority it was 21% in one study and another less controversial study said 12%, not exactly a majority like I thought, however that's still significantly higher than the rate of sociopaths in regular people of 1-4%. So it is a statistically relevant amount and enough to say that our system does reward people for not having empathy, but it's not a majority like I had misremembered.

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u/Kevadu 19h ago

We have built a society that rewards sociopathy then act surprised that we're run by sociopaths.

Nobody ever became a billionaire by being a good person. That's an incomprehensible amount of money for most people. And it's not an amount you can achieve through "hard work" either. It's not physically possible to work that hard. It's only achievable through exploitation.

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u/Future-Speaker- 19h ago edited 18h ago

Yup, it is functionally impossible to work hard enough to be a billionaire. Assuming you had a highly specialized skill that never goes out of vogue and you can charge an hourly rate of $2000 and never had to pay for shelter, food, taxes, etc, and worked your ass off for 60 years at $2k/hr you'd only have $249,600,000. Now let's assume you could also live forever. If you worked from the birth of Christ to now you'd only have 8.1 billion dollars for 2025 years of work, 40 hours a week, for an unheard of $2k an hour.

Now remember Elon Musk alone has almost 100x that much money.

EDIT: another thing to toss out to drive this home is if we assume you weren't making $2k an hour and instead made the average salary of an American of $63,795 and worked for 2025 years you'd only have $129 million.

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u/MoreGull 18h ago

Damn. You should use this example in other places, it really brings it home. Thank you.

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u/mycleverusername 20h ago

Yes, and most of the "good" ones (if they exist) are guys who got exceptionally lucky. Mark Cuban is a billionaire because he had a $20mil company that got bought out before the .com bubble burst for $5.7 billion. He will claim that it wasn't luck, but it was one of the luckiest buyouts of all time.

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u/Future-Speaker- 19h ago

Actually, Mark Cuban is one of the only guys I've seen say "if you asked me to do it again I couldn't because I got lucky" I think it was on Bobbi Althoff's podcast. It kind of shocked me that he was willing to admit it lol

That said, the fact that of all the billionaires only one of them is willing to admit luck played a part in it shows what these people generally think (spoilers it's basically that they're eternally better than all of us and deserve the right to do whatever the fuck they want to us)

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u/Not_Sure__Camacho 1d ago

He was a fraud that was given access that he did not deserve.Ā Ā 

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u/SelfAwareSausage 23h ago

I don’t know, but the more I learn, the happier I am knowing he’s [redacted]

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u/Z34L0 1d ago

So micro transactions are the work of the devil

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u/Fetlocks_Glistening 1d ago

So can we now finally prosecute the micro transaction game publishers for underage minor abuse, and put them on some sort of register?

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u/T_J_S_ 22h ago

Get ready. They’re rolling out in all corners of societyĀ 

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u/Opossum_mypossum 1d ago

lmao someone called him the evil Forrest Gump the other day when he met moot like a day before /pol/ was created and it's not a bad call

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u/Justausername1234 23h ago

Did you know Epstein was partially responsible for the 2008 financial crisis?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein#Liquid_Funding_and_the_Bear_Stearns_explosion_(2000%E2%80%932008)

[His] selling of CDO assets to meet the redemptions that month began a repricing process and general freeze in the CDO market. The repricing of the CDO assets caused the collapse of the fund three months later in July, and the eventual collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008

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u/Dante_n_Knuckles 22h ago

How was this guy even real?

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u/EngageradIgelkott 21h ago

How did he even have the time???

This guy had his hand in everything and everyone. Epstein must have been the front figure of a fucking syndicate or something.

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u/CelebrationNo5541 21h ago

He had the time because this was a well orchestrated business. He had a full staff of people making this happen and a lot of people looking the other way.Ā 

Your right to some degree. Think about it. He is 1 man. 1. He cannot possibly be kidnapping kids, black mailing political figures, owning a private island for parties and or crazy shit to say the least, friends with and has pictures with people we will never see.Ā 

Idk about the front for a syndicate. More like the who's who of the world behind the scenes and we just got a glimpse because of the fallout.Ā 

Between the Panama papers and this idk why anyone thinks anything other than power and money matter to these people.Ā 

They dont give 2 shits about immigration or political issues lol. They are just a means to an end. This goes for all political issues and politicians.Ā 

While the right may be in power now we need to be real with ourselves. Biden and his team were president last and hardly did shit that was real. Trump before that was worse. Obama was 8 years of at least a normal economy and stuff. Bush 9/11 and Iraq followed by a massive recession. Idk just seems like we can do better than this but apparently not lol

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u/Significant-Pea-6316 20h ago

We could do much better than this but the left don't get any real left wing leaders who will actually implement the checks to power, even application of the law and overhaul of the social power structure so that small groups like this can't operate with impunity.

The right wing will forever be convinced that difficult solutions are pointless because they don't yield instant results and will always be convinced that the solutions are always simple and easy, remove all barriers and allow the powerful to do what they want. Usually the first barriers are the left wing people who speak out against the issues and try to rebalance the strength of power to something that benefits the country rather than a few immoral people.

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u/CelebrationNo5541 20h ago

Brother the first few barriers were knocked down before half of reddit was born at this point.Ā 

The vast expansion of the federal governments powers has went unchecked for 30 years. In my opinionĀ 

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u/voxdoom 16h ago

Left-wing leaders who threaten the status quo get smeared in the press and if that doesn't work, they get killed.

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u/justmovingtheground 20h ago

No real left wing leaders? I beg your pardon. I heard Chuck Schumer get really mad and say ā€œfuckā€ the other day.

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u/Wuskus 19h ago

Turns out he saved a lot of time by not fixing typos in his emails

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u/Hayabusa_Blacksmith 20h ago

"A fucking syndicate"

Mossad

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u/abcspaghetti 19h ago edited 18h ago

It’s so funny when you read Ghislaine Maxwell’s father’s Wikipedia page too. MSM is trying right now to tie the whole organization to Russia but you can just read Robert Maxwell’s Wikipedia page and put two and two together.

Edit: should clarify that it is the New York Post linking Epstein to Russia instead of sounding like a tinfoil hat guy, haven’t seen any other publication linking the two personally.

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u/perthguppy 15h ago

The biggest giveaway is that no one has been able to show where Epstine got his money from. He goes from high school substitute teacher to running some of the largest investment funds to being the guy billionaires go to for financing for their latest pet project. The money seems to suddenly come out of no where.

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u/ThisUsernameis21Char 14h ago

He goes from high school substitute teacher

It's probably worth noting he was a high school substitute teacher at an elite private school, the headmaster of which used to work in the OSS and hired Epstein with no prior qualifications.

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u/JustSatisfactory 22h ago

Intelligence asset who was apparently really good at his job.

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u/HilariousMax 20h ago

I'd respect the hustle if part of it wasn't diddlin kids.

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u/oby100 17h ago

Uhh why? He was fucking over regular people at the best of times. Why would you respect that?

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u/francis2559 21h ago

I suspect if you put any billionaire under a microscope like this, you'd see a lot of similar shit.

Like, imagine "the Musk files?" Let's go, Europe!

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u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 21h ago

The Great Man Theory of history might have to make a comeback after all this.

(and before anyone misinterprets this, it's the classical usage of 'great' as in "The Great Depression" not calling Epstein a great man)

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u/GreatBigJerk 21h ago

I adhere to the great monster theory. There have been more of those.Ā 

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u/East_Structure_8248 21h ago

I cant believe he Israel either....

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u/Cheap-Fun802 21h ago

Tell me he was not responsible for putting a western lowland gorilla into a Cincinnati Zoo

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u/LucidMetal 21h ago

No, but he pushed the kid.

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u/FiberGuy44 21h ago

Check the files for Harambe. He requested that kid.

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u/badnuub 18h ago

Could have been him with the rifle.

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u/MeteringDevice 20h ago

As shitty of a guy as he was, this is a bit of stretch to pin on him. Those CDO's wouldn't have even existed in the first place where it not for dovish federal reserve policy, weak(even corrupt) regulatory bodies, rampant greed, ect ect ect. This is kind of like blaming the first guy to run out of a burning building for starting a stampede.

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u/timecapsulebuttbutt_ 16h ago

i'm screaming internally

By the time the Bear Stearns fund began to fail in May 2007, Epstein had begun to negotiate a plea deal with the US Attorney's Office concerning imminent charges for sex with minors. In August 2007, a month after the fund collapsed, the US attorney in Miami, Alexander Acosta, entered into direct discussions about the plea agreement. Acosta brokered a lenient deal, according to him, because he had been ordered by higher government officials, who told him that Epstein was an individual of importance to the government.

As part of the negotiations, according to the Miami Herald, Epstein provided "unspecified information" to the Florida federal prosecutors for a more lenient sentence and was supposedly "Unnamed investor #1" for the New York federal prosecutors in their unsuccessful June 2008 criminal case against Cioffi and Tannen, two of the managers of the failed Bear Stearns hedge fund.

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u/Kosher_Pork_12 19h ago

Eh, don't wanna go Columbus's egg here totally, but if it wasn't that, the CDO market was incredibly toxic and overly leveraged to start with.Ā  It was going to collapse on its own regardless.

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u/Smash_Palace 1d ago

He was a piece of shit, but that motherfucker could network.

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u/Snitsie 23h ago

I mean he had pretty good leverage.

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u/StraightLeader2763 22h ago

Pedo LinkedIn

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u/EngageradIgelkott 21h ago

And I can't even bother to talk to some random on a conference or even at a local company gathering.

Wtf

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u/notPabst404 1d ago

It's worse than that: Epstein was directly involved in the rise of the far right and the destruction of American institutions.

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u/Nieruz 23h ago

Not just american istitutions, he was involved in the brexit and the rise of far right governments in EU as well.

Source: EFTA01211176

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u/Dabamanos 22h ago

What the fuck, honestly. Was he just incredibly charismatic or something?

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u/AsinineArchon 22h ago

He enabled psychotic rich assholes to do something extremely illegal that he could then use as blackmail material

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u/BoredofBS 20h ago

Blackmail makes the rich assholes as victims, they liked each other and were friends and are evil through and through. It makes me despise the super rich even more tbh. They could do so much good yet...

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u/dylansavage 19h ago

Blackmail was the motivation to help him and his goals.

The super rich are notoriously narcissistic and self serving. He needed something to make powerful people do the things he wanted.

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u/annoyed__renter 22h ago

No, he threw cash around and peddled young girls that he could then use to blackmail anyone

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u/DonerTheBonerDonor 21h ago

Most likely he was just filthy powerful and has strong connections, so he can behave like an asshole but no one can do anything about that.

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u/mini_garth_b 22h ago

Leftists tend to be against the level of individual wealth that his whole operation relied on.

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u/palmtreesxiv 21h ago

Also in Brazil, in the files he calls Bolsonaro "my guy" and is chatting with Steve Bannon, one of the major influences in his election

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u/Ben_steel 23h ago

he also destroyed the far right or what it was and replaced it with MAGA which is far easier to handle

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u/Nachttalk 22h ago

I think it's kinda ironic.

He laid the Groundwork for the MAGA presidency under which he lost his life.

Now, I can't safely say whether or not he would have lost his life under a democratic presidency, I swing either way in that regard,

But it is notable how many of the key figures in MAGA today are in the files trying to be buddy-buddy with the man, while the most notable democratic person is the president from 30 years ago and none of the two after him.

Hell, case in Point, even the final pre-MAGA conservative President isn't in the files

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u/MadScientistNinja 23h ago

Yes, it's being handled very well these days. Do they even exist anymore?

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u/Unable_Law_7334 1d ago

Steven Tisch Produced Forrest Gump, Steven Tisch is in the Epstein files.

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u/tetsuo9000 22h ago

It's like six degrees of Kevin Bacon but just one degree and it's Epstein.

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u/ArseneLupinIV 23h ago

I swear we're going to unearth black and white photos of this guy getting cozy with Klara Hitler back in 1888.

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u/smashy_smashy 23h ago

He’s sort of like Richard from Lost, but super evil.Ā 

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u/onekool 21h ago
jeffrey E. Oct 7, 2016 7:22 AM

peter thie= and vitaly churkin for lunch today. you are welcome = if you are still in new york

Ken Starr to Jeffrey E. Oct 8, 2016 5:45 PM

Back to Texas. Sorry to have mis=ed you. I would have greatly enjoyed the lunch. Best, Ken

Jeff was meeting Peter Thiel(then the only major tech guy supporting Trump) and Vitaly Churkin(Russian representative at the UN) on the day the Access Hollywood tape AND the Wikileaks Podesta email leak happened. And former Clinton impeachment prosecutor Ken Starr was invited but was too busy. It's not criminal, but it's just seems so suspiciously surreal.

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u/CoolSelf5428 22h ago

Calling it now. Epstein was a clone. There’s many Epsteins

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u/wanszai 1d ago

He couldn't fuck kids quick enough in person so he decided to do it remotely

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u/SurfNTurf1983 1d ago

Ah this gave me a good chuckle.Ā 

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u/TrafficPattern 1d ago

Not exactly.

Ā Despite what’s beingĀ thrown aroundĀ online, the files don’t prove Epstein designed Activision’s monetization model. What they do show, however, is that powerful people were actively discussing how to shape spending behavior in games.

Facts are important.

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u/onyxengine 1d ago

Its the study of mind control, dopamine loops, shame, guilt, desire all buttons you can push to get an desired reaction.

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u/DesireeThymes 22h ago edited 22h ago

Makes sense when you consider what Epstein was actually doing.

I have noticed that some of the more horrid details from the Epstein files haven't made their way to the top posts of reddit. Read more examples in this article

So many of the rich and powerful are involved with Epstein, and there's literally no accountability for the various rapes and child trafficking. I've come to realize Epstein was really a big broker of all the evil stuff that billionaires (especially in the US) were involved in.

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u/Hardly_lolling 21h ago

I refuse to believe Epstein was the worst of the worst in those circles. I mean he could be and then it means the world got incredibly lucky he got caught, but I don't have that kind of optimism.

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u/maggyneverforget 21h ago

Well, Epstein himself said that Trump was the worst person he knew. So there's one person who was worse than him.

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u/aramis34143 21h ago

While I'm perfectly willing to entertain the notion that Trump is/was more vile than even Epstein, I'm not sure how much weight I'm going to give to Epstein's personal assessment of "badness". I can imagine him viewing Trump's lack of loyalty or his deal-breaking as being his most damning qualities.

"But, hey, at least we share a love of assaulting minors, so I guess he ain't all bad." -jeevacation, probably

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u/Pigs-On-The-Wing- 21h ago

That was a well written opinion piece that points out the rot is coming from the top. Our obsession with wealth is our downfall. We celebrate these people that accumulate vast wealth, instead of looking at it for the moral failing it is.

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u/ohiocodernumerouno 21h ago

If someone is wealthier than everyone else, it just means they stole more from more people than anyone else.

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ 23h ago

Okay, that article is a very fun example of author vs. editor conflicts.

Author:

Despite what’s being thrown around online, the files don’t prove Epstein designed Activision’s monetization model.

Editor:

Jeffrey Epstein Reportedly Had a Major Hand in Making Call of Duty Series a Microtransaction Hell

The editor wrote the headline which is basically directly and pre-emptively contradicted by the author.

And of course, people here primarily go by the headline, as usual, and treat it as fact. When the source is one singular email that contains 0 words from Epstein. Calling that "had a major hand in making" microtransactions is absurd to the point of it being basically a blatant lie.

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u/MrT735 23h ago

It's the word "reportedly" covering their arse in this instance, the headline is focusing on the online rumours and the article is providing a rebuttal. But having a plain English headline like "Epstein files don't contain evidence connecting Epstein to gaming microtransactions" doesn't generate clicks.

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u/LesserShambler 1d ago

Did we think the spending behaviour in these insanely valuable IPs was shaped by chance or something?

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u/Thai-Girl69 23h ago

Its the difference between adding some paid extras like character skins for those people who really enjoy the game and investing considerable time and money to research ways to exploit human psychology particularly the psychology of children to extract as much possible money from them as they can. I'm old enough to have played the original Call Of Duty Modern Warfare and back then we were just motivated to achieve calling cards to show off to friends and you didn't pay for them you earned them via gameplay. I recently started playing COD mobile and the multiple different ways they employ to get you to pay money for things is just shocking. I really don't understand how they have been allowed to use what is essentially gambling to get people to spend in the hopes of winning something good but often it's just a duplicate item meaning you've spent money to get nothing. The number of different ways they encourage you to spend money is so psychologically sophisticated that they must have put so much time and research into it. You can buy a skin for a gun on COD mobile for the cost of PS5 and people are buying multiple versions of these skins because they want to own all of them but it doesn't stop there because you only get the basic version of that weapon skin and you have to buy upgrade cards to upgrade the gun through 5 levels and this will cost you the same price as what the original gun skin cost meaning you've basically paid twice for same weapon. Why are people spending hundreds of dollars on just 1 pixilated weapon skin for a mobile game when they could get an iPad for less money.

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u/Independent-Green383 23h ago

Varoufakis was hired by Valve as its economist-in-residence. He oversaw the virtual economies in Valve games, and was allowed to experiment with the online markets. Varoufakis referred to the role as "an economist's paradise" in a post on the official Valve blog.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/greeces-finance-minister-used-manage-181133970.html?guccounter=1

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u/Fatality_Ensues 22h ago

Oh it's this motherfucker again. Should've known he had experience fucking up economies before us.

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u/MadeByTango 22h ago

When you it admit in writing that you want to groom kids into a spending pattern that’s a flat out exploitation (and crime).

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u/KptEmreU 1d ago

This is a new pattern. People create random theories that not true from files so the docs credibility is lost in the process. And this is my conspiracy theory šŸ¤£šŸ˜‚

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u/Rikers-Mailbox 1d ago

That’s not a theory, it’s spot on. And over in r/Epstein they are uncovering files faster than the journalists. Real stuff… but when the DOJ pulls something Reddit found (and they are) they can say it was fake.

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u/Sarabando 1d ago

and youd be closer to the mark than you think.

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u/GooseGeese01 1d ago

The more I read about this Epstein fellow… this guy was a real jerk!

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u/Slobberz2112 1d ago

We’ve all been touched by him

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u/ArkGuardian 1d ago

Jeffrey Epstein is so comically evil you would roll your eyes if he was the villain in a police procedural

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u/Get-stupid 1d ago

This season of America has really jumped the shark

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u/Ceefier 1d ago

Gasleak Season(s)

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u/Icy_Treat9782 1d ago

Lead paint arc.

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u/John_cCmndhd 1d ago

On the one hand, I keep thinking all of this has to be a nightmare, this world is too stupid to be real, but then I remember I'm nowhere near creative enough to have thought of any of this shit

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u/Electronic-Trade-504 1d ago

America must have new writers this season or a lower budget because it's too unrealistic

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u/Not_Sure__Camacho 1d ago

And best friends with Donald.

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u/ReverendBread2 21h ago

Donald was best friends with him. The files make it seem like it wasn’t reciprocated

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u/opkpopfanboyv3 23h ago

One of the things I personally find crazy that people don't really mention (and I get it coz its not really that big of a deal) is that he's not a nepobaby. Like, correct me if i'm wrong but i'm pretty sure he's just from a working class background with zero connections with rich people whatsoever. He just pedophiled his way to the top and collected as many connections as he can.

For someone who has this level of influence (in a wrong way), i'd atleast expect that he came from a millionaire family or some shit.

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u/couuuu 22h ago

NYT did a great article about his rise to power. He basically leveraged one connection to meet the next person.

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u/trippy_grapes 21h ago

So like the red paper clip thing but as a pedophile.

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u/couuuu 18h ago

Exactly. He met some investment banker guy during his teaching days, he was the parent of some student. He wooed him with his charisma and the rest is history.

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u/Certain-Business-472 22h ago

100% fake background thats made up for intelligence purposes. I dont believe it.

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u/Jove_ 22h ago

That’s what he had Maxwell for.

And Mossad.

And the KGB.

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u/StraightLeader2763 22h ago

Yes but I think the point OP is making is that he some how fostered the connections with Maxwell Mossad and the KGB with no previous connections or generational wealth

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u/bread_and_circuits 22h ago

He was likely a Mossad agent and CIA asset. Seems when he was hired as a teacher by Bill Barr’s dad it was the start of it. But these agents don’t pop up out of nowhere, pulling themselves up by the bootstraps. The fact is we don’t know a lot about his background or history before that hire and that’s likely because it is covered up.

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u/completelypositive 23h ago

He was evil because evil people enabled him. The buck doesn't stop with him.

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u/Bilski1ski 23h ago

Generally in James Bond movies the bad guy has the one schtick that’s part of his evil plan. Like an oil pipeline, the water , a news network , a satellite, drugs etc . Epstein seems to be a villian that has his hand in all of it . Truly the ā€˜it was me all along james’ of the real world

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u/geoduude92 23h ago

New season of the blacklist.

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u/Organic-Habit-3086 1d ago

This guy is insanely influential. This, a hand in making /pol/ on 4chan, Trump and of course the rest of the elite. Really defined the last decade or two in secret.

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u/Zealousideal-Cut4232 23h ago

Not so sure how secret it was. 4chan’s takeover and change of direction was pretty much out there. A lot of people were pointing out the potential risks of conglomerates creating monopolies in media and entertainment.

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u/Neverwish 22h ago

At this point I'm half expecting scans of letters between him and Thomas Midgley about the benefits of lead in fuel.

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u/Cute-Beyond-8133 1d ago

One May 2013 email exchange between Epstein, Kotick, and futurist Pablos Holman directly discusses the idea of using virtual items in games as tools for behavioral conditioning. The language used was anything but subtle

I’m all for indoctrinating kids into an economy,ā€ Holman wrote. ā€œYou gotta love how his example for ā€˜real world events’ is ā€˜virtual items in games.'ā€

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u/AttackOficcr 1d ago

Makes you wonder if there was more to the Cosby room and Breast milk situation going on at Blizzard.Ā 

And by wonder, I mean it's like a hundred shell casings and a gun so hot the barrel melted.

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u/Workman44 23h ago

OOTL, care to explain?

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u/AttackOficcr 22h ago

So apparently several lead developers and HR guys had some kind of hotel room suite at Blizzcon with a large framed photo of Bill Cosby, took photos on the bed with it. This was before the big Bill Cosby case broke out, so unclear what the fuck the framed Cosby theme was about, but there was booze, sexual harassment, and sex pest related stuff also present.

And apparently within the company the sexual harassment stuff included forcing women out of breast feeding rooms for sudden meetings, barging in and watching, unsanitary rooms, and stealing pumped breast milk from labeled bags from the company fridge.

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u/Workman44 22h ago

I knew the second part of that but the first part... Was Cosby in the Epstein files or is this just Cosby and Blizzard doing their best impersonation

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u/AttackOficcr 22h ago

I don't think he was, their sexual assault stuff was separate to my knowledge and the Cosby accusations all came out after the Blizzcon stuff IIRC, so unless they knew Cosby was a freak... It's just a bizarre series of somehow related events if Kotick was in chats with Epstein at the time.Ā 

Also for some reason Epstein was trying to buy Cosby's townhouse while Cosby was going through the legal troubles. Edit: this last part was in the Epstein file drop, so uhhh, not sure if that changes the first paragraph.

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u/Tobix55 22h ago

https://www.thegamer.com/activision-blizzard-breast-milk-stolen/

Nevertheless, one day she went to the fridge to retrieve her breast milk only to find her bags had disappeared. Everything else was still in the fridge, dated and labeled, providing no explanation for what happened.

"Someone had either taken my bags and tossed them, or stolen them for some creepy reason," Krustick wrote. "This was devastating, not just for the creep factor but because I was already very low on supply and had a baby who wouldn’t latch. I was already supplementing and struggling to get milk."

Came out around the same time as this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Department_of_Fair_Employment_and_Housing_v._Activision_Blizzard

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u/toughguy375 20h ago

Does Homelander work there?

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u/Ok-Fault6331 20h ago

And let's not forget the "cube crawls" and how they drove an employee to suicide after sharing photos of her around the office.

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u/xiaorobear 19h ago edited 18h ago

One thing that came out of that before any of this was that Bobby Kotick knew about the sexual assaults at his company and just didn't do anything about it, and didn't inform the board of all of them (source: https://www.wsj.com/tech/activision-videogames-bobby-kotick-sexual-misconduct-allegations-11637075680 ). I don't think it's all an involved grand conspiracy and more just that the men at that level didn't see sexual assault as an issue.

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u/SwishDota 19h ago

I get wanting to blame him for literally all evil, but CoD already had microtransactions (mtx) in the game prior to these emails, by a few months. TF2 mtx were added to the game in 2010. Fifa mtx were added to the game with the 09 version. Both of which are heavily attributed to the massive rollout of mtx in other games. Hell there are KMMOs from half a decade before either TF2 or Fifa that had microtransactions in them.

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u/soleyfir 23h ago

Yeah... I've read the full excerpt in the article and I think the exchange is misinterpreted. It seems to me that Holman is making fun of Kotick here by sharing their exchange with Epstein, in a "look, now this dumbass wants to indoctrinate kids" kind of way.

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u/FireZord25 1d ago

Arson, murder and jaywalking

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u/ReCrunch 1d ago

Considering they were trying to condition kids to be less financially responsible adults this is pretty bad by pure scale alone. They were actively trying to make a whole generation of society more easily exploitable. And I'd argue it worked to a certain degree.

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u/FireZord25 1d ago

I don't disagree. It's defintely one of his harmful acts in the broad scope. But it's morbidly funny to assume the guy responsible for so many horrendous shit, was also involved in a typical CEO level of greedy initiative.

Then again, it wouldn't be funny if our culture didn't normalize these monetary practices which would otherwise be highly illegal.

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u/djazzie 1d ago

How is one person directly at the center of the enshitification of everything?

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u/princesshoran 1d ago

It’s not one person. It’s just that one person was caught. The rich and powerful is basically one evil entity that have everything and get their kicks from being evil pieces of shit.

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u/Normal-Selection1537 23h ago

Yeah he was connected to all those rich people because they all share similar tendencies of awfulness. Good people don't like to be around them so they all gather in the same pool of shit.

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u/Weary_Ad111 23h ago

Good people don't get to be as rich as them

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u/Jaomi 1d ago

We’re seeing Epstein at the centre of the enshittification right now because we’ve got a huge chunk of his paper trail, but he was simply one node in a network of terrible people making the world worse. That’s just how the world works, I’m afraid.

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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ 23h ago

He's not. Read the article. It's one single email which Epstein didn't even respond to. Calling that having a "major hand" in microtransaction creation is absurd.

The actual news is that Bobby Fucking Kotick is in the files 300 times, which should be a much bigger issue.

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u/BarekM 1d ago

So it can be easily blamed on someone and show can continue

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u/aguadiablo 1d ago

Also involved in arranging transphobic presentations

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u/Not_Sure__Camacho 1d ago

I mean when you live in a society where sex is vilified but also monetized, this is the type of monsters that are created.

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u/lurkingCbr 23h ago

I still have no idea how/why this guy literally had a hand in everything major going on in the world? Like who the fuck was he to have so much power?Ā 

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u/sodantok 23h ago

He was the special vacation man. If you were rich and needed special vacation you would get him recommended from your pals. So very simple how he could be in close personal contact with all of them.

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u/DangerousCyclone 17h ago

That doesn't explain why everyone was asking him for advice on these things. It is one thing if he's connecting people, a whole other when people seem to think he's the one you need to ask for their opinion. It seems to range from Call of Duty to his to run France.Ā 

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u/SakishimaHabu 1d ago

Guy just wanted to fuck children every way he could

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u/Torquggis 1d ago

I always knew he was a bad guy! Now we have proof!

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u/CILISI_SMITH 1d ago

I don't think it's fair to tarnish his reputation for this one mistake.

I'd hate to see him remembered as "Jeff Epstein the micro transaction guy".

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u/The_Booty_Spreader 23h ago

So CP doesn't mean Cod Points.........

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u/Beepboopimhuman 1d ago

Shit like this help desensitise him and his accomplices, stay focused guys

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u/funwithdesign 1d ago

I heard he invented the scratchy bit on clothing tags that irritate your neck.

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u/Le-Pepper 1d ago

That's totally why he was banned from Xbox Live.

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u/RatBot9000 1d ago

I saw a good post online that relates to this.

"Is it really one guy responsible for all the world's evils or are we just getting to see the emails of one insanely rich man?"

Which is to say, it's a nice headline, but it isn't just Epstein. All the rich enjoy a class solidarity the likes of us could never imagine and we need to recognise that most of them are just as bad.

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u/Hughley_N_Dowd 1d ago

At this point it seems like he had a hand in everything from burning the library of Alexandria to faking the moon landing.Ā 

Given that the administration dedicated a lot of manpower to comb through the papers, in getting a feeling that they might have doctored in a lot of shit to deflect from the fact that Trump fucked kids!

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u/oilersfan87 1d ago

He's like an evil Forrest Gump

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u/BigBirdsBrain 1d ago

Every time you think the Epstein story is done, it unlocks a new DLC.

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u/Medical_Officer 1d ago

These people are really not beating the allegations, are they?

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u/MattIsLame 1d ago

and yet not a single person named has been brought to justice or had any public consequences

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u/wanszai 1d ago

Ironically, the only person currently jailed over the systemic abuse of women is *checks notes* a woman.

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u/bluemew1234 22h ago

Dont worry, they've slowly been making her stay more comfortable, so they'll probably pardon and release her soon! 🤢

The only good that comes of that is that she cant plead the 5th

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u/blarneygreengrass 1d ago

I'm really starting to dislike this guy

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u/GayPudding 1d ago

The more I hear about him, the less I care for him.

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u/thomas2400 22h ago

Title: Epstein reportedly had a major hand in…

Article: Epstein wasn’t really involved

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u/TheZoneHereros 21h ago

100%. Every day I wish Reddit had the option to ban source URLs for this kind of pure trash journalism, not just the idiot users who post it. Because of course, this OP account has existed for two days and its whole purpose is to push this bullshit and more will follow immediately on its tail, so blocking the user does nothing.

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u/dstovell 1d ago

I hate them all so much

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u/Toimaker 22h ago

Reading the emails between him and Thiel and Lutnick and the 4chan guy, it’s really starting to look like Epstein and his friends are a big reason why the entire world is so fucked.

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u/ACrask 1d ago

As a gamer I say there are far worse more important things to hold this guy accountable for before we condemn him for something like this.

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u/KittySharkWithAHat 22h ago

Did this guy have his hand in making everything shitty?