- Why did billionaire Leon Black pay Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for estate-planning recommendation?
- Black has a solution: He wasn’t holding monitor of it; $158 million does not imply a lot to him.
- Black is reportedly value $14.4 billion.
You understand how while you’re feeling flush, you typically pay rather less consideration to how a lot issues value?
Seems billionaires are like that, too. Or, no less than, that is what financier Leon Black says about his relationship with disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Black’s long-standing connection to Epstein — the billionaire has stated he consulted with Epstein on property planning — raised all types of questions and press protection within the wake of Epstein’s arrest on federal intercourse trafficking costs in the summertime of 2019 and his loss of life weeks later.
The most important query: Why had Black, a classy and profitable Wall Avenue boss, the cofounder of Apollo World Administration who might work with anybody he wished to, paid Epstein tens of thousands and thousands of {dollars} for recommendation?
Black, it seems, has a solution for that, which he associated to William Cohan in Puck this week. He by no means added up how a lot cash he despatched Epstein’s means — which he now says was $158 million over a number of years — as a result of it was only a rounding error in opposition to his enormous wealth.
The person who as soon as paid some $130 million for Edvard Munch’s The Scream then tried to place the Epstein charges into perspective. “My household and I now personal 93 million shares of Apollo,” he continued. “So each time, which is daily, going again 15 years, the inventory strikes up or down by $1, that is both plus or minus $93 million.” In different phrases, $158 million over quite a lot of years wasn’t materials, particularly for the reason that Dechert report revealed that Epstein’s recommendation “conferred” between $1 billion and $2 billion “in worth” to Leon.
In order that form of sounds … affordable?
However, some math: Black’s web value is a reported $14.4 billion, whereas the median web value of an American household is $192,900.
So when Black is speaking a couple of $93 million swing in his household’s fortunes and shrugging it off, he is describing a change of plus or minus 0.6 %. For the typical American household, that will imply including or subtracting $1,152.
So perhaps the richest folks on the earth actually are fairly a bit completely different from the remainder of us.
