In 1982, according to those who know Epstein, he set up his own shop, J. Epstein and Co., which remains his core business today. The premise behind it was simple: Epstein would manage the individual and family fortunes of clients with $1 billion or more. Which is where the mystery deepens. Because according to the lore, Epstein, in 1982, immediately began collecting clients. There were no road shows, no whiz-bang marketing demos — just this: Jeff Epstein was open for business for those with $1 billion–plus.

His firm would be different, too. He was not here just to offer investment advice; he saw himself as the financial architect of every aspect of his client’s wealth — from investments to philanthropy to tax planning to security to assuaging the guilt and burdens that large sums of inherited wealth can bring on. “I want people to understand the power, the responsibility, and the burden of their money,” he said to a colleague at the time.

As a teacher at Dalton, he had witnessed firsthand the troubled attitudes of some of the poor little rich kids under his charge; at Bear, he had come to the realization that, counterintuitively, the more money you had, the more anxious you became. For a middle-class kid from Brooklyn, it just didn’t make sense.

From the get-go, his business was successful. But the conditions for investing with Epstein were steep: He would take total control of the billion dollars, charge a flat fee, and assume power of attorney to do whatever he thought was necessary to advance his client’s financial cause. And he remained true to the $1 billion entry fee. According to people who know him, if you were worth $700 million and felt the need for the services of Epstein and Co., you would receive a not-so-polite no-thank-you from Epstein.

It’s nice work if you can get it. Epstein runs a lean operation, and those close to him say that his actual staff — based here in Manhattan at the Villard House (home to Le Cirque); New Albany, Ohio; and St. Thomas, where he reincorporated his company seven years ago (now called Financial Trust Co.) — numbers around 150 and is purely administrative. When it comes to putting these billions to work in the markets, it is Epstein himself making all the investment calls — there are no analysts or portfolio managers, just twenty accountants to keep the wheels greased and a bevy of assistants — many of them conspicuously attractive young women — to organize his hectic life. So assuming, conservatively, a fee of .5 percent (he takes no commissions or percentages) on $15 billion, that makes for a management fee of $75 million a year straight into Jeff Epstein’s pocket. Nice work indeed.

….It’s a weird relationship,” says another Wall Streeter who knows Epstein. “It’s just not typical for someone of such enormous wealth to all of a sudden give his money to some guy most people have never heard of.” The Wexner-Epstein relationship is indeed a multifaceted one.

Given the secrecy that envelops Epstein’s client list, some have speculated that Wexner is the primary source of Epstein’s lavish life — but friends leap to his defense. “Let me tell you: Jeffrey Epstein has other clients besides Wexner. I know because some of them are my clients,” says noted m&a lawyer Dennis Block of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. “I sent him a $500 million client a few years ago and he wouldn’t take him. Said the account was too small. Both the client and I were amazed. But that’s Jeffrey.”

…Again, facts are hard to come by. [Speaking of which, where did the author get all of this info???] A working day for Epstein starts at 5 a.m., when he gets up and scours the world markets on his Bloomberg screen — each of his houses, in New York, St. Thomas, Palm Beach, and New Mexico, as well as the 727, is equipped with the necessary hardware for him to wake up, roll out of bed, and start trading. He will put some calls in to his private banker at JPMorgan to get a reading as to how wealthy investors — the best gauge of market sentiment, he believes — are reacting to the market’s movements. Then he will call currency traders in Europe. On a given day, he will spend ten hours or so on the phone — after all, he is running $15 billion essentially by himself.

Strangely enough, given his scientific obsessions, he is a computer-phobe and does not use e-mail. “I like to hear voices and see faces when I interact,” he has said.

…Given the huge sums he has to invest, he focuses on assets with extremely high liquidity, like currencies — though he dabbles in commodities and real estate as well. Those who know him say he is an impulsive, quick-to-change-his-mind trader, still governed by Ace Greenberg’s trader’s maxim: If the stock is down 10 percent, sell it. He has been on the short side of the Brazilian real, and those close to him say bets there have paid off in spades. He recently took a long position on the euro before its rebound on the basis that Europeans were too proud to see their currency sink any lower against the dollar. His next targets: an across-the-board short of the German stock exchange and a possible attack on the Hong Kong dollar peg in light of the recent disclosure of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program.

Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery

The fawning him in this article is a hoot viewed through the lens of 20/20 hindsight. Interesting (and apparently unsubstantiated) details about how Epstein made his money is interesting though. A contrived fairy tale, with glimmeringly romantic details which simply do not add up.

Wexner just gave him the largest residence in NYC?

Those who know him? Like who? The PR stunt folks who delivered these details to the author for this story?

Conveniently there is no paper trail or email to support any of these fanciful notions of an investment wunderkind?

Come on!