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- Jeffrey Epstein is an American financier, billionaire and philanthropist. Epstein was raised in Coney Island and attended Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, New York. He attended classes at Cooper Union from 1969 to 1971 and then at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, leaving without a degree. From 1973 to 1975 he taught calculus and physics at the Dalton School. He then became a trader at Bear Stearns. In 1982 he founded his own financial management firm, J. Epstein and Co. and later called Financial Trust Co. , located on his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He reportedly only takes billionaire clients; one client was his mentor and friend Les Wexner who recently hired Dennis Hersch to replace Epstein. Since all but one of his clients are anonymous, it has been speculated that Epstein's lavish lifestyle is primarily financed by Wexner. Epstein has befriended high profile scientists such as Leonard Susskind, Richard Axel, Gerald Edelman, Murray Gell-Mann, Ben Goertzel, and Marvin Minsky, and politicians including George J. Mitchell and Bill Clinton. In September 2002 he flew Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker to Africa in his private Boeing 727, to promote the ex-president's anti-AIDS efforts. Epstein is a friend and supporter of theoretical biologist Martin Nowak. He funded Nowak's research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and in 2003 pledged $30 million to Harvard University to fund the newly created Program for Evolutionary Dynamics there which Nowak directs. He is a former board member of Rockefeller University, a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and a visiting fellow at Harvard University. He has also funded microbiology experiments in Bangladesh, particle physics in South Africa and M-theory in India and was a founding member of the Scholar Rescue Fund. Epstein is a former trustee of the International Institute for Education, the parent organization of the Fulbright Program. He has held conferences on artificial intelligence, cosmology and the origin of life with prominent scientists. In addition to his private island in the Virgin Islands (Little St. James Island), Epstein owns a 50,000-square-foot (4,600 m) townhouse in Manhattan that was formerly owned by Les Wexner, a villa in Palm Beach, Florida and a fortress on a ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is often accompanied on his trips and at his mansions by his close friend Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late British publisher Robert Maxwell. He is also often seen surrounded by young women, some of which are employed as his personal assistants. In September 2007 one woman described how she had been hired by Ghislaine Maxwell as a masseuse and assistant to Epstein and had engaged in sexual acts.
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