Read our Digital & Print Editions

And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

For two decades, Jeffrey Epstein moved through the private networks that shaped modern Silicon Valley - even after his sex-offending conviction.

Newly released House Oversight Committee files, combined with a deep review of archived material, reveal how his money, ideas and relationships flowed into the founders, labs and political circles now defining America's new tech order.

Part One of this exclusive three-part investigation explores how Epstein was embedded in the Silicon Valley 'Broligarchy' brains trust. Part Two uncovers how Epstein intersected with pivotal moments in Bitcoin. Part Three, the channelling of an apocalyptic vision of climate 'culling' and eugenics.

Newly released Jeffrey Epstein files reveal that an apocalyptic worldview - blending racial hierarchy, genetic "optimisation" and even climate-driven population culling - was circulating inside the elite, founder-linked networks shaping Silicon Valley's rise.

These ideas appear most starkly in the convicted sex offender's private exchanges with the AI theorist Joscha Bach, and sit alongside the longtermist and transhumanist philosophies championed by other influential figures in the same circles.

Joscha Bach, whose work on cognitive architectures and machine consciousness has shaped advanced AI research and influenced figures such as Elon Musk, appears in the documents engaging Epstein in sweeping discussions about race, hierarchy, genetic engineering and the supposed 'utility' of mass death, including under conditions of climate stress.

Meanwhile, another philosopher whose ideas underpin much of modern longtermism and whose work helped shape Silicon Valley's early thinking on artificial general intelligence, Nick Bostrom, moved through the same intellectual and institutional ecosystem.

His published arguments on eugenics, selective population strategies and existential "optimisation" reveal a parallel strand of thinking within that milieu, financed and legitimised by many of the same networks.

Both men were also financed by Epstein.

Taken together, the Bach correspondence and the longtermist ideas circulating in this environment show that human hierarchy, population thinning and genetic destiny were not fringe provocations, but part of the ambient intellectual air inside the circles designing the next generation of AI.

How Trump's 'Reverse Algorithmic Capture' Is Creating the Unseen Curators of Our New Digital Realities

The US Government is shaping by - by stealth - the emergence of a privatised information infrastructure that serves its ideological aims. Caroline Orr reports

Caroline Orr

Epstein and the Radicalisation of the Silicon Valley Mind

Previous excellent reporting by the Boston Globe first brought to light Bach's exchanges with Epstein, but focused narrowly on some of Bach's comments in isolation. What has been missing - and what this investigation provides for the first time - is a clear view of how these ideas moved through Epstein-funded institutions, longtermist organisations and the AI networks now exerting growing influence over Silicon Valley's emerging political order.

One of the most revealing documents in the House Oversight Committee's Epstein archive is an email chain from the same month that Trump won the Republican nomination as presidential candidate in July 2016 - between Jeffrey Epstein and the cognitive scientist Joscha Bach.

This was eight years after Epstein's conviction for soliciting a child following a major criminal investigation into wider sex trafficking allegations. At this time, Epstein was in regular communication with Peter Thiel, who that month would endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention.

By this point, Bach was an integral member of the Edge Foundation - the network of Silicon Valley elites founded by John Brockman but principally funded by Jeffrey Epstein, who, as B...