The Epstein files have shown, once again, that elites from the worlds of politics, finance, technology, and media form an interconnected network. At points, their interests and connections collide into a single vortex—in this case, most probably a deliberately created one. This begs the question: why was it exposed?
I don’t think there is much doubt that Jeffrey Epstein was an intelligence asset. He was most probably working for Mossad, but with ties to others—for example, MI6, as his extensive relationship with Lord Mandelson indicates. His life and “career” were a typical example of this. He was virtually unknown, with no significant traceable family connections; yet, after working in a finance firm, he launched his own financial company and did extremely well.
Epstein ran a financial advisory firm that charged “fees” to his clients. Fees are virtually unlimited, unlike the sale of goods, which is much more complicated to justify. If an agency wants to channel money to an individual, it’s a great cover. Some argue that those fees were, in effect, blackmail, but that is a flimsy argument.
When Epstein died in 2019, he was a wealthy man. He was worth $578 million, including two private Caribbean islands, several lavish homes, and about $380 million in cash and investments. But $578 million is a relatively small number for the world’s billionaires, sovereign funds, and politicians with state budgets—and a manageable investment to control them.
The Epstein files have exposed the debauchery of elites. They operate in a separate order, both physical and moral. Through their corporate offices, private villas, jets, and exclusive hotels, they inhabit a different world. In that world, the amorality of the current cultural form is expressed through perversions. However, many of those who so loudly criticize them might fall into the same pattern if only they were assured immunity.
Which is what Epstein seemed to provide: a safe environment in which to let loose all kinds of fantasies. Whether they were legal or illegal was of no consequence. The correspondence of many with him shows a tacit understanding that whatever happened when they were together was not to be spoken about too directly—only by reference, and never in public.
For about 30 years, since he bought Little St. James Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, it worked. The man must have been smart, no doubt. He managed to infiltrate elite circles, gain their trust, and make them feel safe enough to engage in illegal activities, all while keeping records and probably reporting to his bosses.
Until it was no longer private. In 2008, when he was first tried and convicted, few in the public suspected the reach of his network and the scale of the operation. It might be more than mere coincidence that it was the year of the big financial crisis. In 2019, he was arrested, and less than a month later, he supposedly killed himself while in jail. But I don’t think many people really accept that.
The question, assuming one does not buy into the mainstream media narrative of Epstein being a perverted, self-made millionaire who happened to have many elite friends, is why he was exposed. Having the wealth, connections, and compromising evidence, why did he not use it? Perhaps he tried after he was arrested, and that’s why he “died.”
But the question remains: if we accept the hypothesis that he was not working alone but for someone, why did they allow him to be caught and exposed? I will attempt a circumstantial answer, not a particular one, as I don’t think many people are in a position to answer it definitively.
We are in the midst of a change in the “central domain”—to use the Carl Schmitt framework—of our current technological paradigm. For Schmitt, a central domain is the subject that gives an age its structure, language, and battles. A central domain is the core of an age in relation to which all other subjects and challenges are defined. Each era has one dominant domain that organizes how people understand reality.
Schmitt offers the example of European technical progress during the nineteenth century. Progress in this field was the central domain of that age’s paradigm. The massive upsurge of “technical progress” affected all “moral, political, social, and economic situations,” he writes in the essay “The Age of Neutralization.” Its overpowering effect gave it the status of a “religion of technical progress, which promised that all other problems would be solved by technological progress.”
After the age of “technical progress,” for Schmitt, came the age of economic technique, which lasted, I would say, until 2007–2008, coinciding with the release of the first iPhone and the financial crisis. In an economic age, “one needs only to solve adequately the problem of the production and distribution of goods in order to make superfluous all moral and social questions.”
“God, freedom, progress, anthropological conceptions of human nature, public domain, rationality and rationalization, and finally the concept of nature and culture itself derive their concrete historical content from the situation of the central domains and can only be grasped therefrom,” Schmitt writes.
Some might argue with the use of Carl Schmitt’s theoretical framework because of his political choices; however, Schmitt was right in foreseeing two big changes well ahead of time. First, that the relationship between power and the subject in the twentieth century could no longer be thought of through the classical concepts of national sovereignty and the nation-state—an idea that many others, from Foucault to Agamben, developed later.
Secondly, as Nathan Gardels writes for Noema: “It appears Schmitt’s second possibility of America as a balancer did in fact take place during the post–Cold War period. That brief era, which built the exoskeleton of a singular planet, is now splintering. Deglobalization, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the mounting hostility between the West and China—which is seeking to become a maritime global power unshackled from its continental constraints—are morphing into the differentiated Grossraum that Schmitt predicted.”
Schmitt anchored these insights in his concept of paradigms with central domains dominated by his notion of the political. He argued that the central domain is where the definition of friend and enemy—his primary category for the birth of the political field—takes place, and that where this happens is where the political truly resides.
I would argue that we are living through a transitional period between central domains, which Schmitt also considered to be a distinctive phase. We are moving from a central domain defined by economic and analog technique to one dominated by the digital. The digital domain is the age of cloud infrastructure, data, and algorithms, where virtually all spheres of life are reflected and stored—and increasingly, what shapes our very subjectivity.
This new central domain is where the struggle for power happens, and nowhere is that more clearly visible than in the control and definition of money. We are in the midst of a struggle among elites for dominance over the central domain, the power nexus. The money that is coming, which will determine this central domain, is digital; the issue is who will control it.
At its core, digital money is not about currency in the traditional sense, because it is not currency as we are used to defining it; it is a control mechanism. Control mechanisms have “rails.” Whoever owns the rails controls visibility, access, enforcement, and ultimately sovereignty. A central bank digital currency (CBDC) places those rails formally in the hands of the state. A stablecoin, by contrast, places them in private hands—regulated and compliant, but governed through contracts, platforms, and market incentives rather than public law.
This distinction matters because it maps directly onto a deeper conflict inside American power. On one side stands what Simon Dixon and others call the Financial-Industrial Complex (FIC): large banks, asset managers, payment networks, exchanges, and financial infrastructure firms whose profits depend on scale, liquidity, and predictable flows. On the other side are the Military-Industrial Complexes (MIC): the security agencies, defense contractors, and intelligence services whose power rests on threat management, surveillance, and enforcement. Somewhere in between, with Trump closer to the MIC than to the FIC, is the Technological Industrial Complex (TIC).
This is where the tension lies. The FIC wants the rails because they monetize them. The MIC wants the rails because they police them. The TIC has understood that, while they may claim strength on their own to impose order in the previous two complexes, for now they are better off close to the MIC. Stablecoin regulation—who may issue, how reserves are held, and what programmability is allowed—becomes the battlefield where this conflict is negotiated.
Epstein was a tool, and that tool has been used—and is being used at this very precise moment—as a weapon in this conflict. If we continue the hypothesis that he was an Israeli intelligence asset, then trying to understand where Israel fits into this conflict could be clarifying.
For decades, the Middle East functioned as a U.S. security theater. Israel was a central node in that system: a military ally, intelligence partner, and testing ground for surveillance, targeting, and population-control technologies that would face legal or political resistance elsewhere. Continuous instability justified defense budgets, arms sales, and a permanent security posture. The Military-Industrial Complex thrived on this arrangement.
But finance has a different calculus. War is volatile. It disrupts energy markets, trade routes, and investment timelines. It creates risk. As the global system moves toward a multipolar order—driven in part by China’s rise and the erosion of sanctions effectiveness—the Financial-Industrial Complex increasingly favors managed stability over “forever wars” in the Middle East.
If Epstein was a Mossad intelligence asset, then it could be argued that he is being used in order for Israel to gain leverage and to favor those who favor it—and perhaps that he was allowed to be exposed because, in this elite conflict, he was losing leverage and had become too expensive an asset to let go to waste.
