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by craigc 2434 days ago
This piece reads like it was authored by Bill Gates’ PR team. The Times has to do better than this. They do not question a single assertion and take it all as fact.

> Ms. Arnold said Mr. Gates and the foundation had been unaware that Mr. Epstein had been seeking any fee.

> Some of the Gates Foundation employees said they had been unaware of Mr. Epstein’s criminal record and had been shocked to learn that the foundation was working with a sex offender.

> In March 2013, Mr. Gates flew on Mr. Epstein’s Gulfstream plane from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to Palm Beach, Fla., according to a flight manifest. Ms. Arnold said Mr. Gates — who has his own $40 million jet — hadn’t been aware it was Mr. Epstein’s plane.

> Mr. Epstein complained to an acquaintance at the end of 2014 that Mr. Gates had stopped talking to him, according to a person familiar with the discussion.

Obviously, everyone is in damage control mode and looking to distance themselves from Epstein, but there is a very good chance that Bill Gates and others knew exactly what he was involved in and went along with it anyway.

How do you fly on someone’s private plane without realizing it is their plane?

4 comments

> How do you fly on someone’s private plane without realizing it is their plane?

I was wondering this too, so I googled it:

https://flyxo.com/operator-partners/

Apparently, if you own a private jet, you can rent it out on the equivalent of Uber. Seems like the sort of thing rich people would use a lot when their own plane is somewhere else.

>How do you fly on someone’s private plane without realizing it is their plane?

Easily, you just assume it’s a charter. When you fly on private jets every day you stop thinking about these things really fast.

Haha. I clearly do not have any experience in that area, but I guess that does make some sense.
The same way you might get in a car with someone and not realizing that it's not their car.

A rich person isn't going to boast to an even richer person that it's their plane.

This is not the first article where James Stewart has shown some remarkable incuriosity and refusal to connect any dots. In his earlier reporting on Epstein's connection to Musk & Tesla, he noted that Epstein claimed to know embarrassing intimate details about numerous tech industry leaders, but chalked it up to simple bragadoccio on Epstein's part.