"I'm in favor of not having any rules against insider trading. I would like all the information out there as soon as it's available. Because look, as a society, we are better off knowing as soon as possible anything that is knowable."
A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo.
According to the Epstein documents recently released by the Department of Justice, on April 6, 2013, three months before the public filing, Epstein emailed Sinofsky a copy of Sinofsky's own "Resignation Agreement," asking for comments. After some back and forth about the non-disparagement clause, Epstein wrote: "[SEC] disclosure will appear as if they are concerned about what you say. seems very weak. appears they are buying your silence."
What most leaders label as a content problem is actually a presence problem. Leaders often assume credibility rises and falls based on wording alone. In reality, credibility is shaped by executive presence, which reflects the signals leaders send about confidence, clarity, and authority before their ideas are fully heard.
A 22,000-word magazine feature that an anonymous gadfly had mailed in manila envelopes to several senior faculty members showed how Shleifer had exploited the job and the inside information that came with it to turn himself into a mid-level oligarch while the country literally starved.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took the unprecedented step of designating a U.S. firm-Anthropic-as a supply chain risk. Anthropic's crime? It refused to violate industry-wide protocols against using AI for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. Hegseth's designation, which has until now been reserved for foreign firms, bars U.S. military contractors from doing business with the company.
Near the beginning of " The Way We Live Now," Anthony Trollope's searing satire of high-society London in the eighteen-seventies, Madame Melmotte, the wife of Augustus Melmotte, a crooked parvenu financier who has burst onto the British social scene, hosts a ball at the couple's mansion in Grosvenor Square, Mayfair. Despite Melmotte's checkered past, many members of the London élite accept his invitation to the party, including many aristocrats, a newspaper editor, and Prince George, a member of the British Royal Family.
Documents released as part of an effort to bring greater transparency to Epstein's relationships with powerbrokers in politics, business and culture shed light on Summers's extensive correspondence with Epstein, whom he once emailed asking for advice on wooing women.
Billionaire wealth jumped three times faster in 2025 than in the previous five years to its highest peak ever, new figures have has shown, sparking warnings of dangerous political inequality. Figures published by the charity Oxfam show that in the UK, the richest 56 people now hold more wealth than 27 million combined. Calling on the government to impose a wealth tax,
Since Richard Nixon was forced to resign, powerful people in both political parties have worked assiduously to ensure that their leaders would escape the consequences of their actions. Trump has evaded punishment for crimes both low (campaign-finance violations, for which he was convicted, though he will serve no time thanks to his 2024 victory) and high (his attempted overthrow of the federal government in the aftermath of his 2020 election loss, for which he was spared by the Supreme Court's decision to grant him a kingly immunity).
Adisturbing number of the oligarchs responsible for the mess we're in are not very smart. I realize that this seems like a minor complaint when so many of them are also evil, incompetent, and causing enormous amounts of human suffering. (Though perhaps it's better that they're dimly lit, because who knows how much worse things would be if they were truly evil geniuses?)
Peter Mandelson began seeking advice from the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on how to land highly paid senior roles with companies including BP and Glencore within days of Labour's 2010 electoral defeat, emails show. A flurry of messages, sent in the weeks and months following the collapse of the New Labour project, reveal how Epstein mentored Mandelson as the former cabinet minister touted himself for lucrative jobs at global businesses.
Despite his new status as a registered sex offender, Epstein retained the trappings of wealth and influence. He preserved his foothold in financial circles and rebuilt his relationships among billionaires and senior bankers. Al Jazeera has reviewed the latest documents published by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) on January 30, 2026, gathered during federal investigations into Epstein. The files shed new light on how, despite his conviction, he remained embedded within elite financial networks for years.
A new tranche of Epstein files has blasted its way through the worlds of media, politics, tech, academia, finance and Hollywood. High-profile individuals have once again been forced to explain their relationship with the billionaire financier and why exactly they sent that email, or what they were doing in that photo, in that place, at that time. There have been resignations in Norway, Slovakia, France, the UK and on Wall Street.
That Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo, happens to turn 50 years old this week. It's Buckley, and not the often-excoriated 2010 Roberts court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, that created the conditions for the ultrawealthy to transform their vastly unequal economic power into lopsided political power, and for a billionaire like Elon Musk to contribute a staggering $291 million to help elect Republican candidates, including Donald Trump, in 2024.
The truth about this money: It is invested with some of the worst actors engineering the current takeover. That includes private equity firms, venture capitalists, and asset managers-the most powerful corporations in the world and the billionaires that run them. Many of these people are actively supporting the Trump administration; most are doing little to nothing to oppose it. And all oversee millions, if not billions, of dollars in worker and community capital.
