Why was Jeffrey Epstein obsessed with genes? In the latest tranche of Epstein records and emails made available by the Department of Justice, themes of genes, genetics, and IQ—alongside more explicit threads of white supremacy—keep cropping up, often adjacent to Epstein’s fascination with steering research in the biological sciences.
Those newly released emails include a February 2016 correspondence with Noam Chomsky in which Epstein insists on a genetic basis for Black and white differences in test scores—using it as a springboard to advocate for wider genetic editing. Practically impossible, Chomsky replies—and if it could be done, the best use would be “changing the genes for dedicated savagery and lack of concern for the welfare or even security of the population on the part of that [sector] of educated elite that reaches positions of power.”
“Agreed,” Epstein wrote. “Genetic altruism.”
Epstein’s language, perhaps influenced by that of biologist Richard Dawkins—whose own interest in eugenics, altruism, and selfishness shows some compatibility—echoes of Silicon Valley’s beloved “effective altruism,” another faux “altruism” built on dreams of harem bunkers for the super-rich. But then, Epstein had ideas in common with the billionaire circles in which he moved. I’ve covered his former friend Donald Trump’s fixation on race and genetics:
There’s a pattern to [Trump’s] comments about intelligence (or lack thereof), his intense hostility towards disabled people (including reputed public use of the r-word stretching back decades), and his preoccupation with “good” genes: it’s inseparable from his constant promotion of Afrikaner and Northern European immigration, sympathy to claims of “white genocide,” and promotion of close advisors like Stephen Miller and Elon Musk.
And those of Epstein correspondents Peter Thiel and Elon Musk:
Musk’s fantasies of superiority connect deeply to his twin obsessions with genetics and reproduction—especially his own. “He really wants smart people to have kids,” Musk’s colleague Shivon Zilis, mother to four of his 14 publicly reported children, told the journalist Walter Isaacson.
Evil men like Epstein are, in the simplest form, obsessed with eugenics because they believe that their ill-gotten gains are the product of some innate superiority. His personal eugenicist beliefs have been previously reported on: A 2019 New York Times investigation, for instance, found that he “hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch.” He was talking about those plans with scientists in the early 2000s, which, to public knowledge, fortunately did not happen.
But the new emails reveal a previously unappreciated range of public intellectuals and scientists implicitly tolerating those ideas—treating race science and eugenics as acceptable conversation even if, as Chomsky does in that discourse, contesting them. Epstein’s passion for injecting eugenics into conversation after conversation in his emails should shape the way we think about his role in funding scientific research and development—and steering richer men’s money in that world.
Epstein’s fascination with eugenics also puts his funding of health research in a disturbing light.
In a 2017 interview with Science, Epstein diminished the work of the Gates Foundation, which he said “doesn’t search for smart people”: unlike Gates, Epstein said, he was “interested in the rarefied peaks” and in “new theories of biology,” cultivating relationships with sympathetic scientists like virologist and former Stanford University professor Nathan Wolfe, a close Epstein ally and comrade in misogyny.
Some of Epstein’s conversations about genes, I found when parsing through the newest batch of emails, are just weird. In one email to a “Jabor Y,” Epstein wrote that he was “looking forward to your DNA test. to see how many genes we share.”
An unknown sender asked Epstein if he’d had his genome sequenced. Knowing what he’s done, it feels horrific to read Epstein jokingly respond that he has “two recessive genes that cause hyper fucking.”
In a 2013 email, Epstein remarked approvingly on “iq tests for children”—presumably not because the billionaire eugenics class particularly care about some disabled kids getting diagnoses they need for adequate accommodations in school.
Some of his correspondents took it even further. Racist AI researcher and Epstein grantee Joscha Bach said, as reported in MS NOW, that Black children’s brains “are slower at learning high-level concepts” and better suited to a “more hunting/running style of life.”
In a separate email with Bach—in which Bach also discusses the “Ashkenazi mutation”—Epstein reimagines Ancient Rome as a eugenicist paradise, a favorite theme of right-wing eugenicist tech billionaires like Musk: “it seems that Greece and Rome had a class society that allowed the upper classes to have more offspring than the lower classes, and larger social mobility based on IQ than our current arrangement,” Epstein writes approvingly.
And like Rome, it would be nice if the eugenicist billionaire empire fell.
