- Why did billionaire Leon Black pay Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for estate-planning advice?
- Black has an answer: He wasn't keeping track of it; $158 million doesn't mean much to him.
You know how when you're feeling flush, you sometimes pay a little less attention to how much things cost?
Turns out billionaires are like that, too. Or, at least, that's what financier Leon Black says about his relationship with disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Black's long-standing connection to Epstein — the billionaire has said he consulted with Epstein on estate planning — raised all kinds of questions and press coverage in the wake of Epstein's arrest on federal sex trafficking charges in the summer of 2019 and his death weeks later.
The biggest question: Why had Black, a sophisticated and successful Wall Street boss, the cofounder of Apollo Global Management who could work with anyone he wanted to, paid Epstein tens of millions of dollars for advice?
Black, it turns out, has an answer for that, which he related to William Cohan in Puck this week. He never added up how much money he sent Epstein's way — which he now says was $158 million over several years — because it was just a rounding error against his huge wealth.
The man who once paid some $130 million for Edvard Munch's The Scream then tried to put the Epstein fees into perspective. "My family and I now own 93 million shares of Apollo," he continued. "So every time, which is every day, going back 15 years, the stock moves up or down by $1, that's either plus or minus $93 million." In other words, $158 million over a number of years wasn't material, especially since the Dechert report revealed that Epstein's advice "conferred" between $1 billion and $2 billion "in value" to Leon.
So that kind of sounds … reasonable?
On the other hand, some math: Black's net worth is a reported $14.4 billion, while the median net worth of an American family is $192,900.
So when Black is talking about a $93 million swing in his family's fortunes and shrugging it off, he's describing a change of plus or minus 0.6 percent. For the average American family, that would mean adding or subtracting $1,152 in a single day.
So maybe the richest people in the world really are quite a bit different from the rest of us.