The Epstein Emails: A Different Kind of Insider Trading

A recent New York Times opinion piece on the Epstein emails is one of the most revealing essays I’ve read about the intersection of privilege, power, and language. It’s a study not only of abuse, but of the coded ways elite circles communicate, and what those patterns tell us about status, access, and the quiet barter economy of non-public information.

The guest columnist, Anand Giridharadas, makes a compelling case for what he calls the “Epstein class,” writing: “People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance, and media. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances.”

But what struck me most was the attention to language and the way these emails reveal a private vernacular of privilege. In this world, name-dropping, location-pinging, and travel itineraries (“Tulum, Davos, DLD”) operate as shorthand signals within a closed ecosystem. The essay notes that many emails begin with a casual update of whereabouts, a ritual of insider echolocation. Status, too, becomes legible not through polish, but through disregard: “If you were an alien landing on Earth and the first thing you saw was the Epstein emails, you could gauge status by spelling, grammar, punctuation. Usage is inversely related to power in this network.”

Most revealing is the observation that the network functioned as a barter market of nonpublic information: “a draw,” the author writes, “for those seeking money, intel, fun, and prestige.” It is, in many respects, the very behavior regulators warn against in financial markets. MNPI — material nonpublic information — isn’t just a securities concept; it is a social one. It’s what binds elite enclaves, shapes deals, and separates insiders from everyone else.

It’s hard to reconcile how some of the world’s most powerful people stayed close to Epstein, or sought him out, even after his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution and procuring a minor for prostitution. Just over a decade later, he was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges and died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial. Authorities ruled it a suicide. 

At Alphy, we see every day how language can reveal bias, create liability, signal power, or quietly transmit sensitive and insider information. Words can protect or expose; they can clarify intent or conceal it. 

And yet, at the very center of this story, beneath the misspellings, shorthand, name-dropping, grammatical game playing, and coded chatter, are the girls and young women whose exploitation was the horrific subtext to the entire network. Their voices were minimized, their communication unheard, and their suffering obscured by a system that treated access as currency and silence as a form of loyalty.

The opinion piece lays bare a truth we often forget: Communication is never neutral. Language carries hierarchy, intent, class, vulnerability, illegality, and power. It can reveal wrongdoing or help correct harm.

This is why the work of understanding language matters. And why, at its best, technology should help illuminate harm, not hide it.

Book a free demo of HarmCheck today: http://harmcheck.ai/demo

Julian Guthrie is the CEO and founder of Alphy.

HarmCheck by Alphy is an AI communication compliance solution that detects and flags language that is harmful, unlawful, and unethical in digital communication. Alphy was founded to reduce the risk of litigation from harmful and discriminatory communication.