elephant in his living room—that is, the e/ephant in the

elephant in his living room—that is, the e/ephant in the room. (Epstein says too it’s a reminder that elephants have 23 copies of tumor suppressor genes and humans have only 1.) The single book on his bedside table is Lolita (he is, beyond the joke, a great Nobokov fan). And, too, he seems often to be right. Since I began working on this piece in September, Epstein predictions about the price of oil, yen, ruble, and euro have all born out. If I had invested $100,000 the way Epstein said I should in early September, by the end of January I would have made $2.4 million. (Alas, I did not invest.) At any one moment, he is making a series of bets for himself and others--very much not as a workaday hedge fund, and much more as a privileged association. Money is always about the club it gets you into. Most everyone who is now of a certain age and ambition and status grew up in, and found they were temperamentally suited to, the era of wealth that started in the late 1970s. A meritocracy on steroids, or, as Vanity Fair would baldly dub it, the new establishment, an increasingly parallel world, a self-invented one, at further and further remove from the ordinary one. Epstein’s is just one version. Epstein often tells, with some obvious marvel, his middle class to riches tale: born in 1953 in Coney Island, father worked for the city’s Parks Department, mother a housewife. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022877