After I posted last week’s piece on how the New York Times broke the news of Epstein’s first conviction in the most disgustingly sympathetic way possible, the name of the reporter Landon Thomas started popping up in my email and Bluesky feed, and it made me realize I had left a big chunk of the story out of my account.
From Margaret Sullivan:
One of the best investigative reporters I know, Pulitzer Prize-winner James Risen, wrote to me about Landon Thomas, after the Epstein emails raised serious questions about that reporter-source relationship.
“This raises so many questions,” Risen told me. “Did this guy tell his editors he might have stuff on Trump and Epstein? What did they do about it? Did they ignore it?”
We may never know. The Times has said very little so far, despite being pressed. After the Intercept and other news organizations asked these kinds of questions, their spokeswoman declined to get into it, only noting that Thomas left the Times years ago. He departed in 2019 after he revealed to his editors that he had solicited charitable donations from Jeffrey Epstein; the Times put out a statement back then saying his solicitation was “a clear violation” of their ethics policy. But what about all he knew about Epstein and about Epstein’s dealings with Donald Trump? (“Would you like to see photos of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen?” Epstein asked Thomas in one recently released email.)
Given what we knew even back in 2019 about the ethical lines Thomas had been crossing for almost two decades (behavior the NYT knew about before they hired him), the idea that soliciting donations was the one that went too far is a bit much. If I were the cynical type, I'd assume that Thomas's bosses were relieved to have an excuse to get rid of him just as their previous coverage of Epstein was about to go under the microscope.
An email I got in response to last week's post pointed out that Thomas was also the author of the notorious 2002 New York Magazine puff piece, Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery, an article that helped lay the foundation for the highly useful myth of Epstein as a financial genius and all-around brilliant thinker.
He comes with cash to burn, a fleet of airplanes, and a keen eye for the ladies — to say nothing of a relentless brain that challenges Nobel Prize–winning scientists across the country — and for financial markets around the world.
...
A former Dalton math teacher, he maintains a peripatetic salon of brilliant scientists yet possesses no bachelor’s degree. For more than ten years, he’s been linked to Manhattan-London society figure Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the mysteriously deceased media titan Robert Maxwell, yet he lives the life of a bachelor, logging 600 hours a year in his various planes as he scours the world for investment opportunities. He owns what is said to be Manhattan’s largest private house yet runs his business from a 100-acre private island in St. Thomas.
...
The wizard that meets the eye is spare and fit; with a long jaw and a carefully coiffed head of silver hair, he looks like a taller, younger Ralph Lauren. A raspy Brooklyn accent betrays his Coney Island origins. He spends an hour and fifteen minutes every day doing advanced yoga with his personal instructor, who travels with him wherever he goes. He is an enthusiastic member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.
...
At the time, options trading was an arcane and dimly understood field, just beginning to take off. To trade options, one had to value them, and to value them, one needed to be able to master such abstruse mathematical confections as the Black-Scholes option-pricing model. For Epstein, breaking down such models was pure sport, and within just a few years he had his own stable of clients. “He was not your conventional broker saying ‘Buy IBM’ or ‘Sell Xerox,’ ” says Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne. “Given his mathematical background, we put him in our special-products division, where he would advise our wealthier clients on the tax implications of their portfolios. He would recommend certain tax-advantageous transactions. He is a very smart guy and has become a very important client for the firm as well.”
...
But it is his covey of scientists that inspires Epstein’s true rapture. Epstein spends $20 million a year on them — encouraging them to engage in whatever kind of cutting-edge research might attract their fancy. They are, of course, quite lavish in their praise in return. Gerald Edelman won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1972 and now presides over the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla. “Jeff is extraordinary in his ability to pick up on quantitative relations,” says Edelman. “He came to see us recently. He is concerned with this basic question: Is it true that the brain is not a computer? He is very quick.”
More than any other journalist, Thomas appears to be the key figure in allowing Epstein to cultivate his image as business genius/philanthropist/charming rouge. This role kicked into higher gear when the first round of accusations came to light.
John Power writing for Al Jazeera. (And yes, I do take this publication with a grain of salt on certain topics, but they don’t seem to have an agenda here, and the details are accurate as far as I can tell.)
A New York Times reporter told Jeffrey Epstein that he could write an article that would define the financier on his own terms as he faced allegations of sexually abusing minors in the months leading up to his 2008 conviction, newly uncovered emails reveal.
After a negative article about Epstein was published in September 2007, then-New York Times journalist Landon Thomas Jr advised Epstein to “get ahead” of more bad publicity by doing an interview that would define the story “on your terms”.“I Just read the Post. Now the floodgates will open — you can expect Vanity Fair and NYMag to pile on,” Thomas wrote to Epstein in an email dated September 20, 2007, referring to the magazines Vanity Fair and New York Magazine.
“My view is that the quicker you get out ahead of this and define the story and who you are on your terms in the NYT, the better it will be for you.”
Thomas, who left the Times in 2019, urged Epstein to quickly do an interview to prevent the “popular tabloid perception” about him from hardening, and expressed sympathy over his legal troubles.
“I know this is tough and hard for you, but remember jail may [be] bad, but it is not forever,” Thomas wrote.
...
“Remember how for a while my NY Mag piece was the defining piece on you? That is no longer the case after all this,” Thomas wrote to Epstein.
“But I think if we did a piece for the Times, with the documents and evidence that you mention, plus you speaking for the record, we can again have a story that becomes the last public word on Jeffrey Epstein.”...
Among other revelations, those emails showed that Thomas let Epstein know that the late investigative journalist John Connolly had contacted him for information for Connolly’s 2016 book Filthy Rich: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.
“He seems very interested in your relationship with the news media,” Thomas wrote to Epstein in an email dated June 1, 2016. “I told him you were a hell of a guy :)”.
The Epstein–Thomas correspondence also hit one of the longest-running threads here at the blog: how Elon Musk became the world’s richest man through stock manipulation.
In 2018, Musk was sued by the SEC for a tweet stating that funding had been secured for potentially taking Tesla private. The lawsuit characterized the tweet as false, misleading, and damaging to investors, and sought to bar Musk from serving as CEO of publicly traded companies. Two days later, Musk settled with the SEC, without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations. As a result, Musk and Tesla were fined $20 million each, and Musk was forced to step down for three years as Tesla chairman but was able to remain as CEO.
About that:
Ed Niedermeyer, who wrote the definitive book on Tesla, takes it from here.
finally doing a little of my own perusing of the Epstein Files, and I'll be darned if Elon Musk's personal elite influence monger Juleana Glover wasn't keeping ol' Jeff E apprised of all the latest developments in Tesla's stock pump narrative
— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 4, 2026 at 10:58 AM
Glover to Epstein: "Tesla is becoming an Energy company" www.justice.gov/epstein/file... Glover to Epstein: Model 3 teardown shows 30% profit margin (lmao) www.justice.gov/epstein/file...
— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 4, 2026 at 11:01 AM
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Welp, looks like Elon Musk and Jeffery Epstein were definitely in touch around the time of the "Funding Secured" faux Saudi Takeover Why did Tesla suddenly need as much as $10b in cash? Investors sure weren't ever told! Nobody was, other than Elon's pedo buddy. Very cool!
— e.w. niedermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 4, 2026 at 11:06 AM
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We will get into the New York Times’ coverage of that story another day.
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