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Time of India
23-07-2025
- Time of India
Jeffrey Epstein's $560 million net worth: How did he amass such massive fortune?
Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financer and notorious paedophile passed away in 2019. Jeffrey Epstein signed a will two days before killing himself in his New York jail cell, according to US media. Accused of abusing dozens of teenage girls, the legal documents turned the focus on Jeffrey Epstein, with public scrutiny of the court papers reigniting interest in the late sex offender's wealth and how he amassed it. The grandson of Jewish immigrants, Epstein was raised in Brooklyn, where he excelled in math and graduated from high school early. Explore courses from Top Institutes in Please select course: Select a Course Category Jeffrey Epstein briefly attended Cooper Union and New York University, according to published reports over the years by multiple news outlets, some citing court documents. The controversy over Epstein's death also became a hot topic of debate after President Donald Trump returned to office in January. But the US Department of Justice and FBI concluded that sex offender Jeffrey Epstein did not have a so-called client list that could implicate high-profile associates, and that he did take his own life - contradicting long-held conspiracy theories about the infamous case. As Trump continues to spar with parts of his political base over his handling of the Epstein files, attention is turning to the relationship between the two men. ALSO READ: Maria Farmer, Jeffrey Esptein accuser, details chilling encounter with Trump: Who is she? Live Events What is Jeffrey Epstein's net worth? According to CBS News, when Jeffrey Epstein was found dead at the age of 66 at the Manhattan jail cell in August 2019, a filing in his criminal case pegged his net worth at roughly $560 million. Epstein's assets also included a number of lavish properties. Certain reports suggest it is estimated that Epstein made a $634m (£505m) fortune. It was this massive money with the help of which he was able to join social circles which included former US presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump as well as celebrities. The disgraced sex offender owned a palatial townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan worth more than $50 million. He also had a mansion in Palm Beach, Florida worth about $12 million, a ranch in New Mexico valued at over $17 million. Epstein also owned an apartment in Paris worth an estimated $8.6 million. ALSO READ: $1,390 Stimulus check in 2025: Do Americans need to pay tax on the amount and who needs to apply? His two private Caribbean islands — Great St. James and Little St. James — were together valued at $86 million following his death, but purchased for $60 million in 2023 by billionaire Stephen Deckoff, founder of alternative investment firm Black Diamond Capital Management. Epstein also owned a private jet. What did Jeffrey Epstein do for a living? Jeffrey Epstein was publicly known for his rise in the finance world. From a school drop-out to one of the richest men in America, with former US presidents and Hollywood stars among his acquaintances, he started teaching math at The Dalton School, one of New York's most prestigious prep schools in his early 20s. After being dismissed due to his "poor performance", Jeffrey Epstein chose to go into banking, starting his career as a junior assistant to a floor trader. In 1981, he set up his own company aimed at helping people recover stolen money from fraudulent lawyers and brokers. ALSO READ: Ozzy Osbourne's massive wealth exposed: How did the legendary rockstar make $220 million? Six years later, he was hired by Steven Hoffenberg as a consultant at Towers Financial Corporation, a collection agency that bought debts owed to hospitals, banks and phone companies. In 1988, he founded his financial management firm J. Epstein & Company, where only clients with at least $1 billion of assets were considered. It's then that Epstein became involved with money laundering and other criminal activities, according to a report in The Independent. In 1993, it was claimed he became involved in an fraudulent investing scam that brought in investors on false promises of return - but he avoided being charged for his involvement in the scheme. It still remains a mystery as to how he achieved success so quickly at his company, But over the next two decades he struck multi-million-pound deals with some of the world's wealthiest people and biggest financial institutions. Where else did Epstein get his money from? Apart from these, America's largest lender, JPMorgan Chase loaned Epstein money and regularly let him withdraw large sums of cash from 1998 through August 2013, according to a class-action lawsuit settled by the nation's largest bank. In an emailed statement to CBS MoneyWatch in June of 2023, JPMorgan called Epstein's behavior "monstrous," and said it regretted any association with the disgraced financier. ALSO READ: Social Security payments worth $5,108 to be rolled out for Americans this week: Who could see up to 50% cut? Epstein also had financial dealings with Deutsche Bank, which in May 2023 agreed to pay $75 million to settle a lawsuit alleging the German bank "knowingly benefited" from his sex trafficking and profited from doing business with him. Deutsche Bank declined to comment on the settlement. In 2020, it acknowledged its "error of onboarding Epstein in 2013 and the weaknesses in our processes." But his world began to crumble in 2005, when the parents of a 14-year-old girl accused Epstein of molesting their daughter. In 2008, he reached a controversial plea deal with prosecutors and served just 13 months in jail. Over the years, more women came forward with disturbing allegations about his behavior. Eventually, the threads of an alleged sex trafficking network began to unravel. In 2019, Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges — but a month later, he was found dead in his jail cell.
Los Angeles Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Noah Davis' at the UCLA Hammer Museum reveals the brilliant early work of a life cut tragically short
The modest but pungent survey of paintings by Noah Davis at the UCLA Hammer Museum is a welcome event. It goes a long way toward demythologizing the Seattle-born, L.A.-based artist, who was heartbreakingly struck down by a rare liposarcoma cancer in 2015, when he was barely 32. The show affirms his gift for what it was: Davis was a painter's painter, a deeply thoughtful and idiosyncratic Black voice heard by other artists and aficionados, even as his work was in invigorating development. Talented artists often come into a steadily mature expression in their 30s, the moment when Davis' accelerating growth was brutally interrupted. The show's three dozen paintings are understandably uneven, but when Davis was good, he was very good indeed. That intriguing capacity resonates in the first picture, '40 Acres and a Unicorn,' which hangs alone in the show's entry to mark the start of his career. Davis was 24 and had studied at Cooper Union in New York and the artist-run Mountain School of Arts in L.A.'s Chinatown. The 2007 painting is not large — 2½ feet tall and slightly narrower — but it casts a spell. In Western art, a man on a horse is a classic format representing a hero, but here Davis sits a young Black man astride a mythic unicorn — notably white — its buttery beige horn shining amid the painting's otherwise neutral palette. It's easy to see the youth as signifying the artist, and the replacement for an art-historical horse likewise standing in for a mule. That animal was famously promised to thousands of formerly enslaved people near the end of the Civil War, along with 40 acres of Confederate land on which they had worked, uncompensated and abused, making the white planter class rich. The 1865 pledge to redistribute confiscated lands as restitution to African Americans for their enslavement didn't last a year before being annulled — reparations as rare, unique and desirable as a unicorn, offered by an untrustworthy white ruling class. (Had the 1865 redistribution happened, imagine where we might be today, as racist cruelties initiated by the federal government are running rampant.) Davis, placing his at least symbolic self on the unicorn's back, plainly asserts his social and cultural confidence. Art is imagination made real, and as a Black American artist, he's going to ride it forward. Perhaps the canvas' most beautiful feature is the rich skin of black acrylic paint within which he and his steed, both rendered in soft veils of thin gouache, are embedded. The luminous black abstraction dominating the surface was visibly painted after the figures, which feel like they are being held in its embrace. Thirty-nine paintings on canvas and 21 on paper are installed chronologically, the works on paper selected from 70 made during Davis' lengthy hospitalization. The layering of topicality, color sensitivity, art-historical ancestors and figuration and abstraction in '40 Acres and a Unicorn' recurs throughout the brief eight-year period being surveyed. (The traveling show was organized by London's Barbican Art Gallery with Das Minsk, an exhibition hall in Potsdam, Germany.) The most abstract painting is on a wall by itself in the next room, and it demonstrates Davis' unusual exploratory strategies. Titled 'Nobody,' a four-sided geometric shape is rendered in flat purple house paint on linen, 5 feet square. The layered difference in materials — an image built from practical, domestic paint on a refined and artistic support — is notable. The irregular shape, however two-dimensional, seems to hover and tilt in dynamic space. It suggests a 2008 riff on the long, rich legacy of Kazimir Malevich's radical, revolutionary geometric abstractions from 1915. The reference to the Russian avant-garde recalls that Malevich's art was dubbed Suprematism, which bumped aside the academic hierarchy of aesthetic rules in favor of 'the supremacy of pure artistic feeling,' most famously represented as a painted black square. Here, it twists into an inevitable jab at an ostensibly liberal Modern art world, still in fact dominated by unexamined white supremacy. 'Nobody' weaves together art and social history in surprising ways. It's one of three geometric abstractions Davis made, their shapes based on the map contour of a battleground state in the revolutionary election year that brought Barack Obama to the presidency. Colorado, a state whose shape is a simple rectangle, flipped from George W. Bush in 2004, while the secondary color of Davis' choice of purple paint was created by combining two primary pigments — red and blue. The color purple also carries its own recognizable, resonant reference, embedded in popular consciousness for Alice Walker's often-banned Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Steven Spielberg's hit movie of the book, a record holder of dubious distinction, tied for the most Oscar nominations (11) without a single win. Davis' torqued purple rectangle looks to be in mid-flip. That Davis exhibited but ultimately painted over the other two works in his geometric series might suggest some dissatisfaction with their admittedly obscure nature. ('Nobody' almost requires footnotes.) He returned to painting the figure — 'somebody' — but often embedded it in visually sumptuous abstract fields. The hedge behind 'Mary Jane,' a young girl in a striped pinafore, visually a cousin to the little girl engulfed in billowing locomotive steam clouds in Édouard Manet's 'The Railway,' is a gorgeously writhing arena of spectral green, gray and black forms. So is the forest of 'The Missing Link 6,' where a hunter with a rifle sits quietly at the base of a massive tree trunk, virtually secreted in the landscape, like something rustling in the dense foliage in a Gustave Courbet forest. The missing-link title declares Davis' intention to join an evolutionary chain of artists, the hidden hunter adding an element of surprise. Art history is threaded throughout Davis' work. (He spent productive research time working as an employee at Art Catalogues, the late Dagny Corcoran's celebrated bookstore, when it was at MOCA's Pacific Design Center location.) The tension between established and new art, which seeks to simultaneously acknowledge greatness in the past while overturning its rank deficiencies, is often palpable. Nowhere is the pressure felt more emphatically than in the knockout '1975 (8),' where joyful exuberance enters the picture, as folks cavort in a swimming pool. The subject — bathers — is as foundational to Modern art as it gets, conjuring Paul Cézanne. Meanwhile, the swimming pool is quintessentially identified with Los Angeles. (Another fine pool painting, 'The Missing Link 4,' has a Modernist Detroit building as backdrop, painted as a grid of color rectangles reminiscent of a David Hockney, an Ed Ruscha or a Mark Bradford.) Bathers are an artistic signal for life crawling onto shore out of the primordial ooze or basking in a pastoral, prelapsarian paradise. For America, the swimming pool is also an archetypal segregationist site of historical cruelty and exclusion. Davis seized the contradiction. Draining public swimming pools to avoid integration in the wake of civil rights advances happened in countless places. It showed the self-lacerating depth to which irrational hate can descend, as policy advocate Heather McGhee wrote in her exceptional book, 'The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together.' People were willing to harm everyone in a community by dismantling a popular public amenity rather than accept full equality. In '1975 (8),' the title's date is within just a few years of the Supreme Court's appalling ruling in Palmer vs. Thompson, which gave official blessing to the callous practice McGhee chronicled. The 2013 painting's composition is based on a photograph taken by Davis' mother four decades earlier. A bright blue horizontal band in an urban landscape is dotted with calmly bobbing heads. A leaping male diver seen from behind dominates the lower foreground, angled toward the water. The soles of his bare feet greet our eyes, lining us up behind him as next to plunge in. Davis suspends the aerial diver in space, a repoussoir figure designed to visually lead us into the scene. Like the unicorn rider, he assumes the artist's metaphorical profile. A moment of anticipatory transition is frozen, made perpetual. Waiting our turn, we're left to contemplate the soles of his feet — a familiar symbol of path-following humility, whether in Andrea Mantegna's Italian Renaissance painting of a 'Dead Christ' or countless Asian sculptures of Buddha. The marvelous painting was made at a pivotal moment. A year before, Davis and his wife, sculptor Karon Davis, joined four storefronts on Washington Boulevard in Arlington Heights to create the Underground Museum. Their aim was to create a self-described family-run cultural space in a Black and Latino neighborhood. (Money came from an inheritance from his recently deceased father, with whom Davis was close.) A year later, the ambitious startup expanded when the project took on the internationally acclaimed Museum of Contemporary Art as an organizing partner. One room in the show includes mock-ups of classic sculptures — imitations — by Marcel Duchamp, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson and Jeff Koons, which Davis made for an exhibition to reference the classic 1959 Douglas Sirk movie about racial identity, 'Imitation of Life.' The appropriations ricochet off the feminist imitations of Andy Warhol and Frank Stella paintings that Elaine Sturtevant began to make in the 1960s. Not all of Davis' paintings succeed, which is to be expected of his youthful and experimental focus. An ambitious group that references raucous daytime TV talk programs from the likes of Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, for example, tries to wrestle with their trashy exploitation of identity issues as entertainment — DNA paternity tests and all. But a glimpse of 'Maury' with a crisp Mondrian painting hanging in the background just falls flat. The juxtaposition of popular art's messy vulgarity with the pristine aspirations of high art is surprisingly uninvolving. Still, most of the exhibition rewards close attention. It handily does what a museum retrospective should do, securing the artist's reputation. At any rate it's just a sliver of some 400 paintings, sculptures and drawings the artist reportedly made. Whatever else might turn up in the future, the current selection at the Hammer represents the brilliant early start of Davis' abbreviated career. Forget the mythology; the show's reality is better.
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New York's Chrysler Building Is Back on the Market
"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." The Chrysler Building, one of the most iconic and recognizable skyscrapers in New York City's skyline, is up for sale once again. Back in January, a New York state judge effectively evicted owners RFR Holdings, a real estate investment firm, from the building after not paying their rent. Now, Cooper Union, a private arts and science college that owns the land underneath the skyscraper, has hired British real estate firm Savills to oversee the sale, according to Time Out. Completed in 1930, the Chrysler Building briefly held the title of world's tallest building for 11 months. It stands 1,046 feet tall, with 77 floors. (The Empire State Building, just a few blocks away, surpassed the Chrysler Building as the world's tallest in 1931, standing at 1,250 feet tall, not including its antenna.) Designed by architect William Van Alen, it was commissioned by Walter P. Chrysler as a symbol of the Chrysler Corporation, with its stainless steel spire and ornamented crown. Ownership of the building has changed hands a few times already, for as much as $800 million in 2008 when the government of Abu Dhabi bought a 90% stake in the tower. But then it sold for a shockingly low fraction of the cost at $150 million in 2019 to co-owners Signa, an Austrian real estate company, and RFR, a New York-based development firm. But in 2024, according to the New York Times, Signa filed for insolvency, and an Austrian court ruled that it would have to sell its share of the building. Cooper Union and Savills aren't disclosing the new price tag for the Chrysler Building just yet. Even with astronomical property costs in Manhattan right now, it's questionable how much Savills might be able to fetch. The aformentioned NYT report paints a more dilapidated picture inside of the shining structure on the outside, with tenants complaining about 'bad cell service, the lack of natural sunlight, elevator troubles, murky water coming out of fountains, and pest infestations.' You Might Also Like 12 Weekend Getaway Spas For Every Type of Occasion 13 Beauty Tools to Up Your At-Home Facial Game
Time Out
23-05-2025
- Business
- Time Out
You can now buy the Chrysler Building—here's how much it'll cost ya
Midtown's shimmering Art Deco crown jewel is officially for sale—again. The Chrysler Building, that spired symbol of 1930s New York glamour, has hit the market after a courtroom soap opera that ended with a $21 million eviction notice and a developer ousted from their lease, reports Crain's New York Business. For the first time since 2019, the skyscraper's leasehold is up for grabs. Cooper Union, which owns the land beneath the tower, has tapped real estate firm Savills to shop it around. Just don't expect a bargain. While the asking price is under wraps, the last sale, involving RFR and the now-insolvent Signa, closed at a fire-sale $151 million, down from a staggering $800 million in 2008. Of course, whoever takes the keys will still owe Cooper Union $32 million annually in rent, rising to $41 million by 2028. Pocket change! Built as a 'monument to me' by auto tycoon Walter P. Chrysler, the 77-story tower has been everything from a Depression-era office oasis to a backdrop in Sex and the City and Men in Black 3. Today, it's 100% leased on paper. But behind the stainless steel gargoyles and red Moroccan marble lobby lie cracked ceilings, finicky elevators, pest problems and lobby tourists who try to sneak past the turnstiles. 'There's been times where we would get water from any of the fountains and it would just be completely brown,' one tenant told the New York Times last year. 'My office just ended up shipping giant bottles of water from Costco.' Savills' pitch? Potential. 'It's a great opportunity to reimagine what is the crown jewel of the New York City skyline,' said David Heller, an EVP at the firm. With rents at $65 to $79 per square foot—half the price of shiny neighbors like One Vanderbilt —the Chrysler is a relative steal. But prospective buyers should bring vision, cash and maybe a pest control contract. As Ruth Colp-Haber, a real estate broker, told the Times, 'It's a tale of two buildings.' One is an icon. The other needs a serious glow-up.
Wall Street Journal
14-05-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Paul A. Strassmann, World War II Resistance Fighter Turned Computer Guru, Dies at 96
When Paul A. Strassmann arrived as a 19-year-old immigrant in New York in 1948, his most notable work experience was as a guerrilla warrior who blew up train tracks to stall Nazi troop movements in Slovakia during World War II. In New York, Strassmann diversified his skills. He sold socks at a department store in Queens and studied civil engineering at Cooper Union. As a surveyor during summer breaks, he dodged scorpions in Israel and rattlesnakes in West Virginia. Later, while studying industrial management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Strassmann learned how to use a mainframe computer as part of a project to forecast traffic and estimate the number of toll collectors needed on the New Jersey Turnpike, providing enough data for a 600-page thesis.
