February 4, 2026 | Epstein and the Shrinking Trust Horizon

Let’s start with Bill Gates, because he’s one of the more baffling characters in the Epstein drama. I have some liberal friends, and without exception, they think Gates is a good man. A typical conversation goes like this:

Me: You know Bill Gates is buying up millions of acres of farmland, right?

Liberal friend: He’ll protect it from developers. I think that’s great.

Me: No, that’s not what he’s…never mind.

Gates is also a mega-nerd who is hard to picture molesting anyone, let alone hot teenage girls.

And yet:

(Daily Mail) – Bill Gates slept with Russian girls, got a sexually-transmitted disease and asked for antibiotics to slip to his then-wife Melinda, extraordinary new Jeffrey Epstein files from the Department of Justice allege.

Washing my hands and moving on:

Elon Musk Not Doing Well After Epstein Files Reveal

(futurism) – It’s true that Musk did push for the release of the Epstein files, and even fell out with president Donald Trump over the issue. But the emails clearly show that Musk was, at least at some point, in regular correspondence with Epstein. And not only did he accept Epstein’s invitations on numerous occasions, but sometimes even asked to be invited. He also asked about parties. “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Musk emailed Epstein in 2012.

The desperation only got more palpable as the posts went on. Musk responded to a screenshot of news headlines about his newly revealed ties to Epstein — none of which were all that sensationalized — with his favorite refrain that “Legacy media lies relentlessly.”

But as his replies continued to fill up with screenshots of the emails, Musk tried a new defense: that he was so good with “young women” that he had no reason to solicit the services of the billionaire child sex offender.

“If I actually wanted to spend my time partying with young women, it would be trivial for me to do so without the help of a creepy loser like Epstein,” Musk fumed, before boasting about his incredible mental capacity. “And I would still have 99% of my mind available to think about other things. But I don’t.” (X users pointed out a tweet Musk made in 2022 lamenting that he hadn’t “had sex in ages (sigh).”)

Longevity doctor Peter Attia faces backlash over comments in Epstein files

(NBC) – Peter Attia, the celebrity doctor who helped popularize the longevity craze, has publicly apologized as he faces a growing backlash following the release of email exchanges he had with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Attia’s name appears frequently in the latest batch of Epstein files, which the Justice Department released Friday. The two exchanged jokes, scheduled times to meet and discussed Epstein’s health via email in the mid-2010s, with Epstein saying at one point that he could pay to be Attia’s client.

“You the biggest problem with becoming friends with you?” Attia wrote in June 2015. “The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul…”

In a message in February 2016, Attia made a crude joke that female genitalia was “low carb.”

The List Goes On…

See here for one media outlet’s current tally: A list of powerful men named in the Epstein files, from Elon Musk to former Prince Andrew

But by the time this multi-million-page data dump is finished, the “big-name perv” list will be well into the hundreds.

And if future disclosures are like the current ones, the real shock won’t be that aristocrats tend to ignore societal norms (duh), but that most of these people are morons. In their private lives, they lack both empathy and basic manners, and when thwarted behave like toddlers.

Which leads us to the point of this post:

These Guys Are Running Health Care, Politics, and Money

Much of our lives — including the food we eat, the medicines we take, and the investments we rely on for retirement — are dominated by the people in the Epstein files. Should we trust anything they’ve touched? Obviously not. So…

Globalization? Over.

Pharmaceuticals? Replaced by diet and exercise.

Fiat currencies? Back on a gold standard within the decade.

The lesson: Ignore the current gold/silver volatility and just keep stacking. These people aren’t done trashing the world.

John Rubino February 4th, 2026

Posted In: John Rubino Substack

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