Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board

The thing to understand about Summers is that he is basically the guy that charted the course to where America is today.

Enormously influential, he provided the intellectual gravitas as well as the raw policymaking muscle for a version of the US economy that was financialized, globalized, and monopolized.

If you're broke in 2025, Larry Summers probably had something to do with it.

Anything that will knock this guy down many many pegs is worthwhile imo.

I don't think anybody knew the extent of relationships with Epstein that were revealed when 20k email messages were dumped onto the world.

I have long been a hater of Summers, but had no indication that he was involved with Epstein like this. I could understand others at Harvard not knowing, unless they had access to Summers' personal email somehow.

Chomsky, another person who I have long hated (for setting back linguistics with his extreme bullying, the dominance of bad theory, and the resistance to actually studying languages before they go extinct, etc etc etc). And though I knew there was some connection to Epstein, as many intellectuals had connections to him, I had no idea it was to that extent.

All this is to say that even opponents of Epstein's confidants didn't know the extent of connection, and I'm not surprised that others are Harvard didn't know.

Better to be _seen_ to be doing something later, than to have it pointed out.

> It's also telling that the NYT is the only major outlet to consistently be reticent to state unequivocally that Epstein killed himself. Always said "found to have committed suicide."

Nonsense. "...Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide... [0] "...disgraced financier who died by suicide...[1] etc.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/us/politics/trump-epstein... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/us/politics/trump-epstein...

> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.

What planet do you live on?? I don't see any blowback against Trump himself from MAGA followers. It's always "he's getting bad advice", or they blame his sycophants like Bondi. If MAGA demanded accountability from Trump they seemed to be totally fine when he was caught boasting on tape of committing sexual assault.

> Trump had to finally buck the conspiracy theories of his evil, ignorant MAGA followers and admit that there was absolutely nothing to see and nothing interesting about the Epstein case and it's actually silly that you would think there was.

Didn't Bondi say there was thousands of hours of video of sex abuse? Was that made up?

> Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.

This doesn't accord with experience. MAGA is notorious for rationalizing anything Trump says or does.

The uniparty is a rotten, spiraling race to the bottom.

Isn’t NYT complicit and sat on a lot of Epstein files before the 2016 election.

Thank you for that tldr. Wow

Parent post is being metaphorical. In this case you can read 'many crimes' as 'many incredibly, unbelievably stupid decisions'. Hope that helps

Sounds more like incompetence.

I know we're never going to fix this problem, but it's depressing how we seem to have made zero or negative progress on it.

I think this is a side effect of having "paid law enforcement", it's not that the cops are bad, but their bosses are. The people who fund the law enforcement are ultimately at the mercy of the "rich and powerful" in some way or another, so basically people of a certain status get a pass.

It might look different if tax payers funded Law enforcement via different means, but it would never be allowed to happen, by,,,the elites.

Don't get me started on Trump

According to wikipedia:

> Summers's ties to Epstein reportedly began "a number of years...before Summers became Harvard's president and even before he was the Secretary of the Treasury."[59] Flight records introduced as evidence in the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell show that Summers flew on Jeffrey Epstein's private plane on at least four occasions, including once in 1998 when Summers was United States Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and at least three times while Harvard president.

And on the wikipedia page of Summers' wife:

> In an email to Epstein released in 2025 by the House Oversight Committee, New mentioned a recorded but unreleased episode of Poetry in America featuring Woody Allen, who was introduced to New by Epstein. In an email to Epstein, New mentioned she would reread Lolita (a book Epstein was known to have by his bedside) and, separately, recommended he read My Ántonia by Willa Cather, describing both as stories of 'a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl[20][21].

I recently listened to a podcast about Robert Maxwell[0], the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and in the second part of the podcast they went into great detail about Maxwell's publishing empire and how he apparently started the modern academic publishing industry as we know it.

It seems like Epstein learned from Maxwell's father the technique of finding academics who have desirable resources whether they be intellectual or social and then cultivating relationships with them by offering them what they always wanted but never felt they had be it academic recognition from peers in the form of positions at journals or conferences or dates/sex with young beautiful women and/or girls.

Attention from peers and women/girls is like a kryptonite to nerds like Larry Summers, his wife, or Marvin Minsky and Epstein was able to parlay that influence on these nerds to influence the wealthy and powerful.

But the question of how Summers got into the position that he found himself in still remains. You listen to the man speak and he isn't very smart. He continued a personal relationship with a convicted pedophile and sought dating advice from this person. The more you dig into this Summers guy and his wife the more you realize they're just... dumb.

As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?

[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/part-one-robert-maxwel...

He just supported the status quo. Look how much money he lost during the 2008 crisis.

Summers is just weather vane for current economic thinking. He's not a particularly brilliant at anything.

When has he been right about economics?

Sounds like you might have bought into some baseless PR.

I mean that's the point -- blackmail powerful and influential people to do his bidding.

That his madam (Ghislane) was the daughter of the guy who got Israel nukes and had some deeeeep ties to the Mossad is no surprise. FWIW said guy also had ties to UK Intelligence and the KGB, and he died mysteriously on a boat in the middle of nowhere.

> I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek.

Even his defense of it was not that an argument that it was tongue-in-cheek. His defense is that it was an attempt (apparently by illustrating problems with the apparent logic of the existing draft) to get his staff to clarify the economic logic in a draft report.

I read the memo. Maybe just me, but I don't see any indication that it was tongue in cheek.

That’s what he claimed it is, but I don’t buy it. I’m a big fan of satire and deadpan humor, and that’s just not what this is- the tone is serious, and he put a lot of thought in how to argue the point. Monsters exist, and this guy is one.

What’s the joke?

And yet that's exactly what he and his ilk have been doing ever since western countries began to demand workers' rights and environmental protections.

I'd only entertain the possibility that it was tongue-in-cheek if it came from someone critical of the World Bank and laissez-faire economics in general, for instance Joseph Stiglitz, who has also been chief economist at the World Bank and was critical of it. But if you're fine with structural adjustment – which many see as basically tear-down-orphanage-to-build-mall – you don't get to make that kind of jokes. It's too close to home.

Summers very often does this sort of earnest "kidding on the square" and he's quite proud of it, which was revealed extensively in the Epstein emails. Summers earnestly believes that the villain has very good reasons to tear down the orphanage, and will defend them in whatever way he can in polite society.

It was tongue-in-cheek, but the cheek belonged to an underaged girl.

He was literally part of a ring of rich and powerful pedophiles who trafficked underage women.

Being familiar with economist jargon, this looks like a joke.

Would you accept 0 pollution if it meant you had no electricity, electronic devices, or access to transportation? All of those things create pollution.

The /s was supposed to be implied.

Jonathan Swift was a writer and known satirist with publicly known views that were opposite to the absurdist views expressed in his famous satire.

> And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.

If you're going to engage in satire, its best the satire be obvious.

I believe there are capitalist economist types who believe what Summers wrote unironically.

Most notable about that is the implied confession that he was lying in his original formulation, which was that there was more variability in male intelligence than female intelligence (higher highs, lower lows). In fact, his private undisclosed belief was simply that women were inferior.

I remember brouhaha a whole bunch of pundits and thinkers defending him against evil feminists. On the grounds of intelectual curiosity and rational thinking.

Hey, turns out the dude trades "how to flirt with women in workplace whem they do presentation" advice with literal child abuse sex ring leader.

Surely he could not possibly be sexist, nah.

It was woman who was presenting her scientific work. Just to clarify the situation. I dont think these events are supposed to be about getting laid.

It was not the "fair play in bar" kind of situation at all.

Fully aware of the evolutionary forces that make men act stupid and think women more attractive than them want to jump their bones.

It doesn’t make it any less grotesque though. What I was really commenting on is the men in positions of power who think that that power is enough to get them laid. Nope. Turns out that women are attracted to... can you believe it? LOOKS!

But then you see them fumbling around like this doofus. He doesn't even know what the hell he’s doing. It’s sad.

He has no game.

> "It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship"

Supporting background:

> "Summers went on to describe what he saw as his “best shot”: that the woman finds him “invaluable and interesting” and concludes “she can’t have it without romance / sex.”

> "Throughout June, Summers fed Epstein updates about the woman’s workload and continued contact. Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep her in what he called a “forced holding pattern.”"

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/17/summers-epstei...

It's a big club, and we ain't in it.

> It's a bullshit world we're living in, but I guess it's always been the same?

> It seems for the wealthy, raping children is an acceptable pastime and we're just supposed to accept that it's ok?

This category of malcontent (about out-of-touch elites engaging in all sorts of depraved perversions while the poor starved) at Versailles eventually caused most of the former to lose their heads during the French Revolution.

The smart ones know that they need to keep up appearances, the dumb ones behave like they will never face consequences.

By most metrics, it's almost always been worse. But that doesn't make the modern era suck any less.

"The big thieves hang the little thieves"

You are entitled to your opinion and they theirs.

I assume that someone begining a sentence that way is implying "It is interesting to me that…" and I cut them some slack.

It's interesting to me because how the hell did he think this was going to end? "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't work in the court of public opinion. So, if one was even peripherally associated with Epstein, it would seem like that would be a hell of a liability.

On a side note, did Epstein have employees on his sex island and what happened to them?

What the actual fuck logic is this?

I grinded fairly well enough in my 20s, just as many other people I know who did. We're much better off than 99.99% of the world. That doesn't make us think of sexually abusing children and adolescents one bit because we need to "flush that shit out of our system" and "recapture our lost youth". I have better ways of recapturing my lost youth, by computer games, more time for hobbies and fucking closer to my age like rabbits.

PS:- being in the upper echelon does mean you have a somewhat easier access to the circles that engage in these vile activities, and yes you'll be completely excluded if you say no to them. Many are okay with that, while those who aren't are the ones in the files.

> they were genuinely crazy racists, but they were actual early leaders of one of our two major political parties

Why not both?

Unfortunately, the racist worldview on display in those chats is extremely widespread- and you are in a uniquely small privileged group if you’re neither on the receiving or delivering end.

A lot of middle class and wealthy people are victims of trauma. If you grow up in a house with violently racist and hateful authoritarian parents you will be deeply traumatized, and likely end up just like your parents. Wealth does not protect people from emotional trauma.

Most people are followers whose belief systems are spoon fed to them by the largest village willing to accept them. Understanding cult psychology and the agendas of the people driving the bus is typically enough to understand their worldviews and subsequent behavior. That’s just my gut read on it..

27 years younger.

She is approximately 43 (college grad '04) and he is 70.

The text messages were 6 years ago.

Has the name of the woman come out? She's not directly named in their communications.

Agreed, but continued communication after he was found guilty of sex crimes is definitely a bright red flag.

An example of one of the typical meetings Epstein was able to finagle with Summers:

> this week, thiel, summers,bill burns, gordon brown, jagland, ( council of europe and nobel chairman ). mongolia pres , hardeep puree ( india), boris ( gates). jabor ( qatar). sultan ( dubai, ), kosslyn ( harvard), leon black, woody. you are a welcome guest at any.....also if you >think there are interesting people in town, everyone here for climate summit, clinton ,security council, holy shit im on for next 30 minutes

https://searchepsteinfiles.com/file/text/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028...

He also regularly provided research funding for universities.

he didn't have any power or ability to fix anything that didn't involve trafficking young girls

he can "fix" you up with a teenager who will give you a private "massage"

> Epstein seemed to be a power broker and a political fixer. If so...

If so we are getting a window into a world we rarely see. For some of us this is confirming our priors, for others this will be profoundly shocking.

Why not? He was a part of a pretty radioactive network of people. I doubt that he just happened to hang with Epstein by mere coincidence, and it does raise some questions about how much Sheryl knew about it.

Pretty helpful person to have on your board if you are aiming (as Sarah Friar, OpenAI CFO, mentioned) to get the government to guarantee $100B - $1T in infrastructure loans.

He was terrible at 2 out of three of those jobs. He ruined many people's lives. He was corrupt as hell. He shouldn't be welcome in polite society.. well I guess Epstein's inner circle isn't exactly polite society.

Echoes of Kissinger on Theranos' board (and many other examples, no doubt).

“This whole time” - didn’t the OpenAI board get cleaned out after they failed to fire Sam?

Next up will be selling of shares to finance defense teams

Is that not what is happening?

I got some of basic facts very wrong; I've removed that error.

>We in western democracies used to regard with disdain those corrupt, ridiculous leadership figures in so-called banana republics and third-world dictatorships, with their openly corrupt dealings and amoral excesses.

Not that I wholly disagree, but in the interests of robust conversation, I feel compelled to ask:

When?

> In a way it's comforting to know those people who hold these positions, with distinguished careers and supposedly made of better stuff than us mere mortals, are in fact just a bunch of miserable weasels, a-holes and sycophants.

There's nothing that quite makes me feel like humanity has undergone speciation than the fact that this STILL HAS TO BE FUCKING SPELLED OUT FOR PEOPLE.

Hero worship is sycophancy of the highest order. Ugh, and I know you're so right.

Bill Clinton hasn’t been relevant in politics for like twenty years. Nobody on the left thinks about or cares about him.

> its most valuable elder statesman

That's Barack Obama. Among other things, he's not 80 and still has the vigor of youth. Clinton is just old at this point.

Pretty sure Obama is the MVES of the Democratic party.

As someone who voted for Bill Clinton. If Bill Clinton is implicated, then he needs to suffer for it.

I think the real question is why didn't the Biden administration release the files. How many very powerful people left and right are in there?

> Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman?

Huh? Bill Clinton has been a relatively invisible ex-president compared to the other modern ones (aka Carter & Obama, Biden hasn't been gone long enough for data).

Perhaps that's because he didn't want to overshadow Hillary, but it's at least partly because of the Lewinsky affair.

Thank you for the context! I genuinely didn’t know anything about this person until recently