Epstein-linked resignations spread across US corporate elite

A ritual is playing out again in corporate America: Jeffrey Epstein’s name resurfaces, and boardrooms suddenly discover a moral spine. According to Der Spiegel, a growing list of US business figures and executives are resigning or being pushed out as older ties to Epstein are re-litigated—spanning big finance and hospitality, and reaching into tech.

Less “new information” than “new incentives.” Epstein’s network was never a secret to anyone with a calendar, a private jet terminal, or a taste for donor dinners. What changes is the internal risk calculus: once a name becomes radioactive, companies treat reputational exposure the way banks treat a bad loan—mark it down, isolate it, and make someone else carry the write-off.

Der Spiegel describes how the fallout is hitting multiple sectors, including Goldman Sachs and Hyatt, and even touches the broader tech ecosystem. The interesting question is not why executives step down when the headlines turn, but why institutions so often claim surprise. Large organizations have compliance departments, external counsel, and “know your customer” procedures that can reconstruct a counterparty’s life story down to a high-school yearbook photo—when they feel like it.

That’s the part worth interrogating: due diligence is not a neutral process; it is a budget line item, deployed selectively. When a relationship is profitable, ambiguity is tolerated and paperwork is “in progress.” When it becomes costly, the same organization can suddenly find documentation, timelines, and standards.

This turns moral panic into a compliance mechanism: reputational scandals become an internal enforcement tool that substitutes for genuine transparency about how power networks operate. It is easier to sacrifice individuals—one resignation at a time—than to publish a clear map of the business relationships that were built, maintained, and monetized in plain sight.

The point is not that corporations are uniquely hypocritical—hypocrisy is a universal human resource. It’s that centralized institutions, public or private, will always optimize for self-preservation. They will not voluntarily disclose the real structure of their networks unless forced by competition, litigation discovery, or whistleblowers. And even then, they will try to frame it as an isolated failure of “a few bad apples,” rather than the predictable outcome of opaque elite ecosystems.

Epstein’s utility, years after his death, is that he provides a convenient moral storyline: a villain, a purge, a cleansing. What it rarely delivers is the one thing markets and citizens actually need—accountability in the form of verifiable records: who did business with whom, under what terms, with which intermediaries, and what internal controls signed off.

Until that becomes the standard, corporate “ethics” will remain what it often is: a PR function with an HR enforcement arm.