LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman said he wishes he’d known a little more before agreeing to spend a night on Jeffrey Epstein‘s island.
On the Dec. 1 episode of Eric Newcomer’s podcast, Hoffman said that he visited the island as part of his fundraising work for the MIT Foundation and was told the visit would make Epstein more likely to donate to MIT.
“Note to self: Google before going,” Hoffman said on the podcast. He said he stayed on the island for one night, and that there was a pool, a “bunch of guest rooms,” and a courtyard.
Hoffman has maintained that he only interacted with Epstein, whose 2019 death while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges was ruled a suicide, through his work fundraising for the MIT Media Lab. On the “Newcomer” podcast, he called Epstein a “masterful networker,” and recalled a 2015 dinner he hosted for an MIT researcher in Palo Alto, California.
Hoffman said that Joi Ito, former director of the MIT Media Lab, asked him if Epstein could attend the dinner, which was also attended by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Similar to his visit to the island, Hoffman said he was later told that the financier had said he was more likely to donate if he attended the dinner.
“He’s kind of going through the network, trying to meet people and so forth,” Hoffman said on the podcast. Hoffman also reiterated previous apologies for his involvement with Epstein.
In 2019, a spokesperson for Zuckerberg confirmed the dinner to Business Insider and said it was the only time the Facebook cofounder met Epstein. A spokesperson for Musk also confirmed the Tesla CEO’s attendance.
In a 2019 email to Axios, Hoffman acknowledged multiple interactions with Epstein, which he said were strictly for fundraising purposes, and said he had been told MIT had vetted and approved the convicted sex offender’s participation. He said in the email he was “deeply regretful” of the involvement.
“I went and kind of made a, you know, very public apology because it was like, okay I realized this and I’d already at that point had ramped down connection with him, right, to like no meetings and all the rest of the stuff, under any context,” Hoffman said on the podcast. “And I think he still would drop me an email every so often and say, ‘Hey, can we get on the phone?’ I say, ‘Oh, maybe sometime,’ which is, you know, code for never, right?”
Hoffman said that justice for the late pedophile’s victims is important, and urged the government to release, unredacted, “every single piece of intel that they have about Epstein.”
In November, President Donald Trump signed a bill that will release the Department of Justice’s files on Epstein after months of pressure from Congress, including some fellow Republicans. The department has until Saturday, December 19, to comply with the order.
Trump has also ordered the DOJ to investigate Hoffman, along with other individuals he views as political enemies, including former President Bill Clinton and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, over their ties to Epstein.
Hoffman, a billionaire and major Democratic donor, has previously said that he had to hire security after Musk fueled conspiracy theories about his relationship with Epstein.
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