Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board
79 comments
·November 19, 2025lvl155
Can’t get over the fact that Sheryl Sandberg was Larry’s protege all those years ago.
drivingmenuts
It’s interesting that only now he is stepping back now that he’s been found out. It demonstrates that it’s not about ethics or morals, but about publicity and damage control.
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giantfrog
You can't even be friends with a notorious pedophile and sex trafficker anymore without the woke cancel culture mob coming after you...
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CodingJeebus
You should really Google some of the emails he wrote to Epstein. Summers wasn't just friends with Epstein, he was Epstein's padawan.
ivraatiems
I think you missed the sarcasm in the original post ;)
acdha
Poe’s law applies too much these days. I’ve tried to get out of the habit of leaving jokes ambiguous like that because it’s just too easy to trip readers up, especially when not everyone has native level awareness of idioms or social context.
CodingJeebus
ah crap, my gullibility strikes again
ZeroConcerns
Well, good to see Hahhvuhhhd is not above the British monarchy when it comes to eventually ejecting sex pests! A low bar to clear, but well done!
Now, just for certain ex-Brit colonies to follow their example! Quick... who can think of a popular leader who is, ehhhm, quite intricately linked to the same, ehh, gentleman with pretty specific tastes?
Anyone?
ciconia
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.
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.
Now that the moral posturing of the west is unraveling, the question is really what comes next. Fukuyama talked about western liberal democracy being the "end of history", but it is more and more evident that this is a system ripe for disruption.
pessimizer
And, to be less coy, how is the opposition party the one that treats Bill Clinton as its most valuable elder statesman? It's somehow Epstein all the way down. Glad I'm a left-wing Chomskyite, cynical about all of those corrupt, elite institutions. Wait...
stouset
Bill Clinton hasn’t been relevant in politics for like twenty years. Nobody on the left thinks about or cares about him.
ZeroConcerns
He's still extremely relevant, if only to derail discussions as demonstrated here. I'm waiting for someone to bring up Al Franken!
runako
> 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.
WhyOhWhyQ
Pretty sure Obama is the MVES of the Democratic party.
fsckboy
Obama was the hothouse flower of the Democrat party that Bill Clinton singlehandedly wrought. No Bill Clinton, no Barack Obama. Before Bill Clinton, here's what the NYTimes (left wing though not as far left as now, but i.e. sympathetic) had to say about the field of Democrat candidates for president:
"The strongest and saddest impression this viewer took away from the collective appearance of the Democratic Presidential candidates on national television was that Snow White was missing, while the Seven Dwarfs prattled on." https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/04/opinion/in-the-nation-the...
and you saw similar dynamics at play in the most recent series of elections. Biden was rammed into the nomination in 2020 because non of the field of candidates had a broad enough base of support. On the other side, Trump did what Clinton did, reshaped his party in his own image.
benhill70
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?
KerrAvon
tl;dr: Because there were ongoing investigations (which was true) and it's generally considered bad to release your evidence before trial, or something like that, IANAL.
This will also be Trump's (false) reason for not releasing them.
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bryanlarsen
> 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.
jalapenof
[dead]
squillion
Let's not forget that time he advocated for dumping toxic waste in poor countries.
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
llbbdd
I've never seen this before but I'm surprised anyone ever thought in good faith it wasn't tongue-in-cheek. I think one would have to have a cartoon-villain-tears-down-orphanage-to-build-mall view of how people work to not read the dripping tone in this memo.
sapphicsnail
He was literally part of a ring of rich and powerful pedophiles who trafficked underage women.
llbbdd
Evil people can make jokes too, and mimicking the formal tone of an official document is a bit as old as time.
squillion
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.
hyperman1
Wow. That text is wild! Another excerpt:
I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.recursive
The /s was supposed to be implied.
rhcom2
And Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating children.
burkaman
He also famously gave a speech declaring that one of the reasons women were underrepresented in science and engineering faculty positions was "issues of intrinsic aptitude". - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/science-jan-june05-summ...
It was 20 years ago but he has not changed his views, in one of his emails to Epstein (in 2017) he "observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population..."
watwut
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.
shkkmo
To me that memo is pretty clearly a sacarstic version of reductio ad absurdum.
add-sub-mul-div
Actual unedited title: "Larry Summers resigns from OpenAI board after release of emails with Epstein"
foobarian
Title as interpreted by me: "Larry Summers was on the OpenAI board this whole time"
rchaud
It might have gotten flagged as political content if the full title was used.
pton_xd
Reid Hoffman already resigned so I guess, kudos to him for getting ahead of the curve!
johnwheeler
I saw the email correspondence between him and Epstein. The sense that I got is he's pursuing some young girl half his age. And he actually thinks that she is attracted to him. Powerful, ugly men are so stupid sometimes.
pton_xd
That's a charitable take. It was them joking about how to leverage his power to pressure her into a relationship. Also the woman's dad is the founding president of some major Chinese bank (AIIB) that he was cozying up to.
Also a reminder, he was texting with Epstein up until the day before his arrest in 2019. Well past the point where Epstein was basically a meme for child abuse. Absolutely horrifying.
simianwords
Sorry no. These are not so bad. What, he wants to get with a girl who he has "power" over? That's it? This should not be considered bad enough to step down from roles.
Women have agency to accept and deny advances.
runako
He consulted with the most notorious child sex trafficker of modern times on his plan to use the power of his position to coerce a young woman into sex.
In those consultations, he used a racial slur to refer to the young woman.
There are other contrary positions you can take, it doesn't have to be that this was okay.
foobarian
Maybe not a bad thing for another reason: assuming most powerful men are up to these kinds of shenanigans, this filters out for those who are not clever enough to keep it under wraps. Sounds like a useful job skill for the positions these kinds of people might need to handle.
giraffe_lady
When you got up this morning did you know that this is the fight you would be taking up today? It's not too late man just delete it and go back to bed, try a fresh start.
KerrAvon
Nope. Read the emails before discussing, please.
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koolba
In related news, Harvard is also launching its own investigation into its former president Summers: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/11/19/harvard-opens-...
pessimizer
MIT and NYT need to get back on it, too. Lots of people still not feeling any consequences, much like Epstein during life. The girls were threatened more than he ever was (and still are.)
It seems like the NYT was cackling in glee just a couple months ago, saying that even 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. Nice that MAGA demands accountability from Trump in a way Democrats don't from their leaders.
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." Somebody there with editorial veto control knows that flimsy story isn't going to last forever. Even if he hadn't been made cellmates with an insane strangler murder cop with nothing to lose, hadn't said that the "suicide attempt" was insane murder cop trying to kill him, and was taken off suicide watch one day after that "suicide attempt."
The night Jeffrey Epstein claimed his cellmate tried to kill him, CBS News 2025/09/22
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jeffrey-epstein-claimed-cellmat...
Nicholas Tartaglione
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/crime/2019/09/23/feds-how-n...
[edit: re Tartaglione, who never had the slightest chance of ever getting out of prison. Has anybody checked if the financial situation of his family changed for the better since the incident?]
Teever
There's an interesting list of criticisms about Larry Summers here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15320922
Based on an interview that I've seen of him a few years ago and these emails between him and Epstein he seems kind of... not smart?
It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
GolfPopper
Telling people in power what they want to hear.
I listened to an interview with Summers in the run-up to the 2007-8 financial crisis, and what he was doing was obvious to any grade school student who has ever witnessed someone else sucking up to an authority figure.
profsummergig
Someone (maybe Charlie Munger) said that the presence of a woman he has lust for reduces a man's IQ by 20 points.
Seems anecdotally true.
Finnucane
The bond deal he made to pay for Harvard's Allston campus expansion blew up in the crash and nearly bankrupted the university. It takes a special kind of genius to bankrupt Harvard.
JKCalhoun
What do you mean? I assumed he was cozied up to by the likes of Epstein because he had already ascended the ladder.
I see, because you think he's "not smart"… Yeah, I think "smart" and "makes smart choices" are two different things.
Teever
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...
lapcat
> It raises a really interesting question which is how do people like him climb so high up the ladder?
The real world is not a meritocracy. Awful, greedy, immoral people protect and promote each other. They also have an insatiable appetite for power, status, and wealth. You're rewarded for playing the game, for lying, and especially for keeping terrible secrets.
add-sub-mul-div
He's a pretty terrible asshole, but being dumb isn't the same thing as being wrong about economics. I'm not dumb, but I shouldn't be trusted to make economy-level decisions. Humility is underrated.
benhill70
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.
Finnucane
When has he been right about economics?
jmyeet
I cannot overstate the potential significance of what's going on in Congress currently and it has global implications.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sit at the nexus of an international pedophile ring that threatens to bring down many billionaires and even some governments. There is a concerted effort to prevent the release of this information and we're far from done yet.
A lot of effort was made by the administration to prevent the discharge petition reaching 218 signatures. For anyone unfamiliar with how the House of Representatives works, the majority party chooses the Speaker and the Speaker decides what bills get a vote. But if a majority of the 435 representatives (so 218) want the House to have a vote, there's a procedure called a discharge petition. If it gets 218 signatures, the Speaker has to schedule a vote within a week or so (I forget the exact time line).
The Speaker Mike Johnson went so far as basically putting the House in recess for 8+ weeks to avoid this happening. He avoided wearing in an Arizona congresswoman for that same period because she was going to be the 218th signature. The government was literally suspended to avoid this outcome.
Then the Speaker changed tactics to try to pass the bill with a procedure called "unaminous consent". Basically, if no House member objects, the bill passes. Why would he do this? To avoid having votes on the record. This was good politics to force a role call.
The Speaker continues to play defense here because carve outs were added to the bill to exempt files for "national security" reasons and anything under active investigation. That's brazen obstruction and the least surprising thing is that the president announced an investigation this week. It's explicitly to prevent the release of some evidence. Make no mistake.
It's not unique to this administration either. the previous administration sat on all of this for 4 years doing absolutely nothing.
Where doe sthis lead? Foreign governments and intelligence agencies who were not only aware of what was going on but they (allegedly) actively benefit from and participated in this trafficking ring to get access to and/or blackmail powerful people. That's the "national security" interest.
As many of us are aware by now, Ghislaine Maxwell's father was the British media mogul Robert Maxwell who was a Mossad asset and got a state funeral in israel for his contributions to the state of Israel going back to suplying militia wth weapons in World War Two that were ultimately used for ethnic cleasning. And how did Maxwell die? He mysteriously fell off his own boat and drowned, his body being found the next day I believe over a hundred miles away somehow.
If this stuff gets out, many heads will roll in government, in business and in prestigious colleges. Look no further than one Alan Dershowitz. Harvard in particular has unclean hands and is elbow deep in all of this. And certainly whatever you do don't look into how Kimble Musk met one of his "girlfriends".
This is only the beginning.
jrochkind1
The likely most damning/embaressing thing that has led to Summers resignations -- being a powerful 65-year-old man trying to pressure a 37-year-old mentee into having sex/relationship with you -- is considered (by me too) icky and unethical and an abuse of power, undoubtedly a violation of many ethics codes and depending on how it's done possibly some laws -- but is not actually anything to do with pedophilia or child abuse at all.
i know we like expanding the categories of all sins and then only refering to things by category name without the specifics, but.
sys32768
I doubt it. Probably two or three people like him will step down for being associated.
I suspect the most damning evidence was atomized and very little remains outside of the victims' testimonies.
frankfrank13
Alternatively, there is no justice, and even the truth is lost to partisan politics. I have a strange feeling this benefits foreign intelligence, not harms it. Mossad, for example, knows who slipped through the cracks. Knows how much worse the "truth" is beyond the code names and vague emails. Now they have more power, not less.
jmyeet
This kind of thing can only exist in a climate of apathy and nihilism. The powerful want you to think the situation is hopeless and nothing will change. But remember this: at no point in history has a steady state been maintained for significant periods of time. Ever.
We are at a dangerous point in history. I personally believe that inequality is inevitably going to end in violence and we're beyuond the point of avoiding this with electoral politics. People are struggling to eat and survive at a time where we'll likely mint our first trillionaire in our lifetimes. This simply can't continue.
I'm personally for outing wealthy and powerful pedophiles who are meaningfully making all of our lives worse to accrue completely unnecessary extra wealth.
SilverElfin
This whole Epstein thing feels like a distraction. Yes, the people involved are reprehensible and deserve consequences. But why is this such a big focus for some people on the left and the right (apart from an opportunity to attack their political opponents)? Consider that even if Epstein had 1000 victims, there are still far larger-scale problems the country is facing that we aren’t spending the same time on.
It’s not enough to say “we can do more than one thing” - our attention is limited. And instead of those bigger issues dominating our conversation and political will, we’re focused on the Epstein issue. I also seriously doubt something will come of it. I expect that when anything is eventually released, it may have been selectively redacted or withheld, and any convictions will take years if they happen at all.
Meanwhile, vile politicians like MTG are latching onto this fervor and using it to push their own relevance and position on the American political stage. In her case, it’s a desperate play to disown her past of “Jewish space lasers”, QAnon, pizzagate, and all of that. But the naive public is eating this up. And they’re using what is a minor issue to hitch themselves onto otherwise harmful people.
e584
The story goes way beyond the abuse itself, they were videotaping everything to black mail other rich people and even world leaders... it's one of the biggest scandals in American history and it's about more than Epstein alone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/technology/larry-summers-..., https://archive.ph/ASfq6