Seven years ago today, Jeffrey Epstein was found hanging in a Manhattan jail, and the usual reactions to a sudden, violent death were reversed.

It was the people who abhorred the convicted sex offender — his victims and all who sympathized with them — who were stricken with sadness and anger. Now, they feared, the full truth about this man and his odious life would never come out.

It was Epstein’s friends and far-reaching galaxy of influential associates who surely allowed themselves a quiet moment of relief back in 2019. Now, they had reason to hope, the full truth about this man and his odious life would never come out.

The anniversary of Epstein’s demise is occasion to note two paradoxes that have emerged over those seven years — and most vividly in recent months, as it has become clear Epstein was a more consequential figure, and more emblematic of a sordid age, even than we knew at the time. Both paradoxes come courtesy, however grudgingly or unintentionally, of Epstein’s one-time friend, President Donald Trump.

The first is the surprising degree to which the truth did indeed come out, and answers were not left hanging with Epstein in Cell 220 on the ninth floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Yes, there are important matters of detail that remain clouded by mystery. These include the precise details of how Epstein killed himself, in a supposedly secure facility, according to the official medical examiner’s conclusion (which some still doubt), as well as a full illumination of his relationship with Trump and why it apparently dissolved early in the 2000s. Many of the survivors of Epstein’s crimes also remain distraught and hungry for more answers.

But the nature of Epstein’s monstrously manipulative character, and the ease with which he ensnared some of the planet’s wealthiest and in many cases most accomplished people is now commonly understood — in a way that it almost certainly would not be if he had lived. Perhaps he would have reached a settlement with prosecutors, or gone to trial under rules of evidence focused narrowly on a few crimes rather than receiving scrutiny over the broad contours of his life. Any Epstein associates who exhaled in gratitude at his passing in 2019 had it exactly wrong — the ruin of reputations caused by this scandal was only beginning.

That we know the back-scratching and bawdy badinage, with cringe-inducing specificity, that was the essence of how Epstein nurtured his elite relationships is a gift to posterity. It comes of course because of the documentary goldmine of his massive trove of emails. These were released under an act of Congress, largely because important voices in the MAGA movement, later joined by Democrats, defied Trump’s reluctance and insisted they be released.

That gift to posterity as it happens, was central to the second paradox of the Epstein anniversary — and it is an uncomfortable one. At the time, his death looked like a cowardly end to a despicable life of con artistry and sexual predation that could mercifully soon be forgotten. Cowardly and despicable remain true. “Soon be forgotten” is not happening. Epstein’s life, it seems probable, will be known and studied and written about 100 years from now. He’s dead, but the narcissist in Epstein might perversely appreciate that his historical persona will outlive all but a few of his contemporaries’.

The primary reason is because his web of relationships, we now know, is deeply revealing of how an age that produced vast power and wealth became unhinged, at least in some elite precincts, from self-restraint, judgment, or simple decency.

Not everyone whose reputation was besmirched by disclosure of their Epstein interactions was an intimate of his, or necessarily knew the details of his criminal procurement and exploitation of underage girls. But in most instances that have come to light they knew of his reputation as a lothario who, as Trump said in 2002, liked women “on the younger side.” Just like Trump, many of them concluded this contributed, rather than detracted, from an appraisal that he was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” Likely in nearly every case these people were attracted to Epstein because of his wealth, his access to others with wealth, his airplanes and his island, and his self-fashioned aura as an intellectual savant who used his bespoke brain to make money in ways that ordinary mortals couldn’t understand.

If someone early in the 22nd century is curious about what the top levels of American life were like early in the 21st century, it will be hard to avert their gaze from someone whose career intersected in ways that echoed damagingly with two presidents (Trump and Clinton); royalty (the former Prince Andrew); the foremost technologist of the 20th century and the foremost philanthropist of the 21st (Bill Gates); a one-time prince of Wall Street (Jes Staley of JPMorgan Chase and later CEO of Barclays in the United Kingdom); a star of academia and government (former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers), and a long roster of the wealthiest people in the world (such as Epstein confidant Leon Black, the private-equity titan) as well as some of its most prominent intellectuals (like linguist Noam Chomsky, Nobel laureate and molecular biologist Richard Axel, and computer scientist and Unabomber victim David Gelernter).

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Weaknesses of the flesh, the bottle, and the purse are not a recent phenomenon. Nor will people studying this era a century from now be startled to learn that lust and greed can lure people to bad places. But there are three distinct signatures of the Epstein scandal that will surely cause them to wonder: What were those friends and associates of Epstein thinking?

A notable feature of Epstein emails is the intense hunger for connection revealed by many of the people caught up in the scandal. Recall that almost all of the famous examples involve people who already had amassed large achievements and presumably had lots of friends who did not have previous sex-crime convictions (as Epstein did from 2008 onward.) But they were hypnotized by Epstein’s flame even so.

Jes Staley, who traded emails with Epstein filled with suggestive references to women using Disney characters (“Say hi to Snow White”), in 2009 opened himself up to the man who would later destroy his career: “I owe you much. I appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound.” Summers was seeking dating advice from Epstein (Summers wanted to know what to do about a woman who was treating him as a “friend without benefits”) just before Epstein was arrested again in 2019. You might suppose that one benefit of being Bill Gates is that you would no longer be thirsty for anything. But that’s not the case. In 2011, he emailed a colleague about Epstein: “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me.” It definitely didn’t work for Melinda French Gates, who reportedly dissolved their marriage in part because of disgust with her husband’s intersection with the Epstein scandal.

Another signature of the Epstein files merits a nod to Hannah Arendt: the banality of creepishness. The notorious collection of tributes assembled for Epstein’s 50th birthday is a good example. These purported friends and high achievers toasted Epstein with page after page of double-entendres and chortling sexual references of the sort early adolescents might scribble in a middle-school yearbook. There was the apparent drawing from Trump (he denies it) of a naked woman with his name signed where pubic hair would be. Notably, at mid-life, there were not notes from people recalling the time they helped each other through the illness of a parent, or even the time they stayed up til 3 a.m. talking about politics and sports at an all-night diner. This is life at the top? The superficiality of Epstein and his horny, rich friends was a revelation.

One more reality unveiled by the Epstein files is arguably (without overdoing it) more appealing: The remarkable social fluidity reflected in the modern elite. In an earlier era, inherited social class was a powerful force — facilitating the careers of people to the manner born, but an infuriating limitation for many other talented people. Epstein’s circle included privileged kids like Staley, whose father was a CEO and who went to Bowdoin before Wall Street. But it also included Epstein’s most important patron, Leslie Wexner, the billionaire retail investor, who grew up as a middle-class son of a Russian immigrant and went to Ohio State. Epstein himself grew up near Coney Island and dropped out of college. It turns out modern social mores — which reward networking, scene-making and showy displays of wealth no matter whether new or old — are a more potent force than the previous generation’s old-chum country club culture. This was a phenomenon that had already been established earlier this century by the Bernie Madoff scandal.

What is true in 2026 that was not true in 2019 is that Jeffrey Epstein’s name is going to live in national memory for as long as people are curious about the Trump era. Those emails will find an audience for decades to come.

At this month’s NATO summit in Ankara, allies announced billions of dollars in new arms deals and reaffirmed their commitment to spend more on defense. European governments have made the pledge, and the money is real: European defense spending has doubled since 2019, and by 2030, European NATO member countries are projected to spend in excess of €800 billion a year, up €300 billion from 2025, with equipment spending alone nearly doubling.

But committing money is the easy part. The harder question is whether Europe’s defense industry can turn it into equipment fast enough to matter. Europe’s largest defense manufacturers’ order books now average more than five years for production, and some are closer to nine. Money is flowing in faster than industry can turn it into equipment. But a purchase order is not equipment that can be deployed on the ground and the air.

European countries have long duplicated capabilities rather than pooling them.

The bottleneck sits in the defense industrial system. Deterrence relies on the chain from funding to contracts, then through production, deployment into services, then rapid innovation in the field. Europe’s next goal comes after the spending promise. The continent fields six times as many weapons platforms as the United States, because countries have long duplicated capabilities rather than pooling them. Production ends up split across many small runs that never reach an efficient scale. Ukraine, under pressure, has shown how fast a defense system can move, adapting tactics in weeks and building drone detection networks from consumer electronics. Europe needs to catch up and then accelerate.

Four moves would help Europe accelerate.

The first is multi-speed procurement. Software-led systems such as drones and targeting improve in rapid cycles throughout their deployment and need procurement that can keep up. Israel’s Iron Dome started out as far less capable than it is today and improved continuously in service. European defense ministries have already set up high-speed procurement units with dedicated teams and greater risk tolerance. These need to become mainstream, rather than the exception.

Collaboration in procurement, maintenance and training brings costs down and delivery forward.

The second is military collaboration to reduce fragmentation. Collaboration in procurement, maintenance and training brings costs down and delivery forward. The Tempest project, where the U.K., Italy and Japan are jointly building a next-generation fighter, demonstrates the model: shared development costs that no single country could carry alone. Recent bilateral maritime agreements, and Romania’s use of EU funding to buy European while expanding production at home, show the same logic spreading.

The third is industrial consolidation, which is already underway and needs to move faster. Companies are driving it themselves. Airbus, Leonardo and Thales have agreed to merge their space divisions into a single joint venture with roughly €6.5 billion in revenue and 25,000 employees, and European defense mergers and acquisitions rose 35 percent year over year in the first half of 2025. McKinsey analysis finds that consolidation across key supply chain segments could unlock around €9 billion in annual synergies, more than the current equipment budgets of 24 of Europe’s 30 NATO members. The deepest opportunity sits below the big primes, among the thousands of tier two, three and four suppliers that still duplicate one another’s work. Europe can speed this up by harmonizing requirements, reducing national carve-outs and letting industry do the combining. Consolidation is only half the task. Europe also needs to build sheer capacity — more shipyards, more assembly lines, more of the physical plants that turn orders into hardware — and the capital to fund it. In several categories, Europe simply lacks enough places to build.

Real deterrence means difficult choices, and a public that understands the importance and the cost of security.

The fourth is regulatory unlocking. Full scale-up demands skilled workers retrained, accredited and security cleared from other industries; production sites with preapproved permitting; and alignment of export controls across European allies. These regulatory unlocks now need the same energy and focus as the funding commitment debate. 

Real deterrence means difficult choices, and a public that understands the importance and the cost of security. That conversation is only beginning in much of Europe. It must include the potential for “gray zone” cyber strikes on hospitals, arson at industrial sites, drones disrupting ports, undersea data cables cut — these have all occurred, but many citizens do not yet recognize this as having malicious intent.

The opportunity in getting it right is significant. McKinsey and GLOBSEC estimates indicate that every euro of spending on European-manufactured equipment generates two euros of revenue across the European supply chain, and an additional €165 billion a year in equipment spending could create up to 1.2 million jobs. The coming years will reveal how effectively Europe is able to scale up to protect its territory and citizens, and how much of the promised investment becomes lasting deterrence and European jobs. Getting there depends on the whole ecosystem — governments, industry and investors — moving together. Increased spending is important. Spending it effectively matters more.

Jonathan Dimson is a senior partner in McKinsey’s London office. Mikael Robertson is a senior partner in the Stockholm office.

Palantir is shifting profits from its European operations to the United States, allowing the Florida-based data analytics giant to pay minimal taxes in Europe, a new report finds.

The report by the U.K.-based Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research, a group partly funded by labor unions that researches corporate tax avoidance in an effort to win reform of global tax rules, found that Palantir’s European subsidiaries, which took in €440.5 million in annual revenue in 2024, report far smaller profit margins in Europe than in the U.S.

“Although a substantial part of Palantir’s revenue is realized in Europe, almost all of the pre-tax profits are funneled to the United States,” the report said.

Palantir pays no U.S. federal income tax because previous losses, tax credits, and R&D deductions offset its taxable income; and virtually no state income tax, with the exception of Maryland, which levies a digital services tax.

The profit gap between the U.S. and Europe is stark. In 2025, Palantir’s American business pocketed 47.7 cents in profit from every dollar of revenue — more than double the previous year’s 22.5 cents. Outside the U.S., the profit margin was just 6.3 percent. In some European subsidiaries, it fell to around 3 percent, according to the new report.

CICTAR argues that Palantir “intentionally and artificially” shrinks European profits — and therefore its European tax bills — to concentrate profits in the U.S. There is no claim in the report that such arrangements, often referred to as “profit shifting,” are illegal. Multinational companies often reduce reported profits by paying subsidiaries or other related entities for intellectual property, loans or expertise.

In Sweden, for example, Palantir reported €13.7 million in revenue in 2024, but only €1.1 million in profit. At Sweden’s 20 percent corporate tax rate, that left the company with a tax bill of just €424,000.

In its Q2 earnings report on Monday, Palantir made no explicit reference to earnings from its European subsidiaries. Instead, it highlighted its U.S. business, where revenue rose 115 percent year-on-year to $1.57 billion (€1.36 billion), and boasted of its 62 percent profit margin.

A U.K.-based Palantir spokesperson said that the majority of the company’s 2025 revenue and profitability was driven by its U.S. business. “Our tax position in each jurisdiction reflects the level of economic activity there, and we meet our tax obligations in every market in which we operate,” the spokesperson said.

Not alone

Palantir is not the first U.S. tech company to draw scrutiny over how it books profits in Europe.

In 2024, the European Court of Justice ordered Apple to pay Ireland €13 bn in back taxes, ending an 8-year-long fight over what Brussels said amounted to illegal state aid. Amazon also fought the European Commission over claims it had received an unlawful tax advantage worth around €250 million in Luxembourg — a case the company ultimately won. Microsoft, meanwhile, has faced scrutiny over its Irish subsidiary, Microsoft Round Island One, which avoided paying millions to the state after claiming tax residency in Bermuda. The U.S. software giant has denied that it is circumventing Ireland’s tax laws.

Jan Willem Goudriaan, General Secretary of the European Federation of Public Service Unions — a supporter of CICTAR— said that companies such as Palantir, Amazon and Microsoft focus on minimizing the taxes they pay, “thus robbing funding for public services.”

“Companies bidding for public contracts should have to demonstrate responsible tax conduct by disclosing where their revenues, workforce, profits and taxes are located,” he said.

Another reason for the low profits of Palantir’s European subsidiaries is their high personnel costs. In the U.K., where most of the company’s non-U.S. workforce is based, Palantir reported £173 million (€204.3 million) in employee costs for 749 staff in 2024 — an average of £230,974 (€272,803) per employee.

The report also points to Palantir’s use of stock-based compensation across its European subsidiaries, especially in the U.K., Spain and Norway. This means employees are paid partly in company shares or awards. Those awards are recorded as staff expenses, which can lower a subsidiary’s corporate tax bill.

NATO’s reliance on the “doctrines of World War II” and its slow adaptation to new forms of warfare make it unlikely Ukraine will ever join the alliance, said Kyiv’s Ambassador to the U.K. and former Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi.

“For 12 years, I must have personally been working to ensure that we mastered NATO standards, and every year I listened to tales that we were about to join NATO. Unfortunately, we will never join it,” Zaluzhnyi privately told Ukrainian ambassadors in Kyiv on Monday, according to Ukrainian media.

Although “Ukraine needs technologies that are still available in NATO countries today,” like defenses against ballistic missiles, he said, “it is impossible to join an organization that possesses the doctrines of World War II with the level of development that exists in the armed forces of Ukraine.”

Russia has made deep changes to its forces under pressure from the war, and many politicians and intelligence officials worry it could be ready to attack a NATO country by the end of the decade.

Zaluzhnyi’s unusual rebuke underscores a growing change in the alliance’s relationship with Ukraine. The country has shifted from relying on European military support in the early years of the war to becoming one the continent’s most powerful and technologically advanced militaries — far ahead of Western forces in the mass production of drones, missiles and other key systems.

“Ukraine contributes to transatlantic security,” said NATO’s 32 leaders in a joint declaration at the alliance’s Ankara summit last month. In recent military exercises where NATO has invited Ukrainian troops to participate, allied forces have repeatedly been surprised by their tactics and drone use.

The comments are also notable given Zaluzhnyi’s widely rumored political ambitions. He was replaced as Ukraine’s top commander by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2024.

“Most likely, NATO will remain in the same form as it is, and will spend 12 years, like Ukraine, transitioning to the standards that need to be achieved in order to be at least half the level of the Russian Federation,” said the retired general.

Zaluzhnyi’s remarks also reflect an enduring Ukrainian frustration with the alliance for stalling its application to join despite officially floating the prospect of eventual membership in 2023. The U.S. and other allies remain opposed.

As a result, Zaluzhnyi said, Ukraine would instead opt to “be tied to blocs and alliances that will probably be formed,” citing the Joint Expeditionary Force — a 10-nation U.K.-led grouping of mainly Nordic and Baltic countries established in 2014 and designed to complement NATO.

“Most likely, we will talk about a European military security bloc,” added Zaluzhnyi.

NATO declined to comment, referring POLITICO to remarks made by alliance Secretary-General Mark Rutte in June, who reiterated the “irreversible path of Ukraine into NATO.”

Zaluzhnyi and Ukraine’s mission to NATO didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Veronika Melkozerova contributed reporting from Kyiv.