Jes Staley’s Epstein History Has Followed Him Into an Upper East Side Church

Plus: Inside Reddit’s FatFIRE, where the wealthy quietly give one another financial advice once money is no longer the problem.

Good afternoon everyone, en route back to New York. One day I’ll become the kind of person who sends these in the morning. Until then, consider the timing part of the personality.

Starting this week, Wednesdays are becoming News & Noted. The idea is simple: one longer piece that’s either reported out or closely observed, followed by something I’ve been thinking about or noticing in the wild. Then it’s back to regular programming in the next letter. We’ll see how it settles.

Today’s edition is deliberately finance-forward in both halves. Rarely the case going forward, but very much the case right now.

News: Jes Staley Shows Up at an Upper East Side Church. The Congregation Isn’t Having It.

Jes Staley, the former chief executive of Barclays and one of the most powerful investment bankers of his generation, began attending All Souls Unitarian Church on the Upper East Side in July 2025. For decades, Staley occupied the highest tier of global finance, first as the head of JPMorgan’s investment bank and later as the leader of a major international lender. His wealth and status have never been peripheral to his story. They are the story.

The timing raised eyebrows. In June 2025, British financial regulators upheld a lifetime ban preventing Staley from holding senior roles in the United Kingdom, concluding that he had mischaracterized the nature and duration of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and remained in contact with Epstein after his 2008 conviction. The tribunal said the underlying evidence had not changed and criticized Staley for showing no remorse. Weeks later, he was sitting quietly among congregants at All Souls.

At the church, there was no announcement from the pulpit and no mention in the weekly bulletin. According to multiple sources within the congregation, Staley’s arrival in July 2025 was never formally disclosed. There was no effort to contextualize who had joined or why. He simply began attending.

All Souls, a Unitarian Universalist church at East 80th Street, is accustomed to wealth and power. It has long served as a discreet Upper East Side gathering place for people adjacent to finance, politics, and media. That familiarity with influence, congregants say, now feels like part of the problem.

Several congregants raised concerns with church leadership soon after Staley began attending services. They were not objecting to the idea of someone with a controversial past. People are used to sinners in church. What troubled them was being expected to sit beside him and worship without any acknowledgment or expression of remorse for conduct that had been widely reported and publicly adjudicated.

According to sources, congregants brought these concerns directly to leadership. The response, they said, was not to address the substance of the concerns but to emphasize that “everyone was welcome.” Leadership declined to disclose Staley’s attendance to the congregation and would not say whether he had made donations to the church since he began attending.

What angered congregants was that this welcome felt active rather than neutral. Ministers, sources said, appeared to select specific members to greet Staley and make him feel comfortable. Very comfortable. Instead of accountability, congregants said, the priority seemed to be integration.

That imbalance was sharpened by Staley’s demeanor during services. According to one source, he is frequently on his phone throughout the service and shows little visible sign of introspection. He attends alone, without his wife, and carries himself with the ease of someone accustomed to elite spaces continuing to accommodate him. (According to previous reports, Staley has referred to his background as “Unitarian Boston American” and his wife, Debora Nitzan Staley, as Brazilian Jewish).

Staley has denied wrongdoing related to Epstein and has not been criminally charged. His relationship with Epstein is nevertheless extensively documented. Court filings and reporting by CNN in 2025 revealed that Staley admitted to having sex with one of Epstein’s assistants, which his legal team described as consensual. In December 2025, The Guardian reported that Staley had been named, alongside Lawrence Summers, as a potential executor in early drafts of Epstein’s will.

To some congregants, the timing of Staley’s turn, or return, toward organized religion stands out. They noted that in other high-profile cases involving Epstein, religious affiliation had been encouraged as a way to signal seriousness and rehabilitation. In this case, they felt, the moral burden had shifted away from Staley and onto the people sitting around him.

One congregant said they considered distributing flyers outside the church to alert other members to Staley’s presence and his ties to Epstein, but decided against it because they deeply value the church and did not want to disrupt it.

For those who raised concerns, the issue was not exclusion. It was accountability. Without disclosure or remorse, congregants said, they were being asked to absorb the discomfort themselves.

Leadership at All Souls did not respond to a request for comment. An email associated with Staley public filings bounced back. His legal representative opened a single request for comment multiple times but did not respond.

Noted: Financial Advice, From One Rich Person to Another

On a recent afternoon, a man in his early forties logged onto Reddit to ask a question that would sound faintly deranged almost anywhere else. His household spending, he wrote, had crept up. His family employed full-time help, including daily housekeeping. He wanted to know whether paying nine thousand dollars a month for that service was reasonable, or whether he had crossed some invisible line.

No one blinked.

Several replies said the number was normal at his income level. One suggested rolling staff under a household manager. Another pointed out that reliable help had become harder to find and that saving money by losing good people was usually false economy. The tone was brisk and unembarrassed. This was not confession. It was bookkeeping.

This is r/fatFIRE, a Reddit forum for people pursuing financial independence at the very high end of the spectrum. “Fat” refers not to bodies but to margin. Enough money to stop working without altering the texture of your life. The forum bills itself simply as “retire with a fat stash,” an understatement that becomes clearer the longer you read.

It is often confused with other “fat” corners of Reddit, where conspicuous wealth, luxury purchases, or status signaling dominate the conversation. FatFIRE is different. There is little flexing and almost no performance. The money is assumed, not displayed. Questions are practical, sometimes anxious, and often surprisingly restrained. The goal is not to be seen as rich. It’s to understand what comes after.

FatFIRE spun out of the broader FIRE movement, shorthand for “Financial Independence, Retire Early,” but with one key difference. Traditional FIRE treats frugality as a virtue. FatFIRE treats it as optional. The goal is not escape through austerity but exit without downgrade.

The forum reads less like a message board than a Bloomberg Terminal stripped of sentiment and offered free. As Joe Weisenthal noted recently on the podcast How Long Gone, a Bloomberg Terminal can run roughly $27,000 to $32,000 per user per year. FatFIRE trades in a different asset: judgment. It’s anonymous, experience-based, and unbranded.

The median user is not aspirational. They are post-liquidity. Eight to ten million in net worth is common, and often more. Annual spending in the $300,000 to $500,000 range barely raises an eyebrow. The money comes from exits, private equity, inheritance, and early bets that worked. Unlike most corners of the internet, nobody is selling anything or building a personal brand. That, more than the numbers, is what makes it feel like a closed room.

I first heard about FatFIRE through a mutual friend who mentioned, almost casually, that the influencer Tinx looked at it when sense-checking financial decisions. That was enough to send me clicking. I expected to skim. But instead I stuck around.

My own bank balance is nowhere near the forum’s baseline, but the conversations were legible. People were not asking how to get rich which is a rarity. They were asking how not to make a mistake they could not undo once they got there.

One thread asked whether buying a private plane would meaningfully improve quality of life or simply create a new category of headache. Replies focused less on cost than on habit. Once convenience becomes normal, several warned, it is hard to unlearn.

Social life comes up more often than you’d expect. One user with a $12 million net worth asked whether financial independence had subtly changed how friends treated him. Replies mentioned awkward checks, assumptions being made, invitations shifting. No one sounded offended. Mostly, they sounded unsure where they now belonged. Apparently social dynamics don’t always change when bank accounts do.

Read long enough and a pattern forms, even if no one ever names it. Money clears the practical hurdles, then hands you a different problem. Optionality, left alone, starts to feel less like freedom than drift.

This is why FatFIRE feels like a secret club. Not because it is hidden, but because the conversations only make sense once you have crossed a certain line. The forum is not aspirational. It is what happens after aspiration works and stops being useful.

No one on FatFIRE seems especially ecstatic or miserable. What they seem is alert, attuned to the fact that money has removed excuses but not decisions. Money solves the math. It does not supply the structure.

But almost every conversation on FatFIRE, no matter how it begins, circles the same unresolved question. Once work becomes optional, what exactly is worth organizing your life around?