Leon Black at the Calder Foundation in New York, November 2014.
Angela Pham/BFA.com
The aughties were also when Black started working in close collaboration with Jeffrey Epstein. In Black’s interview with the select committee, he claimed he’d trusted Epstein simply because so many other respected individuals also depended on him to look over their cash.
“By the time I first paid Epstein in 2013, I knew him to possess an unrivaled network of relationships with individuals in finance, academia, science, politics,” Black said—a group that included Deepak Chopra, Tom Barrack, Tom Pritzker, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, former president Bill Clinton, Peter Thiel, and Steve Bannon, among others.
And if Deepak Chopra likes the guy, who is Leon Black to not trust him?
Black is one of the few private citizens to personally own a globally famous, guy-on-the-street-would-recognize-this work of art. In 2012, Sotheby’s was set to sell Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which had an estimated value of $80 million. Bidding started at $40 million with half a dozen buyers actively in the hunt. The late Sotheby’s vice president Charles Moffett, speaking with a client on the landline phone, outlasted them all. After a 12-minute bidding war, the hammer came down at $107 million, or nearly $120 million with the buyer’s premium, making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at that point.
And on the phone with Moffett was Leon Black.
At the time, the price was shocking. Now, it seems a bit quaint—honestly, a steal at a time when works with much less cultural weight have been selling for hundreds of millions of dollars. The demand for undeniable trophies is far outpacing the supply. Some estimate that if Leon Black ever put The Scream up again at auction, it would become the first artwork to sell for over $1 billion.
The purchase cemented his status as a true trophy hunter, buying up masterworks for his private collection. Just six months after the The Scream sold for that record price, the Museum of Modern Art organized an exhibition, put together by chief curator Ann Temkin, that showcased the iconic work—and the wall text said it was loaned from a “private collection.” At the time, Black was serving as the vice chair on the board, and by 2015, he was elected co-chairman of one of our culture’s most exclusive cliques: the MoMA board.
