Where the Money Comes From
by Jennie Rose Halperin
I met Joi Ito only once, at an extravagant, boozy dinner for Creative Commons alumni and staff in 2018. Creative Commons is the nonprofit behind the familiar CC open licenses we see on Wiki images every day, and Ito had been its CEO from 2008–2011. Sitting across from me, he spent the entirety of a six-course dinner bragging about a truly dazzling set of activist initiatives that he was involved in, ranging from prison abolition to solving global warming through blockchain. There was nothing particularly special about the way he looked or behaved, but his presence was completely consuming, so much so that I have no recollection of anyone else in the room that night. By then he had become the Director of the MIT Media Lab and a globe-trotting ambassador for digital innovation, connected at the top reaches of a dizzying number of worlds: he was an adopted “godson” of the late Timothy Leary, whom he’d met in 1990 in Tokyo; an early investor in Flickr, Kickstarter, and Twitter; an advisor to Suntory Holdings, Kodansha, and MUFG; he served on the boards of The New York Times, Sony, the Knight Foundation, Mozilla, MacArthur, and ICANN.
Even though I found him incredibly impressive, I found Joi’s shameless confidence about raising money disquieting. There seemed to be no source of philanthropic lucre that he had not courted, no billionaire he had not dined with. He was bold and articulate about his vision, smart and sharp. Seven years later, I still think about our conversation.
About a year later, Ronan Farrow wrote an article in the New Yorker revealing that Ito’s fundraising connections to Jeffrey Epstein had been much deeper than previously disclosed. Epstein was already known as a convicted sex offender. The secrecy around his relationship with Ito led some of Ito’s staff to refer to Epstein as “Voldemort” (“He-who-shall-not-be-named,” the villain in the Harry Potter books).
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