Edge Foundation

The Edge Foundation is a New York nonprofit founded by literary agent John Brockman that operates the website Edge.org, publishes the annual Edge Question, and for years hosted the Billionaires' Dinner. Foundations associated with Jeffrey Epstein provided $638,000 of nearly $857,000 in revenue the organization received between 2001 and 2017, making Epstein its dominant backer during that period.¹²

Founding and the Reality Club

The Edge Foundation was incorporated in 1988 as an outgrowth of the Reality Club, an informal gathering of intellectuals that Brockman had convened from 1981 to 1996 in restaurants, lofts, and other venues around New York. The foundation describes its mission as promoting inquiry into scientific and intellectual ideas in the spirit of the "third culture" that Brockman set out in his 1995 book The Third Culture, in which scientists who write for a general public take the place of the traditional literary intellectual.³⁴

The third-culture framing extended C. P. Snow's 1959 lecture on the divide between literary and scientific cultures, recasting working scientists as the public intellectuals "rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives." Brockman ran the site as a program of the foundation alongside his agency Brockman Inc., with Katinka Matson listed as co-founder, and many Edge participants were also agency clients whose books the firm sold.⁴³

Brockman launched Edge.org in 1996 as the online successor to the Reality Club, posting long-form conversations and essays by scientists and authors. The journalist John Naughton called the site "the world's smartest website" in a 2012 Observer profile, a phrase the foundation has since used in its own materials. Contributors over the years included Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Marvin Minsky, Martin Nowak, and George Church.⁵⁴

The Edge Question and the World Question Center

Beginning in 1998, Edge posed an annual question to its contributors through what Brockman called the World Question Center, with prompts including "What is your dangerous idea?," "What will change everything?," and "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The answers were drawn from a contributor pool that one tally put at roughly 80 percent male.¹⁶

The annual responses fed a long-running book series, with collected volumes published as What We Believe but Cannot Prove, What Is Your Dangerous Idea?, What Have You Changed Your Mind About?, This Will Change Everything, This Explains Everything, and Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, among others. Brockman closed the annual question in 2018 after twenty editions, framing the final question as the finale of the series.⁴⁶

The Third Culture program ran in parallel, with Edge publishing the conversations, video, and essays that fed Brockman's edited anthologies and supplied his agency clients with a steady channel to a general readership. The foundation positioned its participants as a continuation of the figures Brockman profiled in The Third Culture in 1995.⁴³

The Billionaires' Dinner

Brockman hosted an annual dinner from 1999, timed to the TED Conference, that became known as the Billionaires' Dinner, seating Edge contributors alongside technology and finance figures such as Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Elon Musk. Katinka Matson co-organized the events, which Brockman at one point tried to rebrand as "The Science Dinner" before reverting to the original name.¹⁷

Epstein was photographed at the dinners in 1999, 2000, 2002, and 2004 and attended the 2011 dinner alongside Bezos and Brin; the last dinner was held in March 2015. Photographs from the 2002 and 2003 dinners showed Epstein associate Sarah Kellen seated with Brockman and his son Max Brockman, and those images were removed from the site after 2019.¹²

The Edge Foundation also awarded a $100,000 prize to the quantum-computing physicist David Deutsch using funds supplied by Epstein, a connection Deutsch said he had been unaware of. He told BuzzFeed News that Edge had told him the sponsor's name when he won but that "the name meant nothing to me: I'd never heard of him."¹

Epstein Funding and the 2019 Reckoning

The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation and other Epstein-controlled entities, including Epstein's Gratitude America and the C.O.U.Q. Foundation, were among the listed funders of the Edge Foundation, and financial records reviewed by BuzzFeed News showed those entities provided $638,000 of the roughly $857,000 Edge received from 2001 to 2017. Epstein gave at least $50,000 a year in 2009, 2010, and 2011, with no gifts recorded from 2006 to 2008 during his Florida case and imprisonment.¹²

Epstein's last recorded contribution was $30,000 in 2015, after which Edge raised only several thousand dollars from a single donor over 2016 and 2017. For multiple years Epstein was effectively the foundation's sole donor, and his withdrawal after 2015 coincided with the end of the dinner series.¹²

After Epstein's July 2019 arrest, the science writer Carl Zimmer asked to be removed from Edge, the author Naomi Wolf left Brockman Inc. on July 31, 2019, citing both Epstein's funding and the appearance of Sarah Kellen on the site, and Evgeny Morozov called on Brockman to close the foundation while publishing a 2013 email in which Brockman had tried to introduce him to Epstein. Photographs showing Kellen at Edge dinners were taken down. Most listed contributors did not publicly disassociate from the foundation, and the site continued to host its archived conversations.⁸¹