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Fortune 500 Digest with Alyson Shontell
Sunday, May 17, 2026
Foreword
Alyson Shontell
Editor-in-Chief

Lily Mae Lazarus here, filling in for Alyson. Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and sex offender who died by suicide in prison in 2019, inflicted tremendous harm on the still-not-fully-tallied number of women he abused and trafficked to others. He also continues to create problems for the banks that served him as a client while he was engaging in those activities—not least for Deutsche Bank (No. 177 on the Fortune Global 500), where Epstein was a client from 2013 until not long before his death.

In the latest installment of our investigations into the 3 million Epstein-related files released by the Department of Justice, my reporting reveals that that relationship lasted longer than Deutsche Bank previously told regulators.

The bank claimed in a 2020 consent order with New York’s Department of Financial Services that it had severed ties with Epstein in December 2018, giving him til the end of February 2019 to get his money out of the bank. But internal emails reviewed by Fortune show that some of Epstein’s accounts were still open days after Epstein was arrested in July 2019—including one called the Butterfly Trust, which federal prosecutors showed was used to funnel nearly $3 million in payments to alleged co-conspirators and women with Eastern European surnames.

Over the course of 2019, Epstein’s banker at Deutsche Bank, Stewart Oldfield, was still arranging six-figure cash pickups and inviting Epstein’s personal trader to the Frieze art fair as the so-called offboarding dragged on. The evening of the arrest, Oldfield couldn’t even confirm which accounts were closed, internal documents show.

The gap between what Deutsche Bank told its regulator in the 2020 consent decree and what the documents show is where potential legal exposure begins, according to the lawyers Fortune spoke with. “Anytime you affirm something, you’re basically saying, I swear this is the truth,” white-collar criminal defense attorney Priya Chaudhry said. Under New York law, knowingly filing a false instrument with a public agency is a felony—and the Manhattan D.A., the New York A.G., and the Southern District of New York each retain jurisdiction. None has brought charges against Deutsche Bank tied to the Epstein relationship—yet. Read the full story.—Lily Mae Lazarus, reporter

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Catch Up
Deals & Developments
  • Google, owned by Alphabet (No. 7), and SpaceX are in talks to build data centers in space, per the Wall Street Journal, as part of a Google initiative called Project Suncatcher that would use solar-powered satellites to run AI workloads in orbit.
  • Microsoft (No. 14) is quietly shopping for AI startups to reduce its dependence on OpenAI, Reuters reported, citing five people familiar with the matter. The company is now in talks with Inception, a startup that Microsoft’s venture arm had already backed with a $50 million seed round.
    • Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the stand in Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, calling the board’s 2023 decision to fire Sam Altman “amateur city” and testifying that he had no advance notice before the ouster. Nadella said he pressed the board to reinstate Altman.
  • Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Netflix (No. 116) for allegedly spying on users and secretly selling their data, including children’s, despite public pledges from former CEO Reed Hastings that Netflix would never monetize user information. Netflix called the lawsuit meritless.
  • GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is escalating his hostile bid for eBay (No. 411), writing to the company’s board that shareholders, not directors, should decide the fate of his $56 billion offer. EBay rejected the unsolicited proposal this week as "neither credible nor attractive.”
Overheard
“In my professional opinion, 35 years doing this, we are in no risk of running out of jet fuel anytime soon.”
Greg Raiff, CEO of private jet services company Elevate Jet
On earnings calls: