Larry Summers has been forced out of his lucrative consulting gig at ‘woke’ hedge fund DE Shaw — effectively ending the former Treasury Secretary’s career on Wall Street following a scandal over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, The Post has learned.
Two insiders, speaking on condition of anonymity, said 70-year-old Summers — who had sought dating advice from the dead pedophile in a trove of embarrassing emails that surfaced last week — had still been listed as an adviser on the hedge fund’s internal directory as recently as Friday morning.
“They just terminated him,” a source told The Post after an email to the Summers’ DE Shaw address requesting comment bounced back.
“Larry Summers is no longer a consultant to the firm,” a DE Shaw spokesperson said of the former chief economist of the World Bank, who was once described by the New York Times as the company’s “marquee hire” to drum up clients all over the world.
The spokesperson declined to provide further details about Summers’ departure from DE Shaw, which has more than $70 billion of assets under management. Summers did not return further calls or emails from The Post seeking comment.
He had been a consultant on macroeconomics to the secretive financial giant since 2011. It is the latest blow for Summers after he was put on leave from his teaching gig at Harvard University this week.
The Obama and Clinton administration alum worked for the wildly lucrative investment firm “off-site” from Boston, a stone’s throw from Harvard’s Cambridge campus, and reported to one of the firm’s managing directors, Max Stone, the insiders said.
His first stint with the New York-based powerhouse began in 2006 when he joined as a managing director, bringing with him his long-time trusted adviser, Michael O’Mary, who joined the following year, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The one-time Harvard president left in late 2008 to become President Barack Obama’s top economics guru before returning as a consultant after Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary quit government for the second time.
DE Shaw saw its algorithm-driven trades make it the most profitable hedge fund in 2024, raking in $11.1 billion for investors, according to Institutional Investor magazine.
The firm was founded by major Democratic donor David E. Shaw, who helped bankroll the presidential campaigns of Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.
The company’s top brass have been some of the most vocal champions of DEI on Wall Street while effectively slapping gag orders on former employees, as The Post has previously reported.
The one-time president of the top college has also stepped back as director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.
It comes amid revelations that Summers flew to Saint James on Epstein’s infamous “Lolita Express” with his wife, Elisa F. New, shortly after their Dec. 11, 2005, wedding in Cambridge.
They were accompanied by the disgraced financier’s infamous British madam, the socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was later convicted on sex trafficking charges, the Harvard Crimson reported Thursday.
The island getaway came six months after Palm Beach police began investigating Epstein for the rape of a 14-year-old girl, with a search warrant later executed on his mansion in October 2005.
Flight logs show Summers flew to the 72-acre Caribbean island on Dec. 21, 2005 — and took Epstein’s jet, allegedly used to ferry victims and accomplices in his sex-trafficking rings, three other times.
Emails released by a Dem-led congressional oversight panel also show the two men appeared to have had a close relationship right up to Epstein’s arrest in July six years ago.
The pervy pair often discussed women, politics and Harvard-related business in hundreds of emails exchanged between 2013 and 2019, according to the treasure trove of messages.
In one missive, Summers joked that women were less intelligent than men.
“I observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population,” Summers wrote Epstein in October 2017, without providing further context.
In another online back-and-forth in March 2019, Summers asked Epstein for romantic advice.
“I dint [sic] want to be in a gift-giving competition while being the friend without benefits,” Summers told Epstein while discussing his pursuit of a woman, adding that “she must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.”
Summers — who helmed the elite university between 2001 and 2006 and was a tenured economics professor there since 1983 — resigned from the board of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, on Wednesday amid a firestorm over his ties to the infamous predator.
