Gordon Getty and Donald Trump were both prominent American socialites in the 1980s and 1990s, albeit on opposite coasts.
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Gordon Getty, the richest man in the United States in 1983, apparently believes President Donald Trump is a psychopath. Or else a malignant narcissist.
An heir to Paul J. Getty’s oil fortune, Gordon Getty has never spoken out publicly against Trump. Like many liberal-leaning billionaires and elites, he has evidently preferred to sharply criticize the president in private.
But his unfiltered opinions were revealed in emails from the 20,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein messages made available by the House Oversight Committee earlier this month. Epstein was apparently included on an email chain that Getty sometimes sent to friends and family to share personal musings, including theories on politics and economics.
Those released in the Epstein documents mostly discuss Trump.
“What prompted my first memo was a concern that we have a psychopath or sociopath or malignant narcissist or narcissist or Mach (Machiavellian) in the White House, whether or not those categories grade into a continuum,” he wrote in an undated email that appears to have been sent around March 2018. The “first memo” mentioned does not appear in the Epstein release.
It is unclear whether Getty, 91, knew Epstein personally. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers put the sex offender on Getty’s email list, announcing to the group that he was “adding […] Jeffrey Epstein who is a brilliant fund and investment manager (Palm Beach, NYC, US Virgin Islands) with broad scientific interests.” Trivers followed up with a March 19, 2018 email to Epstein introducing him to the list, calling it “Gordon Getty’s echo chamber” and also an opportunity “to get the brightest minds in a room and have them tell each other what they think is most important.” (Neither Trivers nor Getty replied to Forbes’ requests for comment.)
The email list was called the “Gruterites,” possibly in reference to the Renaissance-era linguist Janus Gruter. Getty—who has devoted most of his life to literature and music—is an enthusiast of the early modern arts. He composed an opera, “Plump Jack,” around Shakespeare’s recurring character Falstaff, who refers to himself as “plump Jack” in Henry IV, Part 1. That is also the name of the winery group he owns with California governor Gavin Newsom.
“If I am right in fitting the president somewhere in the groups I listed, the nation faces a different and deeper crisis than many had thought,” Getty wrote in his 2018 email about Trump. “It’s about fitness for office. The President is the world’s number one fiduciary. […] Persons without empathy or remorse are not prudent choices.”
He then calls for the members of his email list to “get the word out.” He seems to suggest that someone in the group write a book to persuade the public of Trump’s potential to harm the economy. “By book, I mean a collection of papers along the lines of ‘Moral Markets,’” he writes, apparently referencing the 2008 essay collection edited by Paul J. Zak, Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy. “A mass-market book would be even better if one of us is up for it and up to it.”
Perhaps he took his own advice. About seven months later, Getty published the 226-page book Logic and Economics: Free Growth and Other Surprises. (He had been drafting writings on economic theories for many years prior.) In the book, he advocates for his concept of “free growth theory,” which contends that economic growth comes from productivity gains, rather than restraining citizen or government consumption. It’s partially an argument for the benefits of government spending. The book does not appear to mention Trump—nor did it get much attention. It has no ratings or reviews on Amazon or Goodreads.
The Getty family is one of the most notorious in U.S. history, known for rocking California’s high society with scandals in the late 20th century. Gordon’s father, J. Paul Getty Sr., founded the oil behemoth Getty Oil in 1942; the Guinness Book of Records called him the wealthiest private citizen in the world in 1966. But J. Paul is also famous for his brutal frugality. He refused to pay a ransom after his 16-year-old grandson was abducted in 1973, so the kidnappers cut off the child’s ear. That grandson struggled with drugs and alcohol in the aftermath, ultimately suffering from an overdose that left him disabled for life (he died from an illness in 2011). Gordon ignited his own scandal in 1999 when he revealed three children he’d kept secret for 14 years after fathering them during an affair.
J. Paul left most of his estate to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles upon his 1976 death, but Gordon and his siblings still inherited massive fortunes from their grandmother’s trust, which contained 40.2% of the shares of Getty Oil. Gordon got off the best as its sole trustee for a time; he’s still the income beneficiary of several successor trusts that were later split between the family. The assets in the Getty trusts are tied up until Gordon’s death, when they’ll finally be distributed among J. Paul’s descendants.
Forbes called Gordon the richest man in the country on its second-ever “Forbes 400” list of the wealthiest Americans in 1983. Now he’s worth an estimated $5.5 billion and ranks 276th. Much of that fortune comes from his sale of Getty Oil for $10.1 billion in 1984. He’s spent most of his adult life focused on the arts—especially music composition—and philanthropy, donating at least $463 million over his lifetime. Once a formidable art collector with his late wife, Ann, he’s been selling off their vast collection in the past few years and giving the proceeds to charity, particularly arts and educational institutions in the California Bay Area.
Getty was mostly a Republican donor in the 1980s but began solely donating to Democrats in mid-1996, FEC filings show. Since Trump announced his presidential campaign in 2015, he’s given $4.5 million to Democratic or anti-Trump causes, including the “Need to Impeach” PAC in 2018, the same year he privately called the president a possible psychopath.
The only other instance of Getty publicly making a negative comment about Trump seems to be buried in an interview about his music compositions that was published last year in the small San Francisco magazine Nob Hill Gazette. It’s not kind to the president, but nor is it an explicit rebuke or an attempt to “get the word out,” as he called on his “Gruterites” to do in 2018.
In a “lightning round” of questions at the end of the interview, Getty is asked what he would do if he had a magic wand: “I wish that Donald Trump would get a long lasting case of laryngitis,” he quipped. “That’s the worst I’ll do.”