Companies Are Trying to Hide Their Ties to Larry Summers

[Celerity]

Some fintech and energy startups haven’t announced that Summers is leaving; they just took him off their websites.

https://prospect.org/2025/11/19/companies-trying-to-hide-ties-larry-summers/



In light of email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein recently released by the House Oversight Committee, Larry Summers has announced that he will be “stepping back from public commitments” as he attempts “to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.” But while some organizations have explicitly ended Summers’s association with their firms, others have simply wiped mention of him off their websites’ “About” pages, attempting to vanish their association with Summers without explicitly ending their involvement with him.

Summers’s statement did not explicitly lay out what “public commitments” he would be stepping back from. But the fallout over the past 48 hours is notable primarily for just how many associations Summers had with think tanks, media outlets, and private companies. The New York Times reported that Summers was no longer affiliated with the Yale Budget Lab and the Center for American Progress, where he was in a leadership role on policy development efforts known internally as “Project 2029.” A spokesperson from the Times also told the Prospect that they would not renew Summers’s expiring contract as a contributing writer, and both the Center for Global Development and OpenAI announced that Summers would be stepping down from their boards of directors.

Summers has also left a paid role on Bloomberg TV, and CBS has reported that the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project and the Peterson Institute for International Economics have cut ties. By contrast, fintech firm Atlas Merchant Capital, where Summers has worked as a senior adviser since at least 2021, and energy startup firm Palmetto, which Summers began advising in April of last year, have both deleted Summers from their website without explanation. Neither firm responded to a request for comment.

Importantly, Summers made it clear that his intention to step back would not include ending his teaching career at Harvard University. This is despite emails with convicted sex offender Epstein describing himself as Summers’s “wing man” and helping Summers plan to proposition a colleague he’d described as a “mentee” by withholding professional assistance. The emails also brought to light new evidence of Summers’s deeply sexist views, which were responsible for his ouster from the Harvard presidency back in 2006. Though Summers intends to remain, the university may have other ideas, and has launched an investigation into his conduct.

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