Joi Ito

Former Director of the MIT Media Lab (2011-2019) who resigned after the New York Times and The New Yorker revealed the depth of his financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Ito solicited and accepted millions in donations from Epstein for both the Media Lab and his personal investment funds, continuing even after Epstein's 2008 conviction. Internal MIT emails described Epstein as a "disqualified" donor whose contributions had to be processed anonymously.

Epstein positioned Ito as a key node in his technology network. In a September 2013 email to Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, Epstein described Ito as "the most connected to the tech world person in the states. He runs the MIT media lab, he is one of us." Bin Sulayem replied: "I look forward to meet him I will take good care of him." The phrase "one of us" appears in multiple Epstein emails as a marker of trusted inner circle status.

EFTA documents place Ito on Epstein's private island Little Saint James in September 2014 alongside Reid Hoffman. Epstein personally invited Richard Branson to "come visit" while they were there. In April 2016, Epstein traveled to Cambridge where his schedule included a 3pm meeting at MIT Media Lab with Joscha Bach and Reid Hoffman, followed by dinner at Ito's home.

A June 2015 MIT lunch documented in the files seated Ito alongside Noam Chomsky, Danny Hillis, Joscha Bach, and Epstein. A 2018 email from Epstein's office confirms he was "funding plant work at the MIT Media Lab as well as the Evolutionary Dynamics Institute at Harvard," revealing the breadth of his funding extended beyond AI and cognitive science into plant intelligence research. Ito resigned from MIT in September 2019, as well as from the boards of the New York Times Company, the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the PureTech Health board.

He appears in approximately 9,819 documents in the Epstein archive. A DOJ document (EFTA00349077) shows that Ito and his administrative assistant Mika procured Japanese visas for Epstein and two Russian women described as his "assistants," facilitating their travel to Japan.