In March 2011, a group of technology executives gathered in a private dining room at an upscale Italian restaurant in downtown Long Beach, California, for a meal and some conversation. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and others were all in town for TED, the annual conference with the slogan “ideas worth spreading.” They were among friends at an annual event called the “billionaires’ dinner,” without a retinue of handlers and hangers-on.Yet when the event was later immortalized online, at least one infamous individual was missing from the names of the masters of the universe who had gathered for the evening: the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.This elite dinner, and another similarly select gathering that Epstein attended later that year, were both organized by the New York literary agent John Brockman, whose exclusive intellectual club, called Edge, seems to have played a role in Epstein’s efforts to regain credibility and influence in circles of the rich and powerful. At the time, he was less than two years removed from finishing a 13-month prison term in a Florida state jail for soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.A leaked email obtained by BuzzFeed News also suggests…