It’s funny enough that Kotaku reports that Trump’s dead bestie Jeffrey Epstein was banned from Microsoft’s Xbox online gaming service back in 2013, preventing him from pwning noobs in Halo 4 and Grand Theft Auto Online, per emails sent that December and dumped in Friday’s Justice Department release of millions of documents. Why? At first it was due to “harassment, threats, and/or abuse of other players.” That might’ve been a boilerplate though, as Microsoft then followed up a few hours later add that it was (also?) to enforce their policy to “remove New York registered sex offenders from online gaming services to minimize the risk to others, particularly children.”
So either being a sex offender was the icing on the cake of a regular ban or they initially sent the wrong notification for them banning a convicted sex offender, the end result being the same.
Even funnier is the context of the ban: About five months earlier Jeff had drafted an email to Microsoft founder Bill Gates complaining that Gates had implored Jeff “to please delete the emails regarding your std, your request that I provide you antibiotics that you can surreptitiously give to Melinda, and the description of your penis,” after Bill supposedly caught a nasty bug from some Russian hookers that Epstein had supplied to him and was worried he had infected his wife.
So maybe the orders to take Jeff’s Xbox privileges away – while their friendship was already on the rocks – came from the top, maybe they didn’t. What is known is that the final rupture didn’t come until late the next year, when they fell out over some kind of “charitable fund” collaboration.