Well, the two are connected, I'm sure.
If he was just a rich guy with slightly unusual tastes, the island would be more than enough. It's the multiple sites (Avenue Foch just revealed last week, how many more are there?) that turns this from a kink into enterprise-level whoremastery.
And is it simple blackmail for self-enrichment? That would be quite clever, but too much for one guy to handle - plus, as has been pointed out, if he was f***ing over enough billionaires to fund this multi-decade, multinational enterprise, someone would have killed him or had him killed years ago.
It's the girl - Ghislaine Maxwell - that's the key.
She’s the procurer, he handles the transactions?
No way you can become a billionaire or live to see 70 if you’re blackmailing. He made his money somehow, insider trading, futures, diamond mines in South Africa, arms merchant maybe. Whatever. And then when he was rich enough, he started finding friends and offering them access to his island as a token of their elite status, with Ghislaine as the madame and Bill as the...mascot or whatever the hell he was. Tattoo to his Rourke? His new friends give him hot tips on stocks and futures trades, and he exploits them and gets richer.