Money to Burn: Leon Black, Apollo and the Remaking of Wall Street

Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s most formidable investment firms, has thrived in private equity and private credit, delivering staggering returns through aggressive takeovers and bold, contrarian bets. Blending gripping narrative with meticulous reporting, Money to Burn offers a spectacular investigation into this controversial and powerful financial empire, where the billionaires at the top have brought the same appetite for risk at work to their chaotic personal lives. Rising from the ashes of Drexel Burnham Lambert after the junk bond crisis in the 1980s, Apollo – under the leadership of Leon Black, its brilliant and fearsome billionaire founder – has come to epitomize the new Wall Street for more than three decades. But, in 2021, Black resigned. His dramatic downfall, due in part to his close personal and business relationship with the disgraced paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, is a riveting saga of extreme wealth, jealous rivalries and public scandal. Drawing on exclusive access to Apollo’s executives, William D. Cohan exposes the power struggles, betrayals and courtroom battles behind the company’s meteoric rise – and offers a first-hand account of how one man’s ambition, hubris and excess altered the course of an international financial powerhouse. Both an origin story and a cautionary tale, Money to Burn also asks a critical question: have firms such as Apollo created an ingenious new model for global finance – or planted the seeds of our next great financial crisis?