This article appears in the October 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
Financial journalist William Cohan is known for his “as told to” style, quoting at length from the Wall Street insiders he interviews so readers feel like they’re in on the action. At its best, the results help to reveal the way our modern masters of the financial universe think, and it garners a few scoops, too. But it’s not conducive to telling an actual story in a compelling or critical way, as Cohan’s latest book, the bloated Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street, demonstrates.
Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street
By William D. Cohan
Portfolio
Yes, Cohan, a former investment banker, got insider access, interviewing friend-of-Jeffrey Epstein Black and other figures at the shadow-banking juggernaut Apollo Global Management: current leader Marc Rowan, co-founder Josh Harris, the head of Apollo’s life insurance affiliate Athene, Jim Belardi, as well as several other key people in the company’s operations and history.
But to what end?
Cohan, in telling the story of this investment behemoth, often substitutes access for judgment. Many events in Money to Burn are told in he-said, she-said style, going on for pages when a sharp summary paragraph or two would do. As a result, it reads more like stenography than reporting, with long transcript-like quotes, not to mention exhaustive accounts of Black’s early career working with Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert and various Apollo acquisitions and conquests (Here’s Harrah’s Entertainment! There’s Executive Life!), along with, for some odd reason, where almost everyone he interviewed attended high school.
What’s rarely mentioned: the downsides of the immense financialization of American life over the past several decades—something that both Black and Apollo benefited from and fueled—and what role that plays in our fractured civic and economic lives. The story of Apollo could serve as an excellent window into the story of the U.S. economy in the neoliberal era, but in Cohan’s hands, we just get an endless scroll of self-justifications.
COHAN TIPS HIS SYMPATHETIC HAND in the introduction. “Leon Black is a bit of a reluctant Wall Street billionaire,” he writes. Little evidence is ever presented for this. How could there be? There are no reluctant self-made billionaires, for the rather obvious reason that acquiring such a status requires a preternatural level of focus, intensity, and want—something, Cohan reports, Black possesses in large quantities. Incidentally, in 2012 Black paid $120 million for one of four existing versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which doesn’t, well, scream that the guy is embarrassed about his fortune or reluctant to show it off.
Apollo Global Management was founded in 1990, with a specialty in distressed debt and leveraged buyouts, then a relatively tiny corner of Wall Street. The firm is both partially responsible for and a beneficiary of an explosion in financialized innovation and growth.
The business titans who, beginning in the 1980s, championed hostile takeovers and mergers with high-interest debt (known as “junk bonds”) they then loaded onto the newly purchased company claimed this would force more efficient operations. But after a string of bankruptcies and the indictment of Drexel Burnham Lambert’s Milken for securities fraud in the 1980s, practitioners of the “leveraged buyout” came to be seen as distasteful. So the industry pivoted to something more neutral-sounding: “private equity.”
From the time of the Roman emperors onward, extreme inequality has led to decadence and indulgence.
This was a remarkable boost—for the finance bros, that is. With promises of big returns, investors crammed into private equity funds, where Apollo and others waited to collect “two and twenty”: a 2 percent annual management fee, as well as a 20 percent share of all profits. In 2011, Apollo went public, turning the founders into billionaires. Today, Apollo has more than $1 trillion in assets under management alone, and spans not just private equity and distressed debt, but also insurance, retirement annuities, and private credit, making it one of the world’s largest and most powerful alternative asset managers.
Others did not do so well. Take RegionalCare Hospital Partners, which Apollo used as a platform to roll up numerous other small and rural health care facilities, ultimately becoming, under the name LifePoint, a large operator of rural hospitals. It’s quite lucrative, at least as far as Apollo is concerned, since they absorb almost none of the financial downside. That accrues to places like Ottumwa Regional Health Center in Iowa, which paid a $2.7 million management fee even while understaffed and operating at a loss, while LifePoint, in turn, turned $9.2 million over to Apollo.
All of this is in Money to Burn because of a 2022 congressional investigation that ensued after a nurse sexually assaulted multiple patients at Ottumwa. Cohan quotes from the report, but does not, as far as I can tell, speak with a single victim (or a victim’s family member). Instead, Cohan quotes an unsigned statement from Apollo, saying they “invested billions of dollars in Lifepoint.” Good to know!
There are other things about how Apollo and private equity have made the U.S. worse that you won’t learn from this book. Here are some others, just in the health care category: Studies have found that patient falls and hospital-acquired infections increase at private equity–owned hospitals, while staffing decreases. At the same time, the amount charged to patients and insurers goes up. In nursing homes, the data is even starker: Private equity ownership increases mortality.
A reader will also search in vain for any discussion of the attempts to crack down on the worst private equity predations, like the Stop Wall Street Looting Act from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) or the Take Back Our Hospitals Act by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), which would simply ban private equity from owning hospitals or nursing homes.
Another thing barely mentioned? The carried interest loophole, which allows hedge fund managers like Black and his partners to pay a lower capital gains rate on much of their compensation. Barack Obama campaigned on doing away with it; Donald Trump and Joe Biden did, too. It still exists. The book mentions it once, simply to allow Rowan’s contemptuous claim that Democrats don’t want it to go away because they can fundraise off of it, which Cohan fails to challenge.
What about the unemployed workers left in the wake of various mergers? Cohan devotes more attention to the “Rosebud” of Black’s father, who committed suicide after getting implicated in a corporate bribery scandal in Honduras known as “Bananagate.” (No, Black doesn’t use that term; newspapers in 1975 did.)
In fact, a reader will learn more about the punishing work hours at Apollo (brutal even by Wall Street standards) and Black’s struggles with his weight than they do about the hardships faced by employees at the firms it financially ravaged. One of the most negative takes on Apollo quoted in the book comes toward the end from the Prospect’s own Moe Tkacik, when Cohan quotes at length—and seemingly approvingly—from her takedown of Rowan’s efforts to prove the University of Pennsylvania administrators took a cavalier approach to antisemitism on campus, noting that if Rowan really wanted to rehabilitate Apollo’s reputation, he would “forswear wage theft or dividends that leave large employers insolvent.”
One can only wish that viewpoint was more integrated into the book.
FROM THE TIME OF THE ROMAN EMPERORS ONWARD, extreme inequality has led to decadence and indulgence. The Apollo bros prove no exception, and this is where Money to Burn, finally, acquires a bit of an edge. While Harris begins buying sports teams (the Philadelphia 76ers, the New Jersey Devils, the Washington Commanders, and a WNBA Philadelphia team that will start in 2030, at last count) and Rowan uses his billions to bully administrators, stakeholders, and residents at places as varied as the University of Pennsylvania and the Hamptons resort town of Montauk, Black finds his billion-dollar art collection isn’t enough and also indulges what polite society once called appetites.
Black’s downfall is not just his decade-long acquaintance with Jeffrey Epstein and his, well, consorts, but the fact that he paid him $158 million for financial and tax advice, even though no one has been able to satisfactorily explain how the louche Epstein possessed expertise that sophisticated Wall Street lawyers lacked. Money to Burn devotes many pages to a somewhat skeptical, but not skeptical enough, tit-for-tat over Black’s claim that a lawyer’s legal malfeasance led to a potential estate tax problem that only Epstein could solve. (Left unmentioned: why a “reluctant billionaire” would spend millions upon millions of dollars to save on estate taxes, though I suppose wanting to hoard wealth upon death as well is a matter of consistency.)
Almost no one thinks Black is telling the truth. He was, after all, spied around town many times with Epstein and any number of younger—much younger—women. As one anonymous insider tells Cohan, “Leon’s disgusting. Can you imagine a girl that would want to sleep with Leon?”
When combined with allegations of rape by Russian model Guzel Ganieva, with whom he had a yearslong on-again, off-again affair, Black’s peccadilloes cause a reputational crisis at Apollo. This leads to him getting pushed out of the leadership ranks. Rowan takes over, and Black goes on to sue Harris, alleging he conspired with journalists, public relations operatives, and Ganieva to drag him through the public mud in a failed plot to become CEO himself. The litigation was dismissed, with the federal court calling the case “nebulous and overtly conjectural,” and arbitration between the two men recently concluded.
Black goes into “you are there” detail on the succession battle at Apollo, which no doubt is of much interest to the sort of people who enjoy Wall Street gossip, but is unlikely to be of concern to anyone else since Apollo is going to continue to screw the little people no matter who is in charge.
More relevant is what, in part, drove Rowan’s ultimate victory: his championing of integrating annuities business Athene into Apollo and using its gusher of insurance money to leverage up and finance involvement in private credit markets to turbocharge profits. This has the rather nasty potential of seriously damaging the entire global economy, since there is evidence that private equity firms like Apollo are stuffing life insurance balance sheets with risky loans rather than boring investments like Treasury debt. But it’s all good for Apollo, since a convoluted state bailout structure is already in place, whereby every surviving life insurer will have to pay if one becomes insolvent—and those assessments are offset with tax credits, meaning that the ultimate payers are poor schlubs like you and me.
The book closes with a discussion with two Cassandras about Apollo’s business model, and a warning that financial crises happen when people don’t expect them. Duly noted. As I said earlier, this book is best for those who want the insider nitty-gritty, and don’t much care to find out about what it means to anyone except Leon Black. As for the nation’s other 330 million or so people, I suggest 2023’s These Are the Plunderers by Gretchen Morgenson and Josh Rosner, a much more critical look at how Apollo does business and how it impacts all of us for the worse.
This article appears in Oct 2026 Issue.
