Apollo Global Management CEO Marc Rowan appeared on CNBC to discuss the controversy at Penn.
Two weeks ago, I happened to have a long chat with a nurse whose hospital is owned by the half-trillion-dollar private equity empire Apollo Global Management. I met this nurse, whose gender I am withholding due to their fear of retaliation, at the height of the pandemic, when they were terrified that the extreme cutbacks Apollo had imposed on staffing budgets were risking patient safety or even contributing to a preventable death in the hospital’s isolated rural community. Three years later, this nurse is largely preoccupied with their own basic survival: A virulent infection contracted during a routine surgery last year left them unable to walk without pain, and they walk 12,000 steps during an average shift.
The nurse knew it was unwise to undergo surgery in their own hospital, where there was a well-documented history of abysmal sanitation practices, the lone sterile technician on staff seemed to never leave the hospital, and corporate is so behind on its bills they had almost entirely eliminated the weekend housekeeping staff and were chronically short on basic supplies like IV tubing. But at some point following a restructuring two years ago, Apollo outsourced its health insurance administration to a company that placed onerous restrictions and preauthorization requirements on care received outside Apollo—and anyway, they felt they owed it to their colleagues and community to stay: “I wanted to show the docs and nurses here that I trust them, because they are wonderful people.” So they took the risk, and have since spent thousands of dollars out of pocket attempting to undo the damage.
Now, the nurse wonders if they will ever have time to heal. Only 24 hours passed after their last surgery before they were called back to work. Then in September, the hospital lost ten travel nurses in a single week; apparently, the hospital had slashed their weekly pay by $1,000 with no notice. The nurse has wanted to quit countless times, but it’s the only hospital for hours in any direction, and every month the patients get sicker and more reliant on what a colleague in their seventies told the nurse was “the most broken hospital” they have ever seen. “You know how you wring out a washcloth three or four times and the last time you squeeze it, you’ve got to squeeze really hard for maybe just a drop or two of water?” another of the nurse’s colleagues told me. Apollo “just never stops going back and trying to squeeze a little more.”
This campaign of deprivation has been extremely lucrative for Apollo, which over the past two years has extracted at least $1.6 billion from the nurse’s hospital chain, at an almost incalculable cost to workers, patients, and their small-town communities.
But that is what Apollo does. In the 33 years since a group of Michael Milken protégés founded the consummate modern private equity firm, Apollo has run its businesses ragged. The economic analysts at Moody’s have consistently found that Apollo portfolio companies plunged into distress or default around two-thirds of the time, the highest rate in the business. Since the pandemic began, the financial giant and its subsidiaries have been involved in at least 20 corporate bankruptcies, from the dramatic (and “perplexing,” in the Financial Times’ characterization) liquidation of the trucking company Yellow to the unexpectedly “messy” bankruptcy of serial looting victim Serta Simmons Bedding. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)
Sometimes Apollo’s “investments” fail as a result of having made Apollo insiders unimaginably rich; other times, Apollo leverages its mastery of the bankruptcy code to enrich itself off other private equity firms’ failures. First-year associates, according to Business Insider, typically make a base salary of $450,000; Apollo founder Leon Black is worth more than $12 billion. And Black’s longtime disciple and current Apollo chief executive officer Marc Rowan is estimated to be worth $5.8 billion.
I bring this up today only because that same Marc Rowan has spent the past week casting himself on cable news and on the anti-woke celebrity publisher Bari Weiss’s Free Press website as some kind of moral authority. Rowan’s oligarch fellow travelers have hailed his “heroic” bid to inflict a campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions upon the University of Pennsylvania, over its administration’s “failure to condemn … anti-Semitic hate.”
Rowan, who assumed the reins after the Apollo board asked his predecessor Leon Black to step down amid revelations he had wired $188 million to the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, looks like a nice enough guy. He wears sweaters for all his media appearances, has spent the past year vowing to reform Apollo’s “ruthless” reputation, and draws a stark contrast with Black, who was sued over the summer for allegedly raping a 16-year-old with mosaic Down syndrome at Epstein’s mansion. (Black denies the allegations and sued the alleged victim’s law firm for the third time shortly after the complaint was filed.) The image rehabilitation has not come cheap: An Apollo investor alleged in an August lawsuit that the private equity firm made $570 million in unexplained payments to Black, Rowan, and their co-founder Josh Harris when Black left the company.
Mark Humphrey/AP Photo
Politically, though, Rowan is a reflection of the financial institution he helms. He also chairs the board of Penn’s famous Wharton Business School, and in 2018 donated $50 million to the business school, $12 million of which was specifically earmarked to bankroll the “study” of a proprietary brand of voodoo economics dubbed the “Penn Wharton Budget Model,” whose proliferation in policy circles the Prospect explored in a recent feature. Penn produces more billionaires than any other undergraduate institution, almost wholly as a result of Wharton’s magnetism to 17-year-olds seeking to become billionaires, but this was the largest single donation in Wharton’s history. Like most oligarchs, Rowan finances politicians who advocate slashing government spending on social welfare programs; but also like most oligarchs, he is not above lobbying for a multitrillion-dollar bailout of the financial sector when his own portfolio is on the line, as it was in early 2020 when he emailed Jared Kushner demanding the Federal Reserve drop its collateral requirements for emergency lending to include junk debt. (“We have a totally unique situation,” Rowan wrote Kushner, whose family business Apollo had recently lent $184 million and whose father-in-law’s 2020 re-election campaign would receive $1 million from Rowan and his wife, according to Forbes. “There has been no MORAL HAZARD.”)
As Rowan had reasoned years earlier in the foreword to a 2012 book: “Traditionally, we are taught to judge the success of a society by how it deals with the least able, most vulnerable members of that society. [But] shouldn’t we judge a society by how they treat the most successful? Do we vilify, tax, expropriate, and condemn those who have succeeded, or do we celebrate economic success as the engine that propels our society toward greater collective well-being?”
Now Rowan is calling on his fellow wealthy Penn alums to inflict the austerity he promotes for the American masses upon his (and very incidentally, my) alma mater, which relies on donors like Rowan to subsidize the educations of students who cannot afford the $90,000 annual cost of attending the Philadelphia university. “Join me and many others who love UPenn by sending the university $1 in place of your normal discretionary contribution,” Rowan wrote in his open letter, “so that no one misses the point.” In a vivid display of class solidarity, his call was immediately heeded by fellow billionaire Wharton alumnus and former U.S. ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, whose family’s eponymous chemical company sued Apollo for $3 billion in 2008, alleging fraud and tortious interference. Penn trustee Vahan H. Gureghian, a charter school mogul with a famously lavish real estate portfolio, also resigned from the board last week, while billionaire Ron Lauder on Tuesday said he was contemplating pulling funds.
ROWAN IS NOT THE ONLY BILLIONAIRE advocating BDS upon the Ivy League over alleged antisemitism, of course; more famously, railroad pillager and fellow bailout demander Bill Ackman, net worth $3.6 billion, called on his fellow oligarchs to assemble a “Do Not Hire” list comprising the listed members of all 34 Harvard University student groups that signed a letter holding Israel “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Ackman’s move inspired a conservative dark-money group to send a “doxxing truck” around Cambridge, parading the names and faces of students it dubbed “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites” on an electronic billboard, a stunt that was quickly condemned by everyone from Larry Summers to Harvard Hillel.
In Ackman’s (extremely limited) defense, the Harvard letter, which failed to muster a single even lukewarm sentence acknowledging the sadism of the attacks on Israel or expressing sympathy for the grieving, was pretty offensive, its combination of absolutist tone and buzzword-laden content calling to mind something the NYU girls in White Lotus might have come up with following a brief consultation with ChatGPT. While ostensibly written to “call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians,” the letter seemed dismayingly unburdened by any genuine reflection as to the power imbalances enabling said annihilation—or for that matter, Harvard—and how fundamental “basic human decency” is to the project of overcoming such an imbalance.
Down the Acela corridor at Penn, Mark Rowan’s Ivy League BDS might seem like a me-too version of Ackman’s McCarthyist blacklist. But it is actually far more sinister. No Penn-affiliated organization produced any tone-deaf letters of note in the aftermath of the Hamas massacre; in fact, Rowan’s coup attempt has nothing whatsoever to do with the barbaric attacks on Israeli civilians—unless you buy into the logic, expressed in his opening sentence, that a Palestinian literary festival held three weeks ago on the Penn campus was somehow a prelude to the carnage.
“It took less than two weeks to go from the Palestine Writes literary festival on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus to the barbaric slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis,” Rowan asserts, relating the rise of wokeness at Penn to the unprecedented orgy of violence.
Reader, I spent days attempting to determine what exactly it was that Rowan and gang found so unspeakably blasphemous about this Palestine Writes literary festival, which was held the weekend of September 22 to honor the late poet and literary critic Salma Khadra Jayyusi. And it is difficult to discern anything other than the festival’s mere existence. Rowan’s letter accused panelists of having “advocated ethnic cleansing,” defending “substantial violence,” and uttering and “repeat[ing] various blood libels against the Jews,” but offered no evidence of any of that. Rowan initially submitted his letter to the campus newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, which failed to immediately publish it, causing him to imply the paper had censored his speech; the DP said in a follow-up story that it had not been able to verify Rowan’s claims.
Contemporaneous media coverage suggested that Rowan might have been referencing Pink Floyd singer-songwriter Roger Waters, who apparently once used the K-word in an email; or possibly CUNY professor Marc Lamont Hill, who was fired from a job at CNN after delivering a speech using the phrase “from the river to the sea”; or possibly Aya Ghanameh, a children’s book author and illustrator who has argued on Twitter that “settlers aren’t civilians” and that violent resistance is necessary when “[peace] isn’t already the status quo.” But the focus of the festival was literature, not inflammatory tweets, as an anti-Zionist Jewish group, Penn Chavurah, pointed out in an Instagram post endorsing the festival: “We do not unilaterally endorse every thing that every speaker at the upcoming event has ever said or done, [but] the festival is an important opportunity to celebrate, center and engage with a diversity of Palestinian voices.” Waters, for his part, claims he arrived at the event only to be told he was not welcome on Penn’s campus, so the single prospective attendee accused of engaging in a normal person’s definition of “antisemitism” was successfully purged from the event. (A Gaza university professor with relatives in Hamas who teaches Israeli poetry to his literature students, but has also posted inflammatory things about Jews on social media, was stricken from the lineup at least a week before the festival started.)
The University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia
A closer look at the right-wing shitstorm that engulfed the Penn campus over the month of September was no more edifying. The Daily Caller accused the event’s organizers of “glorify[ing] Palestinian terrorism” in a September 10 piece noting that scheduled panelist Salman Abu Sitta had “accused Israel of ‘discrimination and apartheid [and] ethnic cleansing,’” accusations former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo made against the country just days earlier. Three days later, Penn alum and fanatical private equity booster Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), who also lobbied Fed chairman Jerome Powell to approve Rowan’s plan to bail out junk bonds in April 2020, wrote Penn president Liz Magill asking her to disinvite Waters and Hill, the latter of whom he claimed had “never adequately apologized” for saying “river to the sea” even though he publicly apologized at least three times. And two days after that, National Review condemned Penn for “hosting an event packed to the gills with people who have time and again openly and unrepentantly called for the deaths of Jews,” while furnishing no evidence that anyone involved had done anything of the sort.
Magill issued a statement “unequivocally and emphatically” condemning antisemitism, but reiterating the university’s support for the “free exchange of ideas.” She hosted meetings on antisemitism, instructed the Penn police to provide additional security to Jewish student organizations, and pledged to funnel additional resources to combating antisemitism on campus in the future—which partially appeased some critics while rendering others still more furious. By September 18, The Jerusalem Post was reporting that the event had split pro-Israel groups into two factions, one represented by Miriam Elman of the Academic Engagement Network, who said she felt the danger of anti-Israel rhetoric could be met with “better speech,” and the other exemplified by the Zionist Organization of America, which threatened to sue Penn if it did not cancel the festival.
Behind the scenes, pro-Israel groups pressured sponsors of the literary festival. Organizer Susan Abulhawa, a best-selling novelist who founded the event as an offshoot of a charity she runs to build playgrounds in historic Palestinian neighborhoods and refugee camps, said in an interview that she received an email from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts two days before the festival started asking her to remove its logo from the event website, ostensibly because the grant it had contributed had been specifically earmarked to support an anthology of essays and short stories published in conjunction with the festival, as opposed to the event itself. After clarifying the nature of the group’s grant on the festival website, she received a cease and desist letter demanding she remove the logo immediately. If she’d had any doubt as to who was ultimately behind the sudden request, the letter was immediately posted on the website of the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization with an annual budget well in excess of $100 million that has often in the past used its mission as an opponent of antisemitism as cover for spying on human rights and labor activists, in particular not just Palestinian rights activists but opponents of South African apartheid, according to multiple published sources in the 1990s.
Then something weird happened. On the eve of the festival’s first day, the Penn chapter of the Jewish campus group Hillel announced on Instagram that a person the organization described variously as a “student” and a “member of the campus community” had earlier that morning sneaked into the building and begun overturning tables and trash cans while muttering antisemitic diatribes; The Daily Pennsylvanian later quoted a Penn Police spokesman describing the perpetrator as a mentally disturbed individual “experiencing a crisis.” A student who witnessed the incident called the perpetrator someone too old to be a student, though a CBS News article on the incident continues to identify the individual that way. (An email to a Penn Police spokesperson seeking details on the incident was not answered.)
“What Did They Think Was Going To Happen?” blared a National Review headline on the incident, in a post reasoning that Penn president Liz Magill “bears responsibility” for the actions of the mentally disturbed individual because she failed to cancel the literary festival: “The Palestine Writes organizers have a right to voice their opinions, but they do not have the right to do so on Penn’s land,” author Zach Kessel concluded, likely unaware and unconcerned that the university used eminent domain to displace 4,500 Black residents a few years before the 1967 war.
That’s where Rowan stepped in. Together with two fellow private equity barons on the board of trustees and a long list of high-net-worth alumni, Rowan composed an open letter to Magill demanding that festival organizers remove all references to Penn from its marketing materials, that Penn-affiliated groups involved with the event (like the Kelly Writers House and the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations program) disclose the precise nature of their involvement with the event and individually issue statements distancing them from the alleged antisemitism, and that Magill immediately implement “mandatory antisemitism awareness training across the University, including in new student orientation programming and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programming—for students, faculty, and staff.” In lieu of such a commitment, someone paid a truck with a digital billboard exactly like the one that appeared last week at Harvard, parading the headshots of various speakers next to captions like “SHAME on [Sponsoring Organization] at U Penn” for sponsoring “[Speaker] for promoting Genocide of the Jews.” Penn did not respond to a request for comment.
IN THE END, THE FESTIVAL BILLIONAIRE hedge fund manager Cliff Asness characterized as an “antisemitic Burning Man” turned out to be strangely short on direct references to Jews or even Israel. Perhaps the most explicitly anti-Zionist feature was the screening of a Netflix film about a young girl’s experience being evicted from her village in 1948, which the American Jewish Committee has slammed as a “blood libel” and Israeli politicians have campaigned to cancel, but which the Palestine-focused news site Mondoweiss describes as a “mild depiction” of the 1948 Nakba, a historical event you can read about in this Israeli intelligence report.
Otherwise, the proceedings were mostly … uplifting. There were panels on Palestinian feminism and the experience of being queer in the Arab world, a lecture on Palestinian embroidery, performance poetry on the Australian aboriginal experience, a chat between Palestinian chefs discussing the region’s bread production techniques, a discussion of friendship and “the recognition that … Vietnamese refugees are settlers and alibis for the American Dream” featuring the novelist and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen, and a lecture on Palestinian resistance to Napoleon. It was essentially a feast of cultural topics that might not be at all political if blockades had not shuttered the textile mills, if children of Russian-Bulgarian immigrants had not won James Beard awards marketing hummus and lamb shoulder as “Israeli cuisine,” and if Israeli law had not criminalized gatherings of more than ten Palestinians to discuss topics “liable to be interpreted as political.”
Indeed, the real-life festival was so wildly at odds with the Nazi death rally promised by the antisemitism squad that a Jewish Exponent reporter dispatched to cover it seemed to come away distinctly underwhelmed bordering on charmed, summarizing its vibe with a quote from the husband of a Jordanian performance poet: “When we gather for Palestine, it’s always for protest or there’s war happening, Gaza being bombed, children being killed … This is more celebrating the culture.”
Penn president Elizabeth Magill at her inauguration, October 21, 2022
Mackenzie Fierceton, a recent Penn alum and subject of a New Yorker profile about the university’s bizarre campaign to revoke her bachelor’s degree and assassinate her character after her biological mother claimed she’d fabricated stories of being repeatedly physically and sexually abused to impress the admissions department, attended the festival and wrote in an email that she “witnessed only joy, love, and peace amidst the celebration of Palestinian voices, art, and literature.”
But if it was difficult to reconcile the jihad convention of right-wing fever dreams with the lovefest described by literally everyone in attendance, there’s a good reason for that: The methods and rhetoric Rowan and company deployed to smear Palestine Writes seem to have originated from a playbook specifically devised to undermine student groups advocating boycott, divestment, and sanctions actions on university campuses. The never-aired four-part Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby—USA, about a young Jewish journalist who went undercover as an operative for the Israel lobby at the height of the BDS campus movement, features a number of successful astroturf operations that share a spooky resemblance to September’s shitstorm at Penn. In one case at University of California, Davis, two spray-painted swastikas mysteriously appeared on the walls of a Jewish fraternity house the week after a successful student senate vote to demand the college divest its Israel investments, and a consortium of Jewish student groups secretly coordinated with help from the Israeli embassy wrote a flurry of op-eds and social media posts using the incident to paint BDS as a “hate group.” But as an Israeli embassy campus operative explained in the documentary on a hidden camera, the Jewish groups believed a “random, like, white supremacist type people who just came in, did it, left”—not a student BDS supporter—was responsible for the vandalism.
Similar to anti-BDS operations staged at Purdue University and the University of Tennessee, the Penn media fracas and the doxxing trucks at both the literary festival and last week at Harvard were powered by the shadowy website Canary Mission, which scrapes social media platforms to pull together profiles on Palestinian rights supporters, no matter how young or inconsequential, and culls their Twitter feeds for inflammatory-sounding quotes it can use as “evidence” of antisemitism. A dizzying network of national nonprofits like the Anti-Defamation League (where Marc Rowan is the chief benefactor of a fellowship program), campus organizations, and allied media outlets and dark-money groups are coordinated by a central command that scours the internet constantly for signs of Palestinian rights meetups. “Generally within about 30 seconds of one of these things popping up on campus,” said one operative in the film, “the system picks it up, it goes into a queue and alerts our researchers, and they evaluate it, they tag it, and if it rises to a certain level we issue early warning reports to our partners.”
In the six years since Al Jazeera filmed its documentary, BDS has largely ceased to be a thing, mostly because pro-Israel lobbyists have passed laws in at least 35 states effectively banning the movement. Last year saw just three campus votes to boycott Israel, down from 44 during the 2014-2015 school year.
Perhaps sheer boredom led the lobby to fix its echo chambers on Palestine Writes, though it may also stem from something specific to Penn, where students who identify as Jewish, who once comprised between a third and 40 percent of the student body, now represent just 16 percent. Earlier this year, Penn Hillel executive director Gabe Greenberg spoke with Inside Higher Ed about the “‘dozens if not a hundred’ conversations” he’d had in recent months “with parents concerned about the shrinkage of Penn’s Jewish population.”
Susan Abulhawa, the novelist and conference organizer, says she had been planning Palestine Writes—and the university had been aware of it—for more than a year, and the first sign of coordinated opposition only came during the first week of September. Abulhawa doubts Rowan’s attempted putsch has anything specific to do with Magill or even Penn. “When you make an example out of a university president, that ensures that not only every other university president falls in line, so does every dean, every provost, every professor,” she said. “It’s to strike terror [and] fear.”
The tactic will surprise no one familiar with Apollo, whose executives are so notorious for bullying creditors in bankruptcy court that investment bankers have historically charged an “Apollo premium” for underwriting deals like the $5 billion bond issuance that financed the firm’s takeover of the rural hospital chain. But that premium is ultimately borne by innocent bystanders like coal miners and factory workers, rural hospital patients and their overwhelmed nurses; the one at the beginning of this story is still owed thousands of dollars Apollo stiffed them for weeks they worked during a ransomware attack two years ago.
If Rowan were truly interested in rehabilitating the reputation of the firm he co-founded, he might forswear wage theft or dividends that leave large employers insolvent or strategic bankruptcies designed specifically to bust unions and plunder their pension funds. But that would require Rowan to acknowledge the carnage with which his company’s insatiable drive for speedy investment returns has littered flyover country. As the scheme to punish his alma mater illustrates, “bullying detractors into exhausted submission” is more amenable to his comfort zone.
Fierceton, who relied on scholarships endowed by rich donors to finance her Penn education after she ended up in foster care, believes lower-income Ivy League students are the ultimate targets of the private equity mogul’s billionaire boycott. “Students who rely on scholarships are forced to realize that their education is dependent on elite, conservative donors who can impose their political preferences on the University to silence speech on campus,” she wrote. “Penn, like other institutions, makes decisions based not in the best interest [of] students, but what billionaire donors tell them to do.”
