Good morning.
It’s been two and a half years since legendary investor Leon Black stepped down as CEO of Apollo Global Management, tarnished from his financial involvement with sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. His successor Marc Rowan has adopted a noticeably lower and less-swashbuckling profile. While Black worked from a 42nd floor suite adorned with French antique handguns and Impressionist paintings, Rowan leads the firm from a spartan interior office whose only views are of the trading floor.
But don’t let that fool you. Rowan has turned Apollo into a money machine that is generating some of the fattest current returns in alternative asset management—with $2 billion in earnings in the first half of this year. Apollo’s share price has jumped 89% since he took the reins. And Rowan believes he will reach a trillion dollars of assets under management by 2026.
