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.
How does he do it? Fortune’s financial whiz Shawn Tully takes a deep dive into Apollo’s business, which is built on a smorgasbord of debt, and it's this morning’s must-read. “I don’t think I’ve discovered fire,” Rowan tell Tully, with characteristic modesty. “I think we’re just logically looking at trends, and we’ve picked a really, really big market that’s got the best future in the world of credit.”
Interestingly, Black had tried on three separate earlier occasions to get Rowan to take the CEO job, and each time he refused. Rowan told Tully he didn’t want to run the firm as a triumvirate. “You can respect your partners but also realize three people can’t run a company. When we agreed on things, it was great. When we disagreed, it became deadlocked.” But after Black exited in 2021 and their third cofounder went off to focus on his sports teams, Rowan took the opportunity.
You can read Tully’s story here. Other news below, including Fortune’s coverage of Amazon’s big bet on AI.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
