Money to Burn

On March 22, 2021, Leon Black, the brilliant and fearsome billionaire founder of investment firm Apollo Global Management, resigned. For more than three decades, Apollo had epitomized the new Wall Street, pioneering both private equity and private credit by delivering staggering returns through aggressive takeovers and astute, contrarian bets. But its most powerful figure would eventually be undone by his own poor judgment, including a friendship and business relationship with the disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and an affair with a Russian woman intent on a shakedown. Yet the path to that reckoning began long before. When Drexel Burnham Lambert collapsed amid the junk bond crisis of the late 1980s, Apollo rose from its ashes, led by Michael Milken's protégé, a young dealmaker named Leon Black. His financial genius and relentless drive mirrored that of his father, a celebrated Wall Street businessman whose life ended in a shocking scandal and unfathomable tragedy. Black’s inherited appetite for risk propelled him to take Apollo to stratospheric heights—and ultimately to his own spectacular fall from power. With exclusive access to Apollo's big dealmakers and those who know them best, Money to Burn is a riveting saga of extreme wealth, jealous rivalries, and public disgrace. Through propulsive storytelling and meticulous reporting, William D. Cohan exposes the power struggles, betrayals, and courtroom battles that fueled Apollo's meteoric rise—and how one man's hubris and excess altered the course of a global financial powerhouse.