The Gaping Hole at the Heart of Financial Journalism

For years, Leon Black, the billionaire chair and CEO of Apollo Global Management, was pummeled by the press for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and his extramarital affairs. Detesting reporters, he had long refused to talk to them, but by 2023 he felt he had to tell his story, and so he turned to the one journalist he felt he could trust: William Cohan.

Cohan had spent 17 years on Wall Street, working on mergers and acquisitions for Lazard Frères, Merrill Lynch, and JPMorgan Chase. In 2004, he left finance for journalism. He wrote about business for Vanity Fair and Air Mail and a host of other publications with the knowledge of an insider but with enough independence to earn the respect of his peers. (In occasional conversations with him over the years, I have always found him a generous sharer of information.) Cohan was also the author of seven books about companies like Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, and GE, and he socialized with many top executives. When Puck launched, in September 2021, he began writing a gossipy and sometimes news-breaking column for it.

And so it was to Cohan that Leon Black decided to unburden himself. Over many hours across multiple interviews, he discussed his dealings with Epstein, his relations with women, and his career in finance. In April 2024, Cohan published two long pieces about Black in Puck. Pleased with them, Black kept talking. Now Cohan has come out with Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street.

For many readers, the most immediate question will be what additional truth Cohan found about Black’s ties to Epstein and why he paid the convicted pedophile and registered sex offender $158 million, as previously reported. Alas, he did not find much. Black insists that that money went to Epstein for advice on taxes and estate planning as well as for help in the purchase of art, yachts, and planes, and that Epstein saved him between $1 billion and $2 billion in taxes. Cohan expresses skepticism about this but found nothing to contradict it.

Nor did he find any evidence that Epstein was supplying Black with women. He does, however, go into Black’s sex life at length. As Cohan makes clear, Black had affairs with many young women and made little effort to conceal them. He devotes 40 pages to his involvement with Guzel Ganieva, a Russian woman to whom Black paid millions of dollars to keep quiet. She nonetheless wanted more, and Black—convinced she was trying to extort him—began wearing a wire to their meetings at expensive restaurants. Black shared the transcripts with Cohan, and in Money to Burn he offers extensive quotations from them, which in the end seem repetitive and voyeuristic.

Cohan similarly offers long passages from his interviews, with little editing or authorial intervention to help us understand their significance. Throughout, Cohan refers to Black as well as his Apollo co-CEOs, Marc Rowan and Josh Harris, by their first names, which seems jarring. But Black does not come off well. He seems the personification of greed, rapacity, and priapism, with boundless resources to satisfy his appetites.

By contrast, Marc Rowan, who succeeded Black as Apollo’s chief executive and who greatly expanded the company’s assets by engineering a 2022 merger with Athene, an annuity and retirement services giant, comes off as a princeling. Chapter headings include “Marc in Control,” “Marc Makes His Case,” and “It’s Marc’s Show Now.” “Marc,” Cohan writes, “has been the perfect choice to lead Apollo in the years since the shit hit the fan with Leon and Jeffrey Epstein, Leon and Ganieva, Leon and Josh.”

The one episode in which Rowan does not sparkle is the campaign he waged against the University of Pennsylvania (his alma mater) over its alleged antisemitism, which ultimately cost its president, Liz Magill, her job. “Some saw the irony in what Marc was doing at Penn,” Cohan writes. He cites an October 2023 article in The American Prospect that lambasted Rowan for Apollo’s treatment of workers and other forms of “the carnage with which his company’s insatiable drive for speedy investment returns has littered flyover country.”

This is one of the few places in Cohan’s 617-page account that mentions the impact that Apollo’s dealmaking has had on the country. In a chapter on the press’s coverage of the company, he offers several examples, including its purchase of Noranda Aluminum in New Madrid, Missouri. Noranda produced about 15 percent of all the aluminum made in the US. In 2007, Apollo—following standard private-equity practice—bought it for $1.2 billion, borrowing $1 billion of that sum and using Noranda’s assets as collateral. Over five years, Apollo siphoned off more than $400 million in dividends and $13 million in fees. In 2015, it sold its stake in the company, generating another $50 million in profit for Apollo’s executives and investors. The following year, the hollowed-out company filed for bankruptcy, at the cost of hundreds of jobs and millions in tax payments to the town.

Cohan’s account of Noranda’s fate is drawn from Gretchen Morgenson’s book These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America. Money to Burn contains little original information on the often-corrosive effect that Apollo’s financial engineering has had on management, workers, and communities. The book devotes far more space to power struggles inside the firm and to Black’s relations with his father, Epstein, and his mistresses than it does to the transformative effect that Apollo and companies like it have had on America.