r/finance • u/bloomberg • Sep 05 '26
The Reinvention of Apollo Is Bigger Than Its Scandals
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-04/how-leon-black-built-and-reinvented-apollo-money-to-burn-review?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4ODU5OTU1NSwiZXhwIjoxNzg5MjA0MzU1LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUS1VITzBSS1YyVVIwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.ge9HftwAJ167xjZOlsH5xDi6mu1G8BpRdeFEgdQ4bnkWilliam Cohan chronicles the private equity giant’s colorful past. But its push into the savings of the upper middle class makes its future more consequential.
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u/Practical-Mobile6508 Sep 05 '26
Does the CEO still rape kids or was that just a Leon Black problem?
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u/MiddleAgedSponger Sep 05 '26
Leon resigned as CEO when his payments to prolific sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein became public. He has given a a lot of his shares to his children.
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u/Practical-Mobile6508 Sep 05 '26
You didn't answer my question
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Sep 05 '26
[deleted]
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u/Practical-Mobile6508 Sep 05 '26
So the jury's still out on if the current CEO rapes kids, got it!
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u/HR_Paul Sep 06 '26
Judging from the propaganda headline and article there can't be any reason to have any suspicion of these career criminals. All upstanding citizens now. Edit: the very picture of legitimate businesscrooks.
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u/McKoijion Sep 06 '26
It’s abundantly clear that Apollo, Jeffrey Epstein, and Israel are the greatest enemies of the American people. There’s a massive backlash coming not just from every other country abandoning the petrodollar, but from within the US itself.
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u/Traditional-Use-4093 14d ago
Apollo's pivot from a pure private-equity firebrand to an annuity-driven, loan-syndicating juggernaut means its money isn’t coming from a few LPs anymore – it’s coming from the whole upper-middle-class saving pool. The real test will be how that leveraged bank-like model holds up when the credit market turns; if those loans go sour, everyday savers could feel the bite. The book scratches the surface of this shift, but the consequences for everyday savers are what make it bigger than the scandals.
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u/Stunning-Most-6515 14d ago
Looks like Apollo’s pivot is really just an asset‑manager‑switch with a street‑style balance sheet. the annuity base gives it a low‑cost deposit‑like funding, but that also means a higher leverage hit to those savers if credit turns sour. i’m curious how they’ll guard against a crisis that knocks the annuity market hard.
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u/NoBodybuilder1496 13d ago
apollo’s big‑move into Athene and the loan spread is really a shift in risk,
not a cure for the past. the annuity holders are the new ‘deposit base’ and the loans
carry the credit exposure—if rates climb or defaults spike the spread will narrow and
the safety cushion shrinks, just like a bank mood‑lighting a liquidity fight. so while
the narrative is about a cleaner, lower‑margin model, the underlying balance sheet
still has the same core perils a bank faces. keep an eye on that curve.
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u/No_Design_1619 5d ago
so the big change isn’t about chasing higher PE returns, it’s about feeding its own loan book with a steady stream of fed‑fund‑style capital from everyday savers. the upside is a lower‑margin model that doesn’t rely on a few mega LPs, but the downside is more people who will see a hit in their retirement accounts if Apollo’s underwriting goes sideways. it’s like a bank that tells you, "we’re safe, just remember the interest rate is fixed at 5%."
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u/NS031716 Sep 05 '26
In many ways the economy hasn’t changed since 2009. Glut of savings are still the biggest problem and the more we shirk from this problem the more we are going to pay for it in the future.
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u/bloomberg Sep 05 '26
Gary Sernovitz for Bloomberg News
Like eating a tub of candy for dinner, reading the nearly 700 pages of William Cohan’s Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the New Wall Street (Portfolio, Sept. 8) leaves you fatigued, stuffed and still hungry. Yet some of the book’s most satisfying insights come in its final eight pages, when an “Apollo competitor” describes the firm, usually thought of as a pugnacious private capital giant, as “a lightly regulated and leveraged bank.”
The numbers supporting the competitor’s case are telling. Only a sixth of Apollo Global Management Inc.’s almost 6,000 people are now investment professionals. Many of the rest sell annuities through its Athene business. Their customers, self-selected for financial caution, provide Athene with low-cost funding; Apollo then uses their money to make direct loans through 16 separate platforms. While the firm isn’t as snoozy as the old 3-6-3 model — take in money at 3%, lend it out at 6%, leave the office at 3 o’clock — it does bear the risks of that model. Apollo, the competitor points out, is contracted to pay its annuity holders, unlike private equity or credit firms that — caveat emptor — merely try their best to meet targeted returns.
The money tells the same story. In the first half of this year, Apollo earned $1.5 billion from the “spread” at Athene, the difference between what it makes from its loans and what it needs to pay out in annuities. That’s the same amount it made from asset management, where three-quarters of revenue came from private capital funds rather than private equity. Indeed, banklike Apollo now makes about the same from syndicating loans as from managing private equity funds. Only 0.8% of its corporate revenue came from carried interest and other performance-related incentive fees.
This is a big-bet transformation. But Money to Burn doesn’t seem particularly interested in exploring the questions it raises. Why is Apollo steadily diversifying away from the competitive, investor-sated business of delivering 15% returns in PE for the lower-margin business of delivering 5% returns to annuity buyers? Is it because Apollo’s PE performance, from its 2006 flagship fund on, has been all over the place? Does Apollo’s evolved approach seem savvy only because its credit underwriting (and annuity-holder behavior) hasn’t yet been tested in a crisis? And how did hard-edged personality-driven Apollo up here?
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