Money to Burn

Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s most formidable investment firms, has thrived in private equity by taking bold, contrarian bets. Blending gripping narrative with rigorous journalism, Money to Burn offers a spectacular investigation into a world where investment firms operate like unregulated banks and where the billionaires at the top bring the same appetite for risk to their chaotic personal lives.Drawing on exclusive interviews, Cohan uses his decades of experience at prestigious M&A firms and his unparalleled access to Apollo executives to reveal the fraught partnerships and high-stakes wagers behind the company’s meteoric rise – and offers a first-hand account of the dramatic downfall of CEO Leon Black, whose own controversies echo the self-destructive, headline-grabbing scandals surrounding his famous father, Eli Black. Both an origin story and a cautionary tale, Money to Burn asks a critical question: have firms like Apollo created a brilliant new model for global finance ­or planted the seeds of our next great financial crisis?

William D. Cohan is The New York Times bestselling author of The Price of Silence, Money and Power, House of Cards, and The Last Tycoons, and most recently, Power Failure, named Best Book of 2022 by the New Yorker, the Financial Times, and the Economist. A former Wall Street investment banker, he was a special correspondent at Vanity Fair and is a founding partner of Puck. His writing appears in The New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic and the Washington Post, among others.