Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street

From the bestselling author of House of Cards and Power Failure comes the sweeping tale of a powerful and controversial financial empire, set against the turbulent backdrop of a rapidly changing Wall Street.

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.

WILLIAM D. COHAN, a former senior Wall Street M&A investment banker for 17 years at Lazard Frères & Co., Merrill Lynch and JPMorganChase, is the New York Times bestselling author of three non-fiction narratives about Wall Street: Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World; House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street; and, The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co., the winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. His 2014 book, The Price of Silence, about the Duke lacrosse scandal was also a New York Times bestseller. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and writes a bi-weekly opinion column for the Dealbook section of the New York Times. He also writes for Fortune, The Financial Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, ArtNews, the Irish Times, and the Washington Post. He also appears regularly on MSNBC, on Bloomberg TV, where he is a contributing editor, and on CNN and the BBC-TV. He has also appeared as a guest on the Daily Show, with Jon Stewart, The NewsHour, The Charlie Rose Show, The Tavis Smiley Show, and CBS This Morning as well as on numerous NPR, BBC and Bloomberg radio programs. He is a graduate of Duke University, Columbia University School of Journalism and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business

“Money to Burn . . . might as well be drawn from the pages of a Tom Wolfe novel. A Shakespearian tragedy measurable in billable hours . . . Money to Burn is a remarkable work about financial genius and human failure.” —The Economist

“Cohan's ear for dialogue is pitch perfect . . . riveting.” —The Times

“Money to Burn is a riveting and astounding exposé of our rotten new Gilded Age. No one is better at spilling the secrets of Wall Street’s high-flying and hard-falling billionaires than the renowned financial journalist William D. Cohan.” —Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money

“William Cohan’s latest exposé, Money to Burn, is a Shakespearean tale of modern hubris on Wall Street . . . [and] a master class in reporting from the hidden power centers of America’s billionaire class. Another must-read from the country’s premier business journalist.” —Susan Glasser, coauthor of The Divider

“Money to Burn is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how one of the most important players on modern Wall Street came to be. It’s one part family saga, one part Shakespearean play, and one part a history of the financial world—and entirely engrossing.” —Bethany McLean, coauthor of The Big Fail and The Smartest Guys in the Room

“William Cohan has the rare ability to translate esoteric Wall Street jargon into elegant, comprehensible words . . . a titan of financial journalism.” —Ken Auletta, author of Hollywood Ending and Googled