New book excerpt details Leon Black's $158M Epstein payments and Apollo exit

Black accused Josh Harris of conspiracy in dismissed RICO suit

A Wall Street Journal excerpt from William D. Cohan’s new book “Money to Burn” details how Leon Black, the billionaire founder of Apollo Global Management, paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for financial advice over five years before resigning from the firm in March 2021 amid harassment allegations and political fallout from the relationship. The excerpt, published in The Wall Street Journal, draws on Cohan’s reporting and interviews with the principals to chronicle the events that ended Black’s tenure at the firm he founded in 1990. It also details the internal dispute over succession that followed, in which Black accused co-founder Josh Harris of hatching an extortionate plot with his accuser in a lawsuit that a federal judge dismissed as “nebulous and overtly conjectural.”

Black founded Apollo in 1990, shortly after the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert, where he had headed mergers and acquisitions. The firm grew from a $400 million private-equity fund into one of Wall Street’s largest alternative-asset managers. Among Black’s first hires was Marc Rowan, a young Drexel associate, who in turn recruited Harris from The Blackstone Group when Harris was 25 and Rowan was 27.

The two men rose with Apollo. In 2007, when Black took the firm public, he named Rowan and Harris “co-founders.” The three accumulated considerable wealth — Manhattan and Hamptons homes, private jets, luxury boats — and pursued separate interests. Harris collected sports teams, buying the Philadelphia 76ers in 2011 with a group of eight others for $280 million, then adding the New Jersey Devils and a stake in England’s Crystal Palace, and leading a 2023 group that purchased the Washington Commanders for $6 billion, then the highest price ever paid for an NFL franchise. Rowan bought and revamped restaurants in the Hamptons and on Long Island and co-founded the annuity insurer Athene with a $16 million Apollo investment. Black amassed an art collection that includes works by Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, Raphael, and Vincent van Gogh, and in 2012 he paid $120 million for an Edvard Munch pastel of “The Scream.”

Around 2017, Harris began telling Black he wanted the CEO job. Black was startled, and felt the role should go to Rowan if he ever gave it up. By 2019, Rowan — burned out from engineering a stock swap between Athene and Apollo and working on Athene’s largest deals — wanted to take a step back. Black insisted Rowan describe the break as a “semi-sabbatical.” In the fall of 2020, with Rowan still sequestered during the pandemic, Black summoned him to walk the hundred-acre grounds of Black’s Bedford, New York estate. “Marc,” Black recalled telling him, “I’m not asking anymore.” Rowan would be CEO. Black would break the news to Harris over drinks, attempting to impress upon him the value of his 59 million Apollo shares.

“I didn’t realize that it was an option for Marc to come back,” Harris said.

The Harris announcement came amid a growing political crisis. Over five years, Black had paid Epstein $158 million for what he described as financial advice on taxes and estate planning — payments that began after Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea to state charges of solicitation of prostitution and procuring a person under 18 for prostitution. Black said he did not realize the full amount because, after an initial written contract, the rest was agreed to by handshakes. In a 2021 report commissioned by Apollo and produced by the Dechert law firm, Apollo said an internal review had found no evidence of wrongdoing by Black. Black had asked for the review himself, telling Cohan, “because I knew I had done nothing wrong.”

Harris, who had been running Apollo day-to-day, told Cohan he was scrambling to contain the fallout well before the Dechert report became public. The pressure was mounting from pension funds, public shareholders, and employees, he said. A teachers’ pension manager told Harris: “Whether or not there was anything here, a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein is disqualifying.” Even before the Dechert report, Harris had been pushing by email for himself and Rowan to become co-CEOs.

Black’s succession plan and the Dechert report were both released on January 25, 2021. On March 8, Apollo announced an all-stock merger with Athene valuing Athene at $11 billion. Then, on March 17, a former Russian model named Guzel Ganieva posted on Twitter: “I was sexually harassed and abused by him for years.” She added that she had been “bullied, manipulated, threatened and coerced” by him, and that she was breaking her silence “because I do not want this type of predatory behavior to continue happening to other women.” Black accused Ganieva of extortion, saying the two had had a consensual affair between 2008 and 2014 and that she had sought roughly $100 million in exchange for her silence. In court filings, Black’s lawyers said the two had ultimately agreed to a $21 million settlement over 15 years in exchange for an NDA, of which roughly $9 million had been paid by the time of her tweets.

Five days after Ganieva’s initial posts, on March 22, 2021, Black announced he would resign as CEO and chairman effective immediately — some three months ahead of schedule. (Ganieva’s subsequent defamation lawsuit against Black was dismissed in 2023 after she failed to demonstrate the NDA was signed under duress; Ganieva and the Wigdor law firm that initially represented her did not respond to Cohan’s request for comment.)

In January 2022, Black filed an amended complaint in a RICO lawsuit against Ganieva and unnamed co-conspirators, accusing Harris of working with Ganieva, Wigdor, and an Apollo public-relations consultant, Steven Rubenstein, to hatch an “extortionate plot” against him. The filing compared Harris to “Shakespeare’s Iago, enraged by being passed over for promotion, he turned his wrath on his mentor and leader.” Harris denied the allegations through a Wall Street Journal spokesperson at the time: “These allegations and insinuations are desperate and absurd.” A spokesperson for Apollo said: “The legal dispute playing out between two former employees is unfortunate but won’t impact our strategy, businesses, or mission.”

In June 2022, a federal judge in Manhattan dismissed Black’s RICO lawsuit with prejudice. “These nebulous and overtly conjectural allegations do not come close to knitting Ganieva, Harris, and Rubenstein together in any solid or coherent way in concerted acts towards a common end,” the judge wrote. An appeals court affirmed the decision in March 2023. In a recently concluded private arbitration, Black accused Harris of violating the terms of their shareholder agreement, the excerpt reports.

Black remains Apollo’s largest shareholder, with about 85 million shares worth roughly $11 billion at recent prices, and runs the Elysium family office from Park Avenue. He was recently subpoenaed by House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer to appear September 3 after declining to answer questions about nondisclosure agreements. Rowan’s Apollo contract runs through 2030, and he was briefly in the running for Treasury Secretary in the Trump administration. Harris left Apollo in January 2022 and founded 26 North Partners, an alternative asset manager with roughly $37 billion under management, while continuing to pursue an NBA championship for Philadelphia — which has not won one since he was a Wharton undergraduate in 1983.