How Leon built the fortune
Leon Black's wealth comes from Apollo Global Management, the investment firm he co founded in 1990 with a group of colleagues from Drexel Burnham Lambert, among them Marc Rowan, Josh Harris and Antony Ressler. Drexel had collapsed earlier that year, and Black's team saw an opportunity in the wreckage of the 1980s junk bond market: debt of struggling companies could be bought cheaply, and some of those companies could be taken over and restructured.
Apollo's early funds bought distressed bonds and loans, including a large portfolio of high yield securities from the failed insurer Executive Life. The returns established Apollo as a specialist in complex and contrarian deals. Over the following decades the firm grew into a broad alternative asset manager, with private equity, credit, real estate and insurance businesses, and became known for buyouts in sectors from chemicals and casinos to retail and travel.
Apollo listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011. Black's long held stake in the firm, along with carried interest earned on its funds over three decades, forms the core of his fortune. He remains a significant shareholder even after stepping back from management.
Black was known inside Apollo for an intense, detail focused approach to deals and for a willingness to buy assets that other investors avoided. Several Apollo investments, such as its purchases of chemical companies and its later move into retirement services, reflected that contrarian view.
Companies and holdings
Apollo's businesses include private equity buyouts, credit investing and retirement services through Athene, an insurer that merged with Apollo in 2022. Black served as chief executive and chairman until 2021.
His other holdings include:
- A stake in Apollo Global Management
- Phaidon Press, the London based publisher of art, design and architecture books, which he bought in 2012
- One of the most significant private art collections in the United States
The collection includes a pastel version of Edvard Munch's The Scream, bought at auction in 2012, and works by Picasso, Matisse, Raphael and Giacometti.
Marc Rowan, one of his fellow founders, succeeded him as chief executive in 2021.
Early life and career
Black was born in New York in 1951. His father, Eli Black, was the head of United Brands, the company that owned Chiquita bananas, and died in 1975 in the middle of a bribery scandal at the company. Leon studied philosophy and history at Dartmouth College, graduating in 1973, and earned an MBA at Harvard Business School in 1975.
He joined Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1977, two years after business school. At Drexel he rose to head the mergers and acquisitions group and worked closely with Michael Milken's high yield bond department, financing many of the leveraged buyouts and takeover bids of the 1980s. When the firm filed for bankruptcy in 1990 after a securities fraud case, Black used the experience to found a firm that would invest in the kinds of companies Drexel had financed.
The lessons of Drexel's fall shaped Apollo's early approach, which relied on deep analysis of credit and a readiness to take control of companies in bankruptcy. Black and his partners raised their first funds from investors who had worked with them at Drexel and knew their record.
Philanthropy and public life
Black and his wife, Debra, co founded the Melanoma Research Alliance in 2007 after Debra's diagnosis with the disease, and the alliance has become a major private funder of melanoma research. Black has also given to Dartmouth, including support for an arts centre bearing the family name, and to the Museum of Modern Art, where he served as chairman.
In 2021 an independent review commissioned by Apollo examined large payments Black had made to the financier Jeffrey Epstein for tax and estate advice. The review said it found no evidence that Black was involved in Epstein's criminal conduct, but Black stepped down as Apollo's chief executive that year and later left the chairmanship and the MoMA chair role. He has faced lawsuits related to the matter, which he has contested.