Money, Hubris and Jeffrey Epstein: The Fall of Leon Black, w/ William Cohan

**William Cohan** (0:00)
We're in one of those periods of time, like we were in 2006, 2007, when anybody who touched a mortgage made a shitload of money off of it. Now we're in a period of time where anything you do on Wall Street, stocks, bonds, private credit, private equity, regular loans, people are just making money hand over fist.

**Kara Swisher** (0:31)
Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher and I'm Kara Swisher. The inner workings of Wall Street are notoriously hard to parse. The jargon, the complex math, the abstract concepts make it feel removed from our everyday lives, that is until things go terribly wrong. But few people do a better job at breaking it all down than author and puck journalist William Cohan, Bill Cohan to me and to many people. His latest book, Money To Burn, is about one of Wall Street's most towering figures of the last few decades, billionaire Leon Black. With his private equity and investment firm Apollo, Black rode the tides of a changing Wall Street to immense personal fortune. He amassed a multi-billion dollar private art collection that includes work by Van Gogh, Picasso, and Cezanne. But Black's ties to convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein ultimately forced him out of the company he built. Black's story now feels like a familiar one, that of a powerful individual with a huge appetite for risk, who was willing to look past Epstein's behavior when there was money to be made. I really love talking to Bill. We talk about all manner of things about Wall Street. Right now, Wall Street's on a real high, but there's all these warning signs of the bond markets, tariffs, the war in Iran, and it's really important to link what's happening on Wall Street, including this incredible risk taking, especially around AI and to what it means for regular people. All right. Let's get into my conversation with Bill Cohan. Our expert question comes from Bethany McClain, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of the book, The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. So stick around.
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Bill, thanks for coming back on On.

**William Cohan** (3:01)
Kara, it's always a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

**Kara Swisher** (3:04)
Always a pleasure. You are my guru of Wall Street, just so you know. We're going to talk about a lot of things, but I want to start with your new book about the rise and fall of Leon Black. Very fat book, by the way. I was with it last night, hugging it all night. You start off as an investment banker for switching to journalism for people who don't know. So put Black in context for people. Why should we care about him and what sets him apart from others who made billions in finance? There's so many of these people.
Explain him for people to understand.

**William Cohan** (3:33)
Yeah. So obviously, you're right. Private equity billionaires or 100 millionaires are a dime a dozen these days.
I don't think there's a better business you could have been in that is both legal and can make you as much money as private equity did for the last 40 years. It hit on more difficult times these days. But Leon was always a different breed, and he built Apollo to be a different breed than just your run-of-the-mill private equity firm that used other people's money, borrowed money and took some equity from institutional investors and then took a company private or bought a division of a public company or whatever. Apollo was always set up to be in a position to buy other parts of the capital structure and not just the equity. What I mean by that is, if bonds were trading at a distressed level, they could buy those bonds, hope that the price of the bonds went up and if they did, great. If those bonds, however, went into bankruptcy or defaulted or were even more distressed, they could convert those bonds into equity and get control of the company that way. They did that repeatedly. No one else was doing that when Apollo was founded in 1990 Of course, they all came out of Drexel Cara, which means they were all part of the Mike Milken junk bond machine. They knew where all the distressed bonds were. They had underwritten the bonds to begin with, and now, in many cases, they were buying them back at a discount and getting control of the companies by doing that. My favorite example, of course, is like Vale, Vale Mountain, Vale Resorts.