Money to Burn- The Unvarnished Truth about Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street by William D. Cohan.jpg
Money to Burn- The Unvarnished Truth about Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street by William D. Cohan.jpg

Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth about Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street by William D. Cohan

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Hardcover:

Instant New York Times Bestseller

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.

Instant New York Times Bestseller

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.

  • Publisher: Portfolio

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

    Author: William D. Cohan

    On Sale Date: September 8, 2026

    ISBN 13: 978-0-593-71634-2

    ISBN 10: 0-593-71634-5

    Format: Hardcover

    Retail Price: $40.00

    BISAC: Related Genres (PRH): Business

    Page Count: 688

    Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.9 in

    Weight: 1.85 lb

  • William D. Cohan spent years working the other side of Wall Street—as an investment banker with degrees from Duke, Columbia Journalism School, and Columbia Business School—before turning that insider's fluency into a career exposing the industry from the outside. He's a New York Times bestselling author several times over, with House of Cards, The Last Tycoons, and Power Failure among his previous books, and he currently writes a regular column for The New York Times and serves as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. In Money to Burn, Cohan turns that same exclusive-access, deeply reported style on Leon Black and Apollo Global Management—tracing a thirty-year rise built on Drexel Burnham's ashes, and a fall driven by the billionaire's own choices.

  • Critics and fellow bestselling authors are calling it riveting, Shakespearean, and unsparing:

    • "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

    • "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, author of The Smartest Guys in the Room

This book is for you if

  • You want the inside story of how a junk-bond disciple built Apollo into one of Wall Street's most powerful—and most feared—firms.

  • You're fascinated by the collision of financial genius and personal disgrace, from the Drexel Burnham collapse to Leon Black's resignation over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

  • You loved Cohan's House of Cards or The Last Tycoons and want his next deeply sourced Wall Street takedown.

  • You want a father-and-son story of inherited risk-taking that reads like a Shakespearean tragedy, not just a business book.

  • You're drawn to reporting built on exclusive access to the dealmakers and insiders who actually lived it.

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