Financial journalist William Cohan has built a reputation around an “as told to” method, letting Wall Street insiders speak at length so readers feel present for the action. At its best, the technique can expose how financiers think and produce useful scoops, but Money to Burn shows how quickly access can curdle into stenography.

The book promises the unvarnished truth about Leon Black, Apollo Global Management, and Wall Street’s transformation. Instead, it delivers a swollen collection of insider accounts that too often substitutes proximity for judgment, leaving the wider consequences of Apollo’s financial power mostly outside the frame.

Cohan, a former investment banker, interviewed Black, current Apollo leader Marc Rowan, cofounder Josh Harris, Athene leader Jim Belardi, and several other figures connected to Apollo. That access produces exhaustive accounts of Black’s early work with Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Apollo acquisitions, internal feuds, and even where many interview subjects attended high school.

What it rarely produces is a compelling critical narrative. Events unfold through lengthy conflicting accounts when concise summaries might have served readers better, while important questions about financialization, inequality, workers, patients, and the broader economy receive far less attention.

Cohan signals his approach in the introduction. “Leon Black is a bit of a reluctant Wall Street billionaire,” he writes, despite also describing Black’s extraordinary focus and intensity and recounting his $120 million purchase in 2012 of one of four existing versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

Apollo was founded in 1990 with a specialty in distressed debt and leveraged buyouts, then a small part of Wall Street. It became both a beneficiary and a driver of the expansion of private equity, private credit, insurance, retirement annuities, and other forms of financialized business.

Investors poured money into private equity funds promising large returns, allowing firms to collect the arrangement known as “two and twenty.” That meant a 2% annual management fee and 20% of profits, an exceedingly pleasant setup for financiers even when others bore the damage.

Apollo went public in 2011, turning its founders into billionaires. Today, it manages more than $1 trillion in assets and ranks among the world’s largest and most powerful alternative asset managers, yet the book devotes insufficient attention to what that power means outside Apollo.

RegionalCare Hospital Partners offers one grim example. Apollo used it to combine small and rural health care facilities into what became LifePoint, while Ottumwa Regional Health Center in Iowa paid a $2.7 million management fee despite operating at a loss and struggling with inadequate staffing.

LifePoint also turned $9.2 million over to Apollo. The episode appears because of a 2022 congressional investigation following the sexual assault of multiple patients by a nurse at Ottumwa, but Cohan apparently did not speak with a victim or a victim’s family member.

Instead, the book quotes an unsigned Apollo statement saying the company “invested billions of dollars in Lifepoint.” It also neglects broader evidence cited in the review showing that private equity ownership in health care is associated with more patient falls, more hospital acquired infections, lower staffing, higher charges, and increased mortality in nursing homes.

Readers also receive little discussion of legislative attempts to restrain private equity, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Stop Wall Street Looting Act and Sen. Chris Murphy’s Take Back Our Hospitals Act. The latter would ban private equity ownership of hospitals and nursing homes, a rather relevant proposal for any serious examination of Apollo’s reach.

The carried interest loophole receives similarly thin treatment, appearing mainly through Rowan’s claim that Democrats preserve it for fundraising purposes. The book also devotes more attention to Black’s father, who died by suicide after becoming implicated in the Honduras corporate bribery scandal called “Bananagate,” than to workers who lost jobs following mergers.

Money to Burn gains some bite when it turns to the Apollo leaders’ excesses. Harris buys sports teams, Rowan uses his fortune to pressure administrators and communities, and Black collects expensive art while maintaining a long association with Jeffrey Epstein and paying him $158 million for financial and tax advice.

Black’s reputational collapse followed scrutiny of his Epstein relationship and allegations of rape by Russian model Guzel Ganieva, with whom he had a yearslong affair. Black left Apollo’s leadership, Rowan took control, and Black unsuccessfully sued Harris over an alleged conspiracy, with a federal court calling the case “nebulous and overtly conjectural.”

The more consequential story concerns Rowan’s push to integrate Athene into Apollo and use insurance money to expand private credit activity. Evidence cited in the review suggests firms such as Apollo are placing risky loans on life insurance balance sheets, while an existing bailout structure could ultimately shift losses toward other insurers and taxpayers.

Cohan closes with warnings from two critics of Apollo’s business model, but his book remains most useful for readers hungry for insider Wall Street gossip. Anyone seeking a sharper account of how Apollo affects ordinary people is directed instead toward Gretchen Morgenson and Josh Rosner’s 2023 book, These Are the Plunderers.