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

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.

Author: William D. Cohan
Publisher: Portfolio
Published: 09/08/2026
Pages: 688
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.85lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.40w x 1.90d
ISBN: 9780593716342


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/14/2026

About the Author
William D. Cohan is the New York Times bestselling author of Power Failure, which was named Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, Financial Times, and The Economist. He is the author of seven nonfiction narratives, including Money and Power, House of Cards, and The Last Tycoons. He was a longtime special correspondent at Vanity Fair and is a founding partner of and Wall Street correspondent for Puck. A former Wall Street investment banker for seventeen years, he writes often for the opinion pages of The New York Times and Financial Times and appears regularly on CNN, MSNOW, and BBC. Cohan is a graduate of Duke University, the Columbia University School of Journalism, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Business.