● Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street
William D. Cohan
Review via Semafor
Apollo founder Leon Black’s career started falling apart in October of 2020, when The New York Times revealed that he’d been one of Jeffrey Epstein’s main financial patrons, relying on the criminal long after others had abandoned him.
The veteran finance writer Bill Cohan’s new 673-page Black biography, Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street, offers a very different narrative of a brilliant finance pioneer laid low by a combination of lust and naïveté — but not by any serious complicity with Epstein in his darker schemes. Cohan told me he views it in part as a rebuttal of a strain of Times reporting he referred to in an interview as a “Leon jihad.”