Speaker

Marc Rowan

Marc Rowan

Co-founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s largest alternative-asset managers (roughly $650 billion in assets, split between credit and equity), and — through his chairmanship of Wharton’s Board of Advisers and former trusteeship of the University of Pennsylvania — a leading figure in the campaign to reform American university governance.

Rowan began his career at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the birth of the high-yield bond market under Michael Milken, before co-founding Apollo in 1990. He built Athene, Apollo’s affiliated retirement-services insurer, into the vehicle for scaling the firm’s private-credit origination, and became Apollo’s CEO in 2021. He earned his undergraduate and MBA degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, where roughly half of Apollo’s early hires originated before the firm broadened its recruiting worldwide. Outside finance, he has chaired or co-chaired Darca, Israel’s largest private/charter school network, for close to four decades, and owns three restaurants on Long Island.

Core positions

  • ‘Private credit’ is a $40 trillion redefinition of where credit comes from, not a $1.5 trillion niche. Rowan rejects the popular-press meaning of the term — below-investment-grade direct lending to buyouts — in favour of a broader one: everything not held on a bank balance sheet, spanning ordinary corporate and consumer loans that have simply moved from banks to investors.
  • Insurance failures are almost always liability failures, not asset failures. A century of major industry losses — asbestos reinsurance, D&O exposure, mispriced long-term-care and annuity products — came from poor liability choices; Athene’s edge is confining itself to one simple, well-understood liability (retirement annuities) rather than the diversified risk books that sank traditional insurers.
  • Moving credit out of the banking system deleverages, and so strengthens, the financial system. A bank is levered ten to twelve times; the same credit held in an unlevered investment vehicle carries none of that leverage. Rowan reads the shrinking bank share of US credit as risk dispersion, not under-regulation.
  • Oversized, mandateless boards — corporate or academic — cannot govern. Penn’s roughly 50-member trustee board, in his account, could not execute the admissions, faculty-promotion, and strategy duties its own charter assigns it; his prescribed fix is a smaller board that sets explicit policy before hiring a leader to execute it.

In the wiki