Marc Rowan

Marc Rowan is the co-founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, one of the world's largest alternative asset management firms with over $700 billion in assets under management. Rowan co-founded Apollo in 1990 alongside Leon Black and Josh Harris. He became CEO in 2021 and has since transformed Apollo from a traditional private equity and credit firm into an integrated asset management and retirement services platform. Rowan's most consequential strategic innovation was the merger of Apollo with Athene Holding, the insurance and retirement services company that Apollo had helped create. The combination gave Apollo a captive, permanent capital source — Athene's insurance float — that could be invested in Apollo's credit strategies, creating a flywheel where Apollo manages Athene's assets and Athene provides stable, growing capital to Apollo. This model has been widely imitated by competitors. His key decisions involve scaling the retirement services platform, expanding into investment-grade credit origination, growing the wealth management distribution channel to reach individual investors, managing the balance between growth investment and capital return, and navigating regulatory scrutiny of the insurance-asset management model. Apollo's stock reflects both its asset management fee earnings and the insurance spread income from Athene.