It’s Wednesday lunch hour at the Apollo Global Management cafeteria, an 8th floor space featuring uniformly, blindingly white marble floors and furnishings, and framed in floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook Manhattan’s Central Park Pond. The troops are attired more Silicon Valley than Wall Street in jeans or slacks (nary a suit, tie or cufflink in sight). They queue for lattes and espressos at the barista station, or at the heavily trafficked seltzer bar, where they can choose from a soda fountain-like array of flavor pumps that dispense coconut, keylime, cucumber and a half-a-dozen other plain-bubble enlivening extracts.
A booth in this buzzing venue happens to be the favorite meeting place for CEO Marc Rowan, and that’s where we’re speaking this morning. To get here, Rowan descends the interior staircase from the trading floor above, where upon taking charge as the pandemic raged in early 2021, he settled in an interior, zero-views office to monitor the action up-close. Leon Black, Rowan’s co-founder and predecessor, had occupied a 42nd floor suite, festooned with French antique handguns and museum-quality Impressionist paintings before resigning amid an explosive scandal revealing that he'd paid $158 million of his own funds for personal finance advice to late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Rowan preferred his relatively spartan digs to Black’s sumptuous aerie.
