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William Cohan

Founding Partner, Puck

Search every verified William Cohan interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. William D. Cohan, founding partner at Puck, has been promoting his new book, *Money to Burn: The Unvarnished Truth About Leon Black, Apollo, and the Rise of a New Wall Street*, across multiple podcasts in September 2026. In interviews with Peter Hamby on *The Powers That Be* and Anthony Scaramucci on *Open Book*, Cohan discussed the rise of Leon Black and Apollo Global Management, including Black's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Cohan stated that Black paid Epstein $158 million for financial, tax, and estate advice, and that an Apollo board-commissioned report published in January 2021 revealed this payment. He also described Epstein's emails to Black, which Cohan said were largely attempts to extract more money until Black cut him off in 2017. Cohan also discussed Apollo's business model and the broader financial industry. On the *Private Capital* podcast, he credited Marc Rowan with developing a new approach to banking that matches long-term liabilities with long-term assets, contrasting it with the traditional "borrowing short and lending long" model that he said contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. In an August 2026 episode of *The Powers That Be*, Cohan commented on the growing backlash against AI data centers, noting grassroots political resistance across states over concerns about energy, water, and land use, and observing a disconnect between local opposition and continued Wall Street investment in AI infrastructure. He has also expressed criticism of what he described as a "hubristic class" of billionaires with generational wealth, arguing that a lack of accountability for this group is "debilitating to our society."

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“Why would somebody with Leon Black's reputation for financial shrewdness be paying Jeffrey Epstein, a guy who didn't even, you know, barely graduated high school and autodidact, for financial advice? It just blew everybody's mind. And of course, 50 to 75 million was low. It turned out to be 158 million, which blew people's mind. So on analyst calls on quarterly analyst calls, Leon started getting questions from resea”

“A lot of the risk that used to be housed in the Wall Street firms and that resulted in the 2008 financial crisis, because of Dodd-Frank, because of Federal Reserve regulation of Wall Street banks, a lot of that risk now by definition is moved out of those Wall Street banks. Hasn't stopped them from being incredibly profitable. I mean, I think JP Morgan Chase is going to make 60 billion, 66 billion of net income this ”

“We've created this class, a hubristic class of people. They're able to have anything they want in the world and will forever. I mean, they've created generational wealth. They are untouchable in that regard. Seems that he who has the gold rules. There probably needs to be more accountability generally. This is undermining our society when we create a class of oligarchs who seem to have no carburetor on their behavior”

“What Mark has really come up with is a whole new way of thinking about banking which is matching trying to match the liabilities and the assets in terms of their tenor. His liabilities at Athen and at Apollo are much longer term. You can't go to an ATM machine and get your annuity out of Apollo. Now you're locked up for 5 years, 7 years, 10 years. Now you can get out. There are penalties. And if everybody decided the”

“Mark had this incredible insight. Mark's one of the smartest people I've ever met on Wall Street. And he's also one of the most articulate. He's got to be one of the best in a positive way. One of the best salesman I've ever seen on Wall Street. He had this insight about the major flaw of banking and the Achilles heel of our financial system, right, which got exposed in raw form in 2008. But it's always been there wh”

“I think there's a disconnect between what's happening politically in the communities and through the grassroots level and what's happening on Wall Street. I mean, on Wall Street we've got, you know, SpaceX being able to raise $85 billion. Much of it probably will be used to develop their AI business, which is losing money now. We don't know when, but we expect Anthropic and OpenAI are going to go public. There must b”

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