About Leon Black
Leon Black, the chairman and CEO of Apollo Global Management, has discussed the firm’s investment strategy and market outlook in several public appearances. Black described Apollo’s approach as value-oriented, stating that the firm aims to buy good companies at low multiples and goes to “extraordinary extent not to lose money.” He noted that about 80% of Apollo’s capital is permanent or long-duration, which he said removes pressure to sell. Black also commented on the economic cycle, saying in 2019 that the U.S. was “10 years into an upcycle” and that “at some point, the music’s going to stop,” adding that a downturn might not occur until after the next election. He credited the Trump administration with extending economic growth and keeping inflation down.
Black has also spoken about his philanthropic activities, which he said were inspired by his father, a former clergyman, and his mother, an artist. He said he supports cancer research, the arts, and a series of biographies on Jewish lives published with Yale University Press. Black described philanthropy as “very much here to stay” and said that a more robust economy would help it grow. He added that his training in private equity, which he described as a “portfolio approach,” influences his giving.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Leon Black's recent appearances.
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Transcript (1 segments)
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Leon Black0:12
You know, I agree to come. The moderator is right to say I don't usually do this. I do this because you're so good at it. And I also do it because truly it's peer-to-peer. If you ask me too tough a question, I can always turn that on you and say, 'And what do you think, David?' So all right. But to answer your question, you know, we started Apollo 29 years ago this week. And it was actually in the midst of a global recession. We started Apollo out of the ashes of a firm I worked at for 13 years called Drexel Burnham Lambert. And in the spring of 1990, when Drexel went under, we began. We were lucky enough—sometimes dumb luck is the best, but you have to know what to do with it—to get money from a big French bank, Crédit Lyonnais, who started us out in June of 1990 with about $800 million of capital to really take advantage of the dislocations in the market. And our backgrounds, my partners and mine, was really as students of capital structures. We had gone to the Mike Milken school of capital structures analysis. I had been the head of M&A and then corporate finance there. So we knew how to deal with a delevering process of buying debt and restructuring the company. So fast forward, if I look back at the last 29 years, there have actually been four real cyclical downturns in the last 29 years. And one of the great arrows in our quiver is that we have studied companies in about nine different industries that we specialize in, and we know which debt we're interested in buying at discounts at what prices. And then, you know, our hope is you either make money on the debt level, and hopefully if you've accumulated enough debt and exchanged it into the new equity of the company, you become the owner on a delivered basis. And so we've been doing that now for 29 years through four cycles. You mentioned the Great Recession of 10 years ago. You know, our feeling there was it was a great time to back up the trucks as long as we had real conviction on the credits. So we did it sometimes with third parties, and we did it sometimes with our own portfolio companies which we still believed in. And it was basically a way of averaging down our price by buying the debt at deep discounts. So you ask about the current environment. And at the same time, you know, we have an administration—like them or not like them—but they've done a pretty good job in extending the economic growth and consumer confidence and kept inflation down. And therefore it's very hard to say whether we're going to have another cycle with interest rates where they stand now and with the growth and inflation numbers where they stand. We might probably won't be until after the next election, but that's not that far off. So the key is to be prepared. You know, we go through hundreds of credits in the industries that we like. And so we do have a lot of conviction, and it is a very useful pathway for a value investor to finding great value.
