Background and career
Marc Jeffrey Rowan (born 1962) is an American billionaire businessman who is the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Apollo Global Management, an American asset management firm. He co-founded the firm in 1990, with Josh Harris and Leon Black, and has been its CEO since 2021. As of 2026, Bloomberg estimated Rowan's net worth at $9.77 billion. Rowan was appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump to a governing body to oversee a controversial reconstruction process in the Gaza Strip.
Rowan was born in 1962. He grew up on Long Island, New York, before his family relocated to Hollywood, Florida, where he completed high school. His father worked in auto-leasing, and his mother, Barbara, was a teacher and a trained concert pianist. He has one sister, Andrea. His grandfather, Emanuel Stein, held a professorship in economics at New York University. Many of his wider family worked as public interest lawyers. Rowan is Jewish. Rowan studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where financial hardship following his father's death might have ended his studies; instead, the university allowed him to complete his degree and settle the tuition when he was able. He graduated summa cum laude from the Wharton School with a B.S. and an M.B.A.
Rowan began his professional career in 1985 in the mergers and acquisitions department of Drexel Burnham Lambert, splitting time between New York and Los Angeles. When Drexel collapsed in 1990, he joined former colleagues Leon Black and Josh Harris to co-found Apollo Global Management. In Apollo's early years, Rowan and his co-founders pursued a strategy of distressed-to-control investing. They acquired interests in companies that Drexel had helped finance by purchasing high-yield bonds from failed savings and loans and insurance companies, including several large portfolios from the U.S. government's Resolution Trust Corporation. Little financing was available for conventional leveraged buyouts at the time of the firm's founding, and therefore Rowan and his Apollo co-founders developed an approach centered on distressed securities that could be converted into a controlling equity stake through bankruptcy reorganization or other restructuring. Among Apollo's earliest and most successful transactions was the acquisition of Executive Life Insurance Company's bond portfolio.
Following the 2008 financial crisis, Rowan helped Apollo establish Athene Holding, a fixed annuity products provider focused on the retirement savings market. This initiative became the cornerstone of a broader insurance strategy for Apollo. Rowan helped scale Athene into a standalone public company. Apollo eventually reacquired Athene in an all-stock transaction valued at $11 billion, completed in January 2022 - one of Rowan's first major transactions as CEO. Athene has since established itself as the largest provider of retirement insurance products in the United States.
Rowan also helped develop Apollo's private credit business, entering into lending markets that the traditional banks had largely ceded following the post-crisis tightening of financial regulation. His strategy served a dual purpose: providing direct lending to corporate borrowers who had lost access to bank financing, while generating investment-grade assets required to back Athene's balance sheet liabilities. The combined strategy positioned Apollo as one of the largest investment-grade private credit providers in the world, and the approach has since been adopted by rivals including Blackstone, KKR, and Carlyle Group.
In July 2020, Rowan stepped back from day-to-day responsibilities at Apollo, taking what the firm described as a semi-sabbatical, though he remained engaged with strategy and board matters. Following Leon Black's resignation as CEO, Rowan formally assumed the role in March 2021. In October 2021, Rowan led Apollo's first investor day under his leadership, a formal presentation to institutional investors and analysts outlining the firm's strategy and financial targets, setting out a goal of reaching $1 trillion in assets under management. Under Rowan's leadership, Apollo grew into one of the world's largest alternative asset managers. An investor day in October 2024 raised the firm's targets further, with Rowan outlining a goal of $1.2 trillion in private loans by 2029. In Q1 2026, Apollo's assets under management crossed $1 trillion for the first time. In late 2025, Rowan wrote an opinion piece for Bloomberg addressing what he characterized as widespread misconceptions about the risks of private lending, arguing that most private credit held by insurers and pension funds is investment grade and that the growth of private credit has made the financial system more resilient rather than more fragile. Apollo also published a white paper defining private credit as a $40 trillion market, largely investment grade. As of 2026, Bloomberg estimated Rowan's net worth at $9.77 billion.
