Apollo’s Marc Rowan actually paid attention in actuarial studies—and what he learned is helping turn his firm into a $1 trillion business

Recently I spent time in the Manhattan offices of Apollo Global Management working on an in-depth look into CEO Marc Rowan’s ideas about where the investment world is heading. Nicknamed inside Apollo as “the professor,” Rowan, who is “slight of build and sporting an open-collared white shirt, describes his strategy with a kind of quiet, cartesian logic.” As I wrote for Fortune:

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, whereupon 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.

I was particularly interested in examining Apollo’s business model, which has changed drastically since Black’s days of running a super-combative private equity shop, in part due to the fact that Rowan is something of an insurance whiz. 

“While studying for my MBA at the Wharton School in the early 1980s,” Rowan recalls, “I was assigned a faculty advisor who turned out to be the head of the actuarial sciences department. At the time, I couldn’t think of anything more boring. But he encouraged me to learn about statistics and probabilities.” When Drexel Burnham, where Rowan worked under mentor Mike Milken, imploded in 1990, he, Black, and Josh Harris famously formed Apollo—and their first deal consisted of buying and rescuing a failed insurer called Executive Life. “It was as if I was the only kid in school who’d even cracked the book and could raise their hand and answer the question. Thanks to the actuarial studies, I knew more than anyone else about insurance risks,” he recalls. Rowan calls the challenge of repairing the Executive Life operations, subsequently sold at a big profit, “an amazing education.”

That success paved the way for insurer Athene, which Rowan helped form by devouring underwater books of business that others were dumping during the Great Financial Crisis. When Rowan became sole CEO, he quickly merged Athene with Apollo.

The union greatly changed the Apollo model. It’s now much closer to insurers such as Mass Mutual than to its previous peers, alt giants such as Blackstone and Carlyle. The Athene merger put a mountain of new capital, now totaling $258 billion, directly on its books, and piled well over $200 billion in annuity liabilities payable to policyholders on the opposite side of the ledger.

That’s led to bigger risks—but also raises the possibility of great rewards. You can read the full story—including how Rowan is deploying those juicy Athene profits into the burgeoning field of private debt, and how he believes that he’ll achieve $1 trillion AUM by 2026—in my story here. And pass this story along to any students in your lives struggling through statistics or actuarial sciences. Pay attention, and maybe someday they’ll have a trillion-dollar business in their sights, too.

Shawn Tully
Shawn.Tully@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Herb Cross, CFO at Atreca, Inc. (Nasdaq: BCEL), a clinical-stage biotechnology company, departed Atreca on Sept. 22 to pursue an external opportunity. Cross will continue to support the company as a consultant through the first quarter of 2024. John Orwin, CFO of the company, will assume the role of principal financial officer and Rick Ruiz, VP of finance, will assume the role of principal accounting officer going forward. Ruiz joined Atreca as VP of finance in 2018, bringing over 20 years of experience in financial management. 

Richard Westenberg was named VP and CFO at Masco Corporation (NYSE: MAS), a manufacturer of branded home improvement, effective Oct. 16. Westenberg brings over 25 years of experience. Most recently, he served as VP and CFO of General Motors North America. Before that, he served as VP of finance and CFO of SAIC-General Motors, GM’s joint venture in China. He held roles of increasing responsibility during his tenure at GM, including as the corporate treasurer and head of corporate financial planning and analysis.

Big deal

Robin Pou Inc., a leadership development firm, released its first Leadership Doubt Index, based on a survey of 601 U.S. business leaders from various industries ranging from director-level roles to the C-suite. Ninety-seven percent of respondents have questioned an aspect of their leadership. But 92% do not associate with "imposter syndrome," which is a term used to articulate a feeling when leaders are uncertain about their abilities, even in areas where they typically excel. A majority of leaders who experience leadership doubt report it has caused them to feel more burned out (65%) and have less job satisfaction (55%), according to the report.

The top four triggers for successful leaders questioning their abilities are managing a huge workload (28%), a team's inability to perform (24%), industry disruption (22%), and missing revenue goals (10%). 

Robin Pou Inc. partnered with Gradient, a market research firm, to create the Leadership Doubt Index. Respondents are at companies with $10 million or more in revenue. And 80% of the respondents work at companies with $100 million or more in revenue. 

Courtesy of Robin Pou Inc.

Going deeper

A new report released by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Harnessing the Tectonic Shifts in Global Manufacturing, discusses how trade disruptions have prompted many global companies to shift where they produce and source goods. A survey found that more than 90% of North American manufacturers have relocated some production from China in the past five years. The survey of manufacturing executives and an analysis of global trade patterns reveals that the primary driver of these global production shifts is the ongoing quest for low costs.

"Changing geopolitics, the evolution of relative cost structures, more frequent and high-impact disruptions, and the push for decarbonization, among other factors, will lead to a massive restructuring of global supply chain networks over the next decade," Ravi Srivastava, global leader of BCG's Operations practice and a coauthor of the report, said in a statement. 

Overheard

"Put your seatbelts on. It’s going to be a very volatile supercycle."

—Christyan Malek, JPMorgan’s head of EMEA energy equity research, told Bloomberg he fears it’s just the beginning of an era of higher oil prices. “The flow of capital into new oil supply is just not what it was like in the last 30 years,” Malek said. “So what that’s doing is driving the long-term price, the back end of the curve, up to $80, or north of $80. We think it probably normalizes around $100.” Oil production cuts by Russia and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries have helped push Brent crude prices up some 10% over the past month to roughly $93 per barrel, Fortune reported.