When Marc Rowan’s father died while he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania and the family could no longer afford tuition, the school told him he could finish paying whenever he was able.
Rowan sent the university the money a few months after graduation, using his first bonus from his job as a junior investment banker at Drexel Burnham Lambert. Grateful for its generosity, he kept giving to Penn as he climbed to the pinnacle of Wall Street power. He donated $50 million to its Wharton school in 2018, the largest gift the business school had ever received at the time.
But after Hamas attacked Israel Oct. 7, Rowan, the chief executive of private-equity giant Apollo Global Management, went on television and said he is halting donations to his alma mater over its response to the conflict and antisemitism on campus. He is at the center of an alumni revolt against the school and has called for Penn’s president and the chair of its board of trustees to step down.
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Campaigning publicly for social issues is new for Rowan, who’s better known for discussing the wonky ins-and-outs of finance. He runs a firm where top executives encourage sparring openly about business strategy in meetings, and now he’s bringing that approach to the cloistered world of higher education.
What set off Rowan and other major donors was Penn’s response to the violence in Israel. On Oct. 10, Penn President Liz Magill called the assault “horrific” but didn’t explicitly condemn Hamas.
The donors had already been upset about what they saw as growing antisemitism on campus and the school’s response to it.
“I don’t think the intent was for it to be forceful,” Rowan says of the response to the attacks. “I don’t think the university gives a crap, to be candid.”
Rowan, 61, spent much of his childhood in Long Island, N.Y. His father was in the auto-leasing business. His grandfather, Emanuel Stein, was born on New York’s Lower East Side and spent decades as an economics professor at New York University, including a period as chairman of the department. He was known to quote Talmudic passages every now and then to help make a point. Stein’s daughter, Rowan’s mother Barbara, was a trained concert pianist. She was “the heart and soul of her family” and “all benefited from her love of Jewish heritage and culture,” her 2014 obituary said.
The family moved to Hollywood, Fla., when Rowan was in high school. He graduated as valedictorian of his class at a local public high school in 1980 and went on to Wharton, one of the country’s elite business programs. He relied on grants, student loans and jobs to help pay for school.
Rowan tapped into his entrepreneurial energy early on. A July 1981 advertisement in the school newspaper said students and parents interested in discounted phone calls should write to him for more information. He earned both his bachelor’s and M.B.A. from the school.
“I can’t help but love a place that I showed up with hair down to my shoulders and I ended up with a job,” Rowan said at a January Goldman Sachs event.
MARC ROWAN
High school jobs included: valet parking attendant, driving cars up and down the East Coast for snowbirds.
Number of children: four
Size of 2018 donation to Penn: $50 million
Recent dinner companion: Republican South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and a bipartisan group of friends
An accidental restaurateur: How he describes owning eateries in the Hamptons
Rowan’s first job was in the mergers and acquisitions department at Drexel. After the firm collapsed in 1990, he teamed up with other former Drexel employees at Apollo, which originally put investors’ money to work in the rough-and-tumble world of distressed investments. Appetite for such “alternative” investments boomed in the decades that followed, making co-founders Rowan, Leon Black and Josh Harris billionaires.
The firm developed a reputation for being particularly cutthroat in an industry known for its aggressive tactics with deals like an investment in Caesars Entertainment that left the casino operator saddled with an insurmountable debt load.
Harris was also a Wharton graduate and Apollo hired heavily from the school. Alumni made up about 40% or 50% of the firm’s employees, Rowan said in a 2009 podcast.
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Obviously, Biden is a certified idiot if he believes a cease fire is going to accomplish anything related to humanness by calling a secession of fighting. Iran has broken it's word time and again. Biden rewards Hamas and insults our supposed ally. But then, when has Biden made a rational decision that actually has worked? Name one.
As the saying goes, with friends like Biden who needs enemies.
I seriously doubt if Israel was losing, as Hamas is, radical Islamists would be seeking a cease fire.
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NYT's Reporter resigns:
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I posed this question to my friend who has served our nation in some of the highest levels of government
and received this response:
"Do you think Israel and the IDF, IAF and Mossad can do what needs to be done, ie. eliminate
Hamas, crush Hezbollah, cripple Iran's nuclear, eliminate Ayotollahs and the IRCG w/o
American help because that is what I believe must happen? Me
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Response: Yes, I do, although I also think Biden is going to apply even more pressure on Bibi not to
do any of them.
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More comments from friends and fellow memo readers:
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:Just wanted to reinforce how much I love all of your posts. Your politics and thoughts align with mine, and so
many of my friends the other ones we are still trying to convince lol.Hope you and Lynn are doing well. I’m heading to Algeria and Tunisia on Tuesday for three weeks. Hope I don’t
get kidnapped or worse.
If you ever decide to get on Facebook or Instagram, please follow me. I do a lot of travel blogs, and the
photography is award-winning all over Europe and Asia. My new passion in life but all is well. I just wanted to tell
you how much I always appreciate your emails.
Much Love, C----"
Another:Hello. Hope you and Lynn are well. I am well and A--- is doing fine.A thought that you can spread far wider than I. Remember "Hooverville"?
BIDENVILLE!! J--
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