From Valet Parking to Leading a $79 Billion Firm: Marc Rowan's Rise

Marc Rowan, the co-founder and chief executive of Apollo Global Management, reflected on a series of modest early jobs—including valet work at the Diplomat Hotel (now the Shell Bay Golf Club), transporting cars for seasonal residents, and managing a party-goods shop in South Florida—during a conversation with iCapital CEO Lawrence Calcano. Growing up between Florida and New York, he finished high school in 1980 when the federal minimum wage was $3.10 an hour, then switched from a pre-law track to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

While at Wharton he spent a summer at Booz Allen and later worked as a runner on the New York Stock Exchange’s Blue Room. His first full-time finance role was in the mergers and acquisitions division of Drexel Burnham Lambert, which collapsed in 1990, prompting him, Leon Black and Josh Harris to launch Apollo that same year. Under Rowan’s leadership since 2021, the firm has shifted toward private credit and insurance, growing assets to over $1 trillion, and he also chairs the Wharton School’s board of advisors and funded the Penn Wharton Budget Model.