Money, Hubris and Jeffrey Epstein: The Fall of Leon Black, w/ William Cohan

In his new book, “Money To Burn,” author and Puck journalist William Cohan traces the rise and fall of one of Wall Street’s most towering modern figures: billionaire Leon Black. His private equity and investment firm, Apollo, changed Wall Street, making Black enormously rich. He reached the highest rungs of New York society, but his ties to convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein ultimately took him down. Kara and Bill talk about how Black and Apollo ushered in a "new Wall Street" and the nature of Black's relationship with Epstein, which continued for almost a decade after Epstein's 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. They also break down some of the latest headlines in business and finance, including Meta’s $17 billion settlement and President Trump’s escalating trade war with Canada. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You know, we're in one of those periods of time like we were in 2006, 2007, when anybody who touched a mortgage made a shitload of money off of it. Now we're in a period of time where anything you do on Wall Street, stocks, bonds, private credit, private equity, regular loans, you know, people are just making money hand over fist.

• 0:31Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. The inner workings of Wall Street are notoriously hard to parse. The jargon, the complex math, the abstract concepts make it feel removed from our everyday lives. That is, until things go terribly wrong. But few people do a better job at breaking it all down than author and Puck journalist William Cohen, Bill Cohen to me and to many people. His latest book, Money to Burn, is about one of Wall Street's most towering figures of the last few decades, billionaire Leon Black. With his private equity and investment firm Apollo, Black rode the tides of a changing Wall Street to immense personal fortune. He amassed a multi-billion dollar private art collection that includes work by Van Gogh, Picasso, and Cezanne.

• 1:16Kara Swisher?

  But Black's ties to convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein ultimately forced him out of the company he built. Black's story now feels like a familiar one, that of a powerful individual with a huge appetite for risk, who was willing to look past Epstein's behavior when there was money to be made. I really love talking to Bill. We talk about all manner of things about Wall Street. Right now, Wall Street's on a real high, but there's all these warning signs of the bond markets, tariffs, the war in Iran, and it's really important to link what's happening on Wall Street, including this incredible risk-taking, especially around AI, and to what it means for regular people. All right, let's get into my conversation with Bill Cohen. Our expert question comes from Bethany McLean, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and

• 1:59Kara Swisher?

  author of the book, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. So stick around.

• 2:13Speaker 02

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• 2:45Kara Swisher?

  Bill, thanks for coming back on On.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  Kara, it's always a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

• 2:51Kara Swisher?

  Always a pleasure. You are my guru of Wall Street, just so you know. We're going to talk about a lot of things, but I want to start with your new book about the rise and fall of Leon Black. Very fat book, by the way. I was with it last night, hugging it all night. You start off as an investment banker, before switching to journalism for people who don't know. So put Black in context for people. Why should we care about him and what sets him apart from others who made, you know, billions in finance? There's so many of these people. Explain him for people to understand.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, so obviously, you're right. Private equity billionaires or 100 millionaires are kind of a dime a dozen these days. I don't think there's a better business you could have been in that is both legal and can make you as much money as private equity did for the last 40 years. It's kind of hit on more difficult times these days, but Leon was always a different breed, and he built Apollo to be a different breed than just your run-of-the-mill private equity firm that used other people's money, borrowed money, and took some equity from institutional investors, and then took a company private or bought a division of a public company or whatever.

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Apollo was always set up to be in a position to buy other parts of the capital structure and not just the equity. And what I mean by that is if bonds were trading at a distressed level, they could buy those bonds, hope that the price of the bonds went up, and if they did, great. If those bonds, however, went into bankruptcy or defaulted or were even more distressed, they could convert those bonds into equity and get control of the company that way. And they did that repeatedly. No one else was doing that when Apollo was founded in 1990. And of course, they all came out of Drexel, Kara, which means they were all part of the Mike Milken junk bond machine. So they knew where all the distressed bonds were. They had underwritten the bonds to begin with, and now, in many cases, they were buying

• 4:50Speaker 00

  them back at a discount and getting control of the companies by doing that. My favorite example, of course, is like Vale, Vale Mountain, Vale Resorts. Leon advised George Gillette in buying Vale and other assets that he owned, using Milken's junk bonds to do it. And then the company ran into trouble. The junk bonds traded down. Leon bought the bonds at a discount, converted it to equity, and ended up with Vale Resorts and made a fortune.

• 5:17Kara Swisher?

  So you talked about Black's Apollo and why it was different, but what about Black? What set him apart from the rest of Wall Street?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  I mean, I just think he thought out of the box. He didn't want to be like the rest of Wall Street. I mean, obviously, he went to Drexel instead of a traditional Wall Street bank. He was head of M&A there. When Drexel imploded, he started Apollo as a different form of private equity firm to have ultimate flexibility to invest in whatever securities he wanted to invest in. And everyone else was sort of just using other people's money to buy companies and take them private and then flip them for sale or go to public again. Leon was busy buying the distressed securities of companies that he had once financed or been part of the financing of at Drexel and then converting that debt to equity to own

• 6:08Speaker 00

  the company. I mean, no one else was doing that.

• 6:10Kara Swisher?

  Right, so innovative flim-flammer is what you're saying to me. I'm teasing.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Certainly innovative. And, you know, obviously, it's all legal. You don't like these laws.

• 6:20Kara Swisher?

  You know what I mean. He's like, he made those deals, and then he went and took advantage of the deals.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  And he got a lot of criticism for that. You know, the amazing thing is, he was like incredible escape artist, too, because Drexel went down and he didn't get in trouble. And then when they bought Executive Life, a half of credit Leon A. went down, and he escaped out of that while making a fortune because he bought $6 billion worth of first executive junk bonds for $0.50 on the dollar. And then, you know, most of those bonds traded up. A lot of them were converted to equity, and he bought the companies, took the companies, and made a fortune owning the companies, like we talked about with Vale. Yeah, but he was an escape artist until he got caught up with Epstein, and he got stuck with the Epstein paper.

• 7:05Kara Swisher?

  So while Black was getting his MBA at Harvard, his father Eli is running United Brands, very famous, huge international conglomerate that's right in the process of unraveling. Eli dies by suicide in a very public way, and Leon experiences its trauma. He's never shown much interest in business before all this, and yet he goes into finance anyway. Talk a little bit about that, because he is getting his MBA at Harvard.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  Right, he didn't want to go get his MBA at Harvard, you know, sort of like my father wanted me to get an MBA, and I did, even though I was a journalist and didn't want to do it. But I did. He was a philosophy major at Dartmouth, of all places. You know, Jewish kid from Park Avenue, going to Dartmouth, okay, that's not that usual. His thesis at Dartmouth was incredibly interesting, intellectual, having nothing to do with business, more with art and philosophy and literature. So he goes to Harvard Business School. His father jumps out of the Pan Am building.

• 8:01Kara Swisher?

  Explain why he did this.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  It has to do with tariffs, Kara, believe it or not. I know we talk about tariffs today a lot. United Brands was the largest importer of bananas from Latin America and South America. We don't grow bananas in this country, hello, so we have to import them. And the Latin American countries, Central American countries, started putting tariffs on the bananas that were imported into this country by United Brands, pretty much trashing United Brands' income statement.

• 8:31Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  That's when Leon's father and the other executives, some other executives there, thought like, how can we make these tariffs go away? How about a little bakshish to the Honduran Finance Minister? And that's what happened. You know, small potatoes by our standards today, but big scandal involving, you know, the discovery that Leon's father, in effect, who was the CEO of United Brands, said okay the payment of a bribe to the Honduras Finance Minister. And, you know, he's a very highly respected Park Avenue CEO and conglomerator. Now, now he's caught up in a scandal, and Leon was in his second. A year at Harvard Business School. His mother was an artist.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  His aunt was an art dealer. He had a sister who was a teacher. Suddenly, he became like the guy who had to be the breadwinner for this family. And a lot of their money was lost because it was tied up in United Brands stock, which naturally plummeted upon the news of this getting out.

• 9:29Kara Swisher?

  So that's why he went into finance. He needed to make money.

• 9:32Speaker 00

  He needed to make money. He was gonna go into like film or something, but he had gotten an offer from Goldman Sachs, which he turned down. I don't know. All these guys turned down offers of Goldman Sachs. I don't know how they did that back then and decided to opt to go to Drexel instead. And he had no aptitude for it, per se.

• 9:50Kara Swisher?

  But went.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Oh, but went.

• 9:51Kara Swisher?

  Explain Drexel. I loved Connie Brock's book about Drexel. But this is Michael Milken, and it was sort of the outliers place. He was known as the junk bond king. He ultimately destroys Drexel and is destroyed by it. He pleads guilty to securities fraud and conspiracy charges sent to prison by, I think, Rudy Giuliani. Talk a little bit about this experience here because that was sort of the gogo place. But it was the outsiders to the white shoe firms, correct?

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Absolutely. They were the renegades. You know, Mike Milken, before he did go to prison, before he pled guilty to securities violations after saying he wouldn't, but he did. And then he's since been pardoned, of course, by Trump,

• 10:32Speaker 00

  created the junk bond market, which is a hugely important innovation. It's huge a market today, but he conceived of it and Drexel pulled it off. That gave them incredible power, both financing all sorts of companies that couldn't get access to capital in the past. I mean, basically, we wouldn't have a cellular telephone industry today without Mike Milken and his junk bonds or cable industry. And those are just two small examples.

• 10:59Kara Swisher?

  It took big risks for big rewards, essentially.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  Right. He understood that investors could make more money buying junk bonds than they could the bonds of investment grade companies. So I won't bore your listeners with why, but.

• 11:12Kara Swisher?

  No, but they couldn't. They wouldn't let him in, like these companies, nor Michael Milken, right?

• 11:16Speaker 00

  No. So he financed the companies that other people wouldn't finance. And he also financed raiders and gave them the money, like Carl Icahn, to buy companies they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. One of Leon's great innovations was the so-called highly confident letter, where Drexel would issue a highly confident letter saying it was highly confident he could raise the money for Carl Icahn to buy, you know, some company that he wanted to buy that he couldn't afford. And it was really, it was really just a puff of smoke and a cloud of dust. There was nothing really behind it, but given Milken's prowess with raising capital for all sorts of companies, it worked.

• 12:01Kara Swisher?

  So what did he learn from working with him and then the implosion, which he escaped relatively unscathed?

• 12:07Speaker 00

  Yes. He was head of M&A at Drexel.

• 12:10Kara Swisher?

  Right. Why did he get good at it? He turned out to be good at it.

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Well, why is he good at it? Because he's incredibly smart, incredibly insightful and savvy. And, you know, he can be good with clients. I mean, my experience is that on Wall Street, having worked there for close to 20 years, was that there are guys who can just turn it on with clients and just have the meeting out of the palm of their hand, even though they seem like rough around their edges or unpleasant to everybody else who works for them. With clients, they can be mesmerizing. And Leon was one of those guys, and he brought in a lot of big business. He brought in a lot of deals, you know, based on largely Milken's clients

• 12:55Speaker 00

  that he had financed and rose through the ranks and was flying high. And then Giuliani, as you said, came after Milken.

• 13:03Kara Swisher?

  And, you know, despite he and Black have remained close friends, what was the impact on him when the implosion happened?

• 13:10Speaker 00

  I mean, I think he told me he was devastated, obviously. I mean, the people who worked at Drexel loved working at Drexel. So, I mean, they were a money-making machine. Don't forget, Mike Milken was paid $550 million.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  $550 million for an investment banker in 1987 was unheard of. So Leon was getting fabulously rich, being head of M&A. So all that came crashing down after Milken pled guilty and left the firm. And then, you know, the firm, of course, had a run on the bank in early 1990 and basically was liquidated.

• 13:47Kara Swisher?

  And he goes to found his own firm, Apollo, which you call the new Wall Street.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Well, the innovations that I talk about in the book, in the last part of the book, since 2008, Mark Rowan, who became the CEO of Apollo in 2021, you know, is essentially the creator, just like Milken was the creator of the junk bond market. Mark Rowan is the creator and the genius, pretty much, behind the private credit, the explosion of the private credit market in this country. And that's how Wall Street has been changing. And that's why the subtitle includes the idea of a new Wall Street. It wasn't because of what Apollo was doing in 1990 and 2008 so much, but really from 2008 to now, 18 years later.

• 14:34Kara Swisher?

  And this is private credit to finance things, being a bank themselves, essentially.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  That's right. In effect, but without being a depository institution, without taking deposits from you and me, they get their capital from this insurance company they created called Athene, which provides annuities to retired or retiring people like me, Karen, not you, you know, who maybe want to lock in a fixed rate of return for X number of years. So their money is sort of long-term capital that they then use to provide long-term financing to all sorts of companies.

• 15:14Kara Swisher?

  Talk about, were the changes of the new Wall Street good for everyday people and Black himself?

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Well, Leon, of course, is now out of the firm. He remains the largest shareholder, so he cares immensely what Apollo is doing. And basically, Mark Rowan has created this private credit juggernaut. They have about a trillion dollars of assets under management now, 850 billion of which are private credit. So he's created a juggernaut. And of course, the rest of Wall Street, just like with Milken, creating the junk bond market and the rest of Wall Street catching up. The rest of Wall Street, the alternative asset managers on Wall Street, the Blackstones, the KKRs, the Brookfields, the TPGs,

• 16:01Speaker 00

  have copied what Apollo is doing and created a huge business out of it. And, you know, you will remember over probably the last nine months or so, a lot of people have been wondering whether there's a crack in the dam of the private equity tsunami, so to speak, mixing all sorts of metaphors there, and whether or not it's a bubble or whether or not it's going to cause the next financial crisis. And, you know, a lot of retail-type investors have invested in these private credit funds, wanted to get their money out and didn't realize they were limited to only 5% of their money and began making a lot of noise. But I think the people like Mark Rowan,

• 16:44Speaker 00

  who are the mad scientists behind private credit, are basically saying this is overblown. You guys are overreacting and everybody just calm down.

• 16:53Kara Swisher?

  But is it good for people? It's good for, you know, you put your money in these markets and it's, you know, the way you described it is kind of like the Hotel California. You can check in, but you just can't check out.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. Are these things good for average Americans? Yeah, it's great for Apollo. Okay, we can stipulate that. It's probably good for the borrowers, although their capital is not cheap, but they can get the capital. It's probably more flexible capital than bank capital. So that's probably good for the borrowers, by and large. There haven't been that many defaults. Is it good for the investors who invest in private credit? Well, Apollo, of course, invests about 20%, takes about 20% of each of the deals it puts together. So I think they wouldn't do that if those were, you know, if that was ugly piece of paper. So I think it's probably well-priced for the investors.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Here's the risk, Kara, comes with the people who are getting the annuities from Athene. Like their promise, say, 5% a year on their money for seven or 10 years. And Apollo was taking that money and investing it, you know, lending it out at 10 or 11%, and then probably using some leverage on top of that. You know, the argument has been made, and I explore this in the book, about whether or not really what Apollo has just created is a different form of a bank. In other words, you know, they own the annuity holders, this 5% a year. If somehow they don't pay that, they're in big trouble. The whole kit and caboodle is in big trouble. Or if the annuity holders, for whatever reason,

• 18:30Speaker 00

  even though their money is locked up for seven to 10 years, say, hey, I don't care about that. I want my money out now. They can't go to the ATM machine like they could at Silicon Valley Bank, but they can get their money out. It maybe comes as a penalty. But they, if enough of them clamor for that money back, you know, the assets are tied up for seven to 10 years, there could be a problem.

• 18:52Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 19:01Speaker 03

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• 19:31Kara Swisher?

  So Apollo turns black into a billionaire a few times over. He amasses a staggering art collection. He sits on MoMA's board of trustees. He has the trophy homes, a yacht, a jet. But one unnamed Wall Street veteran you spoke with said Black's weakness was hubris. That could be said about a lot of people on Wall Street. Was his hubris his big problem? Again, a lot of these people have that.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  So, you know, my thing with Leon, and I spent many, many hours talking to him, and he doesn't talk to many people in the press, is Leon, like you're this incredibly smart guy. You've created Apollo. Your thesis at Dartmouth was mind blowing. You're generally credited as being one of the smartest guys on Wall Street. There was a cover story in Business Week, you know, with one word title calling you ruthless. So you're feared and envied and people are in awe of you a lot of the time. How could you do something so stupid, Leon, to get involved with Jeffrey Epstein? Or to have an affair outside of your marriage that you agree to pay this woman $21 million and sign an NDA and then she blows it up?

• 20:37Speaker 00

  I mean,

• 20:38Kara Swisher?

  Right, right.

• 20:39Speaker 00

  You know, I asked him that many times in many different ways, and he basically said things like, "Life is complicated. I'm also the guy who spent $50 million each for two small Raphael drawings, $130 million for an Edouard Monk pastel." So, I mean, and part of his answer was, "Look, there were a lot of people, it wasn't just me with Jeffrey Epstein. We know that."

• 21:07Kara Swisher?

  Well, that's no excuse.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  No, but it's one that he uses. And there are, you know, as he pointed out to me, hundreds of rich guys within the one mile zip code area of where we were sitting and having this conversation, who've had affairs outside of their marriage and who got the women to sign NDAs. And, you know, and I, by the way, I would know many of them, he told me. And this is, you know, sort of par for the course. Again, not a great excuse.

• 21:37Kara Swisher?

  So for you to know Apollo weathers various missteps and scandals over the years, but eventually takes Black down is his relationship, as you know, to Jeffrey Epstein. His name comes up more than 8,000 times in the Epstein files, so that's kind of a dumb excuse. Now, he denies any knowledge of Epstein's crime, to be fair, although he did remain involved with him long after his 2008 conviction. Epstein's first listing prostitution from a minor. I think one of these things people struggle to understand is how Epstein got access to people like Black and Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. Talk about it, because if this is one of the smartest people I know, how is he so stupid?

• 22:11Speaker 00

  You know, when I first brought up Epstein, we were having lunch in his office and he went over to his jacket pocket and pulled out a handwritten list of all the people who were involved with Epstein, you know, many of whom you just cited. What was he doing for all those people? That remains one of the biggest mysteries, right? You know, for Leon, of course, he asked for, and Apollo commissioned what became known as the Deckard Report, which was a deep dive into Leon's relationship with Epstein. He said he asked for that because he, quote unquote, "knew he had done nothing wrong." The Deckard Report did not find any wrongdoing. They found that he paid him $158 million.

• 22:54Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, now, let me, let me be clear. Black insists the money, you noted in this book, was for legitimate business dealings related to tax and state advice. He even told you, quote, "I've never been that sophisticated tax-wise. They're always dumb when they need to be." More shockingly, he also told you he never added up how much he had paid Epstein. How do you square that with his financial acumen and making claims like these? Because it's obviously hurt his reputation, I think, probably fatally.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Because no one understands how a guy who could be as clever and savvy and is sharp-elbowed and as sophisticated and as successful on Wall Street doing deals could make himself vulnerable to this guy or could have, you know, created a tax structure with, you know, Wall Street lawyers that ended up not working. And then he has to go to Jeffrey Epstein, who's not even a lawyer, who's an autodidact, and find a solution that actually worked. And Leon and I spent a lot of time on this, and I talked to many lawyers who were involved in this. You know, he did have a problem with his tax and estate planning, even though it was

• 24:02Speaker 00

  done by a very sophisticated lawyer who was supposedly an expert in this. He went to Epstein. Epstein looks at the documents. He was no tax and estate expert, but, and I explain it in the book, he came up with a way to have the whole document set redrafted in a new way to eliminate the potential tax liability by Leon, in effect, having been given $400 million that he wasn't entitled to, giving that back. And that allowed for sufficient consideration for the documents to be redrafted without this problem, and then ended up saving Leon $2 billion.

• 24:46Speaker 00

  And, you know, it has never been challenged by the IRS. I know Ron Wyden talks about it all the time and thinks there must be something wrong with it. But Epstein's solution in just this case was very clever, very insightful, and then vetted by, you know, the Paul Weis's, the Sullivan and Cromwells, et cetera. And they all basically signed off on it. So, and I've never been able, I mean, I looked pretty hard, Kara, as you would expect me to do, to see whether there were any flaws in all that, that party line. And, you know, I have not been able to, you know, challenge it.

• 25:22Kara Swisher?

  So he had a good idea, but how did Black justify why he continued to work with Epstein for roughly a decade after his initial guilty plea? I mean, just that he was saving him a lot of money? Like, there's a lot of smart people that don't sleep with minors.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  Right. So here's the justification from Leon, and I lay it out in the book, of why he kept working with Epstein even after his guilty plea for having sex with a minor. He said, one, that Epstein told him that the girl slash woman showed him an ID card that showed she was older than 18.

• 25:57Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, the old excuse.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Of course, the old excuse. Okay. So Leon said, "Okay, that was kind of like, good enough for me." Number two is, he thought, "Okay, he paid his penalty," even though we now know it was incredibly lenient and kind of a joke. "He paid his penalty with society, and I believe in giving people second chances." And then he talks out to me, and maybe it's true, you know, he gave Martha Stewart a second chance. He gave Al Taubman a second chance. He gave Sam Waksel a second chance, all, you know, either convicted or pled guilty to crimes. You know, he's given Mike Milken a second chance and a third chance and a fifth chance.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  So he believes in, you know, this is what he told me, "I believe in giving these people second chances. They're my friends. I'll give them second chances. I didn't know about all of this criminal activity well beyond the having sex with the underage girl. So I didn't know about that. So he was a friend of mine. He helped me solve this tax problem. He then, you know, wormed his way into Elysium, his family office. He helped me buy boats and planes and artwork and sell them all in tax-efficient manners." He did not have, he had just like an agreement to work together. He did not have any written contract with all the other things that Epstein was doing for him over many other years.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  And then when the Deckard people totaled it up and it added up to $158 million, that was apparently news to Leon because he had never added it up before.

• 27:36Kara Swisher?

  So he just was paying the bills. So as more details emerge about Black's tie-stip, seeing, you know, as you noted, he asked Apollo's board to hire outside counsel to review their relationship, and the report exonerated him of any wrongdoing. But, and this is a big but, you didn't buy the review findings, and I got a read, which you wrote at the time in Vanity Fair. "Nice try, Leon. You must think we're pretty stupid, gullible, or insane to believe the tale you spun to the investigating firm." You sat down with him multiple times through this book. What would you say now?

• 28:05Speaker 00

  I still think that people are incredulous about the amount of money he paid to Jeffrey Epstein and the reason for that. So, and I remain incredulous, and I kind of asked him myself, and he knows. He knows he read the Vanity Fair thing I wrote, and he knows I'm skeptical. It is still an incredible amount of money. You know, one of the two main parties to this whole matter is dead. So, you know, absent any evidence to the contrary in the 3 million files, and I've been through a lot of them, especially when it involved Leon.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  And, you know, Epstein ranted against him in these crazy emails, Kara. And then Leon never responded to the emails.

• 28:54Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm. To, to Epstein.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  To Epstein. That's right. And so, you know, despite everybody being incredulous, and people are, people are still incredulous, as am I, basically. But, you know, I don't have any evidence to refute what he is saying.

• 29:10Kara Swisher?

  Why do you think he did it? If, if it was not, he helped me with my taxes.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  No, he helped me with all sorts of things. It wasn't just the taxes.

• 29:18Kara Swisher?

  He helped me with all sorts of things.

• 29:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:20Kara Swisher?

  And.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  He's a smart guy for, with these things. You know, Leon, you know, I get it. You know, you start talking, I don't know whether you've done your own estate planning, but when you start doing that, you know, it becomes very bizarre. And you can't even figure out what you've done, even the moment you leave the office of the lawyer, who you've just been working with.

• 29:38Kara Swisher?

  I'm pretty clear on what I've done, actually.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  Okay, well, you're smarter than the average bear.

• 29:42Kara Swisher?

  No, but it's not that. I don't have that much money. But, um, did your views change at all after you worked on this book with him? I mean, a lot of people have a lot of theories as to why he did this. Um, and obviously Les Wexner, there's a whole gang of theories around him, including.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  And Glenn Dubin, and you name it. I mean, there are plenty of people who are, have been unexplored. I mean, Leon has been explored more than most people. Deckard did do this report. I obviously pressed him on this repeatedly. We talked about it at length and on the record. I remain incredulous that he would pay $158 million to this guy and not realize it, and that there was not kind of like more to it. But I don't have any, have any evidence that there was. Now, he obviously had women on the side, and he got in trouble with one of them. Uh, and maybe others. There's been other allegations made against him, not just, you know, Gagneva, but two other women as well. And, and the lawsuits have been thrown out, basically.

• 30:40Kara Swisher?

  Right. So when and why did their relationship end with Epstein?

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Because if you read these insane emails from this guy, this verbal diarrhea at late, and late at night, he was just constantly harassing Leon for more money. And as Leon said, he thought that the advice and what he was paying for with Epstein was tax deductible. It turned out not to be tax deductible, so he thought he was paying with 60 cent dollars. He wasn't. He was paying with 100 cent dollars. So I think he just got pissed off at Epstein with his relentless, you know, desire for more and more money. And, um, he said, that's it. You're out of here.

• 31:19Kara Swisher?

  So why do you think Black agreed to be interviewed for this book, given that you basically called him a liar in the pages of Vanity Fair?

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Uh, maybe because he knew I was going to write the book anyway. He wanted to get his story out there. I've chronicled other Wall Street firms. I was a Wall Street banker. He reached out to me, Kara. I didn't even get a chance to call him up. He reached out to me and said, you're writing this book. I assume you'll want to talk to me. And I said, of course. He couldn't have been more open with his time and on the record, relentlessly on the record. You know, you know, with Wall Street types.

• 31:52Kara Swisher?

  They don't like to be on the record.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  They don't like to be on the record.

• 31:55Kara Swisher?

  They'll tell you everything off the record.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 31:57Kara Swisher?

  Was he trying to prove something? What motivated him?

• 32:00Speaker 00

  I think he would like a Milken-like redemption, if he could get one. I don't think he's going to get one. Cause I mean, Milken pled guilty to crimes that he was later pardoned for. That's a whole other thing. Don't get me started. But, you know, he had prostate cancer and he is obviously become, been very, very helpful to that whole cancer drive. He's also, Milken is probably smarter with the media than Leon has been.

• 32:29Kara Swisher?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Right? They don't question a thing that he says. You know, he won't even talk to me because I don't suck at that teat. Uh, Leon has kept most of the media standoffish, and rightly so. They've been cruel to him.

• 32:42Kara Swisher?

  Cause the minute Epstein is mentioned, you know, Gates is a similar way, right? We don't know what he did.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  Larry Summers, all of them.

• 32:48Kara Swisher?

  So in the wake of revelations about Epstein, and also revelations that he had years-long extramarital filled with a Russian woman paid her millions of dollars to stay quiet about it. Um, I love how people are so mad. I'm like, of course you pay her to stay quiet. What else would you do? Like, if you wanted them to be quiet? But, uh, Black resigned as CEO of Apollo and as chairman of the Paul's Board in March of 2021. And yet, um, he hasn't exactly been canceled. He's still on the Board of Trustees at MoMA. He still has ties to the Met. Um, what's been the impact on him? Cause the Epstein stink stays on people. I'm thinking of Gates, Clinton, Summers, as you said, he had to leave certain things.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  And, you know, Gates is trying to reemerge, right?

• 33:29Kara Swisher?

  He is.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  With comments about AI.

• 33:31Kara Swisher?

  Scary.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Right. Leon has, it's stuck on him a lot longer than pretty much everyone else. Uh, the sum of money he paid him, as we've discussed, is much higher than anybody else by a large margin. There was the Deckard report, which is a public report. He's got Ron Wyden.

• 33:50Kara Swisher?

  He's in the files a lot.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  He's in the files a lot. But again, never answering the crazy things and never corresponding. I mean, if Larry Summers had just not responded, he would not have been canceled. Okay, so Larry, you blew that. And then asking him for dating advice.

• 34:07Kara Swisher?

  Yes, yes.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Nice one, Larry.

• 34:08Kara Swisher?

  Classy. Keep it classy, Larry.

• 34:11Speaker 00

  Yep. Don't ever change. Uh, but, you know, Leon has Ron Wyden crawling up his ass. He's now got Comer crawling up his ass. He's supposed to, uh, go back and give.

• 34:22Kara Swisher?

  Let me just, for people who don't understand, the Epstein files were released by the DOJ early this year. Some of them contained even more disturbing allegations against Black, including multiple allegations of assault. And we're not going to share the details, but Black strongly denies the substance of all of them. And as you said, the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Finance Committee have been looking into Black as part of their Epstein investigations. So what, what is the biggest question that remained unanswered about his involvement?

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Well, you know, Wyden is just skeptical about the whole 158 and what it was for. By the way, he says it's 170, not 158. I'm not sure where he gets that number, but he's sticking with it. Uh, he's been sort of, quote unquote, exploring how billionaires don't pay their fair share of taxes. And he thinks that Leon is, you know, exhibit A. So that's Wyden. Wyden is relentless. And Comer now is after Leon's NDAs. And he thinking that, you know, he must have been involved, you know, gotten advice from Epstein on the NDAs. He's threatening now to hold Leon in contempt of Congress if Leon doesn't cough up these NDAs, you know, of which there may, may not be others besides the ones he's.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  Uh, he obviously shared the Gagneva one because that was public, uh, because of lawsuits. He's offered to share a second one. I don't know what that is. Uh, but Comer thinks there are all these other ones. And meanwhile, he, you know, with an NDA, you know, that means two people signed it, right? At least. And if Leon unilaterally gives it to Comer without permission from the other person who signed it, that's breaking that contract. So he can't do that. So he's in a bit of a standoff with Comer. Comer is, I think, also wants to run for governor of Kentucky. And this is like, maybe his political stepping stone for that. He's threatened Leon with contempt of Congress. He's supposed to appear on September 3rd for an involuntary deposition.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  So the two of them are really at loggerheads at the moment, literally in real time.

• 36:20Kara Swisher?

  Where does this leave him?

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Leon?

• 36:22Kara Swisher?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  He's still the largest shareholder in Apollo. He told me he has more than a billion dollars in his philanthropy to give away, and he struggles to give it away because there's the Leon Black taint. He, his art collection is astounding. Absolutely one of the most incredible I've ever seen. Um, he's on GLPs, so he's lost weight. He looks better. He wears Ray-Ban sunglasses like somebody I know on this call when he's striding the halls of Congress to go to his testimony. Um, he hangs out, you know, in the Hamptons. He's got his private jet, flies around the world. I mean, you know, his son, Ben, is in the Trump administration. One of his other sons works at Apollo. I mean, it could be worse. He's worth $15 billion.

• 37:07Kara Swisher?

  So what did you take away from this book? Why him?

• 37:11Speaker 00

  I love writing these incredible stories about these incredible characters. So that's one thing. I mean, I just love to get into who they are and their personalities and why they've done what they've done, and all the supporting cast. So that was, you know, I just knew it was a great story, Kara. And then another big part of it was, as we alluded to before, was how Apollo has changed Wall Street because of what Mark Rowan has done with Athene and this whole private credit bonanza. And we don't really know how it's going to play out yet. And a lot of people are very worried that it's going to lead to the next financial crisis. So for those two reasons, I wanted to write the book. I got lucky that, uh, this whole Epstein blew up and there was 3 million files that I never even thought I'd have access to, many of which involved Leon.

• 37:55Kara Swisher?

  So you were working on it before this, right? Correct?

• 37:58Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:58Kara Swisher?

  Has Leon read this book?

• 38:00Speaker 00

  I think he's just getting, uh, his copy today.

• 38:03Kara Swisher?

  How do you think he comes off?

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Fair and balanced. I hate those words because they're Fox News laden, but he, he's had his say. He, you know, he explains it all in detail.

• 38:13Kara Swisher?

  He laid out the case, right?

• 38:14Speaker 00

  Laid out the case. The other side of it is dead. So this might stand for a while until the other 3 million files come out, which will probably be a never thing.

• 38:27Kara Swisher?

  Well, never say never.

• 38:31Kara Swisher?

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 38:39Speaker 03

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• 39:09Kara Swisher?

  So, other business news, let's get to some other stories because you and I text a lot and talk about different things that are happening. Now, Wall Street is still very bullish on artificial intelligence despite ongoing fears of a bubble. All of the Wall Street is buoyed by AI and tech, essentially. Anthropic is preparing to go public soon and hoping to beat SpaceX's record-breaking IPO just a few months ago, though not a particularly successful IPO for people who got in right at the start, except the very start did great. Anthropic is also expected to tell investors it sees more than $30 trillion in potential revenue, an eye-popping figure. Talk a little bit about what's going on with Wall Street and AI right now.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  A valuation bubble of epic proportions. Epic proportions. Absolutely insane. And if people don't get sobered up by that SpaceX IPO, then I can't help them at this point. I mean, now it's creating valuable infrastructure that we will need for this. I mean, AI is not going away. Just like the internet wasn't going away, we needed the infrastructure and that every company that was part of that infrastructure in building it went bankrupt, but we still use the infrastructure. The same thing is happening in effect now. Way too much capital, as you and Scott have talked about many times, is being invested in this area at ridiculous valuations. So, I mean, people are just going to lose a lot of money and they never learn, they

• 40:32Speaker 00

  keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again. You know, and I'm old enough now where I've lived through 10 of these mistakes and, you know, they just have to learn on their own. Kara, lead the horse to water, you can't make him drink.

• 40:46Kara Swisher?

  How realistic is the $30 trillion in potential revenue? It sounds like you think not realistic. Someone there brought it to me and I just said, get the fuck out of here.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  I mean, how realistic are data centers on the moon?

• 40:57Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. Probably more realistic than this. But inevitably, as you noted, there'll be a market correction, there always is, it doesn't mean it will burst necessarily, but even former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has been sounding alarm about the, quote, "unlimited appetite for exposure to positive AI revenue" story. What if anything could prompt a course correction? And what would that look like when you're thinking about it? Because we all know it's coming.

• 41:21Speaker 00

  You know, people always think they know what's going to be the trigger for a correction. Very few people know. It comes out of left field, it's probably the last thing you expect. But what always is the same, Kara, is that it triggers a loss of confidence. And since Wall Street is nothing but a confidence game, once that confidence is lost in this euphoric concept, which at the moment happens to be AI and data centers and ridiculous valuations, then it's just like, oh my God, SpaceX is a $30 stock suddenly, and what were we ever thinking by valuing it at $225 a share? I mean, hindsight is 2020, investors never figure it out.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  You know, and now there's this move to get people, to allow people that when their 401Ks and pensions to invest in private equity and private credit and all these crazy things. Please don't do it, people. I know this is not investment advice, never is with me, but please don't fall for the shiny object yet again.

• 42:25Kara Swisher?

  So, what are the big signals at this moment? You know, everyone's always talking about red flags, big signals, flashing red, you know?

• 42:33Speaker 00

  I mean, it's going to be some sort of revenue miss or profit miss at Nvidia or Anthropic or SpaceX turns out to be a big old dud. I'm telling you, if SpaceX goes to $30 a share, as some people have predicted, you know, then that's going to be the wake-up call. Frankly, if, I think there could be repercussions if, you know, our friends at Paramount and Warner Brothers, if that deal falls apart. Because if that deal falls apart, $31 a share plus whatever ticking fee goes away and Warner Brothers becomes a $10 stock?

• 43:10Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, yes, right.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  And Paramount Skydance becomes a $1 stock and Larry Ellison is out billions, not that he made a care. Oracle keeps swallowing. I mean, it's going to add up. It's like a string of, whatever the opposite of a string of pearls is, a string of calamities.

• 43:26Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. Well, speaking of that, just one of the people trying to get out of it in the stock has been, people consider, undervalued. Meta has also agreed to pay $17 billion to settle a landmark teen social media addiction case. Other cases against Meta are still playing out in the courts, there's lots of them. Talk about why they settled and, you know, just for people that don't know, the same Attorney General who's plaguing Paramount was right in the middle of this case. He had a great case.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  It's a big win for him.

• 43:52Kara Swisher?

  Big win for him. I have warned the Paramount people, this guy is really smart and he has the leverage on them. So, talk a little bit about this, why Meta settled? I get it, they had to.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  Because they were going to lose.

• 44:04Kara Swisher?

  They were going to lose and it could have been hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  17 billion sounds cheap to me.

• 44:08Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, well, it's a lot.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  It's a lot of money.

• 44:10Kara Swisher?

  It's not a little.

• 44:11Speaker 00

  Yes, it's not a little. It's not a little, but it's a rounding error on their market cap.

• 44:17Kara Swisher?

  Right.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  And now, I don't know what this stock is doing today, it's probably trading up with the settlement. So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg slips the noose again.

• 44:26Kara Swisher?

  Right, so, for now.

• 44:28Speaker 00

  For now. And by the way, it was criminal what he was doing to our children.

• 44:33Kara Swisher?

  Yes, 100%. So, explain why they did it and why did Bonta and the others settle, from your perspective, and what it means for their stock?

• 44:41Speaker 00

  Why they settled? Because, why not? I mean, they got 17 billion, we're talking about it as a big win politically and financially for Bonta. It like gives him, I think, even more power over the Ellison's and the Peace Guy situation. Same guy. And so, this guy is riding high and, you know, if, you know, he could have let it go to the jury and he could have won more money and maybe gotten even a bigger victory, could have lost, I don't know why he would have lost, maybe the jury would have awarded less. So, sometimes, you know, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And, you know, he comes, we're singing his praises now.

• 45:20Kara Swisher?

  Right, right. So, what does that mean for the power of these AGs on the companies? Because just for people that know, Rob Bonta is the California Attorney General and he's pushing back against the governor and the mayor of Los Angeles and he's been very vocal about the Paramount deal this week, saying they're basically leaking liars. I think that's pretty much what he said. But what happens now, because this is not just one case, there's dozens and many people feel this is the cigarette moment for these companies.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  And it should be, because those crimes are similar. I mean, I hope this leads to a dramatic change in the way that algorithm works. And not just that algorithm, frankly, all of these crazy algorithms. I'm so sick of what I see in my X feed and I don't know how to get out of it.

• 46:06Kara Swisher?

  You can stop using it.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  I know, I know. You've told me to do that many times, but it's my only social media platform.

• 46:14Kara Swisher?

  Go on threads, or then you're still with Mark Zuckerberg.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  I know, I'm a Luddite. So, I hope it leads to serious reform and it's long overdue.

• 46:22Kara Swisher?

  So, we also appear to be careening towards a devastating trade war with Canada. Canada announced it will propose retaliatory tariffs on hundreds of US products, including steel and appliances, and Trump is threatening even higher taxes on Canadian exports. Right now, the market hasn't reacted too much to the escalating threats. What do you make of that? And is it because they assume, Taco, Trump always chickens out? Or what's happening? How do you assess right now his grip on the economy, if it is indeed a grip?

• 46:50Speaker 00

  Look, Trump and Mark Carney don't get along and I love Mark Carney for it because he doesn't suck up to Trump or kowtow to Trump.

• 46:56Kara Swisher?

  An experienced investment banker, right?

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Oh my God, the guy is, got the most incredible resumes, you know, chance, he is like head of the Bank of England, head of the Bank of Canada, ex Goldman, I mean, the guy, Prime Minister of Canada. The guy is an amazing politician and leader. And he's standing up for his country and for Trump to pick a fight with Canada is absolutely ridiculous. And another example of Trump going off the rails is if we needed another example. Tariffs are taxes on the American people. This tariff thing is ridiculous. You know, we might recall that tariffs led us into the Great Depression once upon a time. Have we forgotten that?

• 47:43Speaker 00

  Yes, of course, we've forgotten that.

• 47:44Kara Swisher?

  Smooth holly, my friend, yeah. So, when you think about this, when you look at these things, tariffs, Iran, gas prices, inflation, Wall Street has done well. And I've had Wall Street people say, hey, it's all going up. And I'm like, okay, you're not the American public necessarily. What do you see ahead, especially with Trump?

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Two words, Kara, bond market. Bond yields are backing up, you know, despite the great Scott Besant trying to, you know, stick his finger in the dyke. Very stupid. Pa, so to speak. Don't try to second guess the bond vigilantes. The bond market is saying something very important here, like deficits matter, debt matters, the Iran war matters, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz matters, gas, oil prices going up matter, your reckless grift matters, your stupid ballroom matters. All these things matter and you're ignoring, you know, you're blowing up the American economy,

• 48:44Speaker 00

  you're hastening the time when the dollar is no longer the reserve currency and you're not doing a damn thing about it. And if you have to refinance parts of this 40 trillion of debt, you're going to need bond buyers to do that and they're going to do it, but they're going to require a higher interest rate. And we now spend more on interest expense than we do on the military spending, which is unfathomable at one point. We spend more than a trillion dollars a year now on interest expense and it's only going to go up higher because interest rates are going to continue to go up.

• 49:17Kara Swisher?

  Until what happens?

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Until, you know, no one rings a bell at the top of the market, Kara, until we lose confidence and we have a crisis.

• 49:28Kara Swisher?

  And then that's where Wall Street, yeah, because they're all like, it's all good. I'm like, not for today. Okay.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not all good. It's not. And they know it's not all good, but they're not going to say it.

• 49:37Kara Swisher?

  They're not going to say it. So every episode, we get a question from an outside expert. Yours is about the insurance company, Athene, which was under Black's Apollo and went public before Apollo bought it back.

• 49:47Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm journalist and author Bethany McLean and former Vanity Fair colleague of Bill's. Hi, Bill. So maybe sanglin isn't the right word, but your book isn't alarmed about Athene either. Mark, Walter and Guggenheim are obviously in the headlines every day now. Would Apollo insiders view that model as having crossed a line that Apollo slash Athene don't cross? Or is Walter's empire simply a cruder, less carefully disclosed version of Apollo's model?

• 50:14Kara Swisher?

  Great question.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  It is a great question because Bethany is so smart.

• 50:16Kara Swisher?

  Explain who Mark Walter is.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Mark Walter is, you know, head of various companies in around the Guggenheim, you know, empire that owns the Dodgers, owns insurance companies, did own the Lakers until somehow Jared Kushner's brother got a hold of it with Bob Iger. Don't even ask me how that was possible. I don't understand it. So obviously, Mark Rowan is think he's thinks he's built a better mousetrap with Athene. He thinks he's solved the, you know, longstanding problem on Wall Street of borrowing short and lending long, which is, you know, one of the major reasons we have financial crises. But I do explore at the end of my

• 50:58Speaker 00

  book, and God bless people if they get there. I think it's an incredible story, Kara, but you need to get to the end to see the questions I raise about this model and whether if these annuities who are promised 5% to 7% interest a year decide they want their money back, it will be like a run on the bank. It will be like Silicon Valley Bank. It will be like, you know, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. And then it'll take down the whole private equity, you know, juggernaut for 10 years.

• 51:34Kara Swisher?

  10 years. Wow. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Look at that.

• 51:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's how long it takes to recover from these things.

• 51:38Kara Swisher?

  So it could be the same thing. It's just a more sophisticated.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  It could be. It could be. Mark, of course, says it isn't. And lots of people say it isn't. And not every one of these models is the same. The good thing is here, they'd have to go through a lot of hoops to get their money out. They can't just go to their ATM machine.

• 51:53Kara Swisher?

  I get it. Still.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  Still.

• 51:55Kara Swisher?

  Runs on the bank or runs on, they're still the same.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Loss of confidence is a loss of confidence.

• 51:59Kara Swisher?

  Yes, exactly. So the through line through both the book and some of the other big stories of Wall Street right now, we just talked about a seemingly bottomless appetite for risk, despite the fact that we're not that far removed from the 2008 financial crisis. Meanwhile, Americans are getting rocked by higher gas prices, higher grocery prices, tariffs, the high cost of housing and healthcare, and Wall Street, as I noted, is doing okay. How has the continued success of private credit firms like Leon Black's Apollo and others reshaped Wall Street's appetite for risk? And what does it ultimately mean for the rest of us?

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Well, we have an affordability crisis. We have a huge growing gap between the rich and poor. None of those things are good. People are up in arms about data centers at the grassroots level. And yet we keep plowing ahead with them and spending more and more capital. And Wall Street has just committed $500 billion to Nvidia so that Nvidia's customers can do more data center stuff. You know, Mark Rowan would say, we are investing our private capital dollars in senior secured debt. So, you know, if you're worried about senior secured debt, you might as well just jump off a cliff because because that means all the equity will be wiped out, all the subordinated debt will

• 53:13Speaker 00

  be wiped out, all the preferred stock will be wiped out, and all these companies will be going up in flames. And his argument is, that's ridiculous. And you know that's ridiculous. We're senior, we're secured, we're good underwriters. Yes. Well, that's true. But, you know, Silicon Valley Bank invested in treasury securities. They still went out of business and were liquidated because there was a run on the bank. So loss of confidence is a loss of confidence. Doesn't really matter sometimes how good your assets are because if you can't liquidate them to meet the redemption demand, so what?

• 53:49Kara Swisher?

  Yeah. So very, very last question. What story or person do you think deserves more attention? Who are you putting your gaze on?

• 53:57Speaker 00

  Ken Griffin. He's the wealthiest guy on Wall Street. He's even wealthier than Schwartzman. He's buying up all of Florida, half of Manhattan. He's an art collector. The guy is controlling empires. He hasn't really gotten the treatment. He doles out his interviews to CNBC where they treat him with kid gloves. You know, he's never really explained himself or his businesses. And, you know, he's one of the most powerful people on Wall Street who has not really gotten his full investigation yet.

• 54:29Kara Swisher?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. Anyway, it's a great book. Leon Black is, these characters are really fascinating, and this is a great book. And I really appreciate all your thoughts, Bill. And keep listening, reading him on Puck. He has the best coverage. We argue a lot about things, but I always learn from Bill, which is, I mean, argue in good ways, but I always learn a lot, and I really appreciate all you do.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  I appreciate you having me on always. Thank you.

• 54:57Kara Swisher?

  Today's show was produced by Nishat Kurwa, Michelle Aloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlante-Duby, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Special thanks to Rosemarie Ho, Corinne Ruff, and Julia Sharp Levine. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're keeping it classy. If not, you're falling for that shiny object once again. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.

• 55:39Speaker 02

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