Apollo's Jim Zelter on AI Disruption and the Future of Private Credit

Welcome to another episode of Goldman Sachs Exchanges Great Investors. I'm Allison Mast, Chairman of Investment Banking and Goldman Sachs' Global Banking and Markets business and your host for this episode. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Jim Selter, president of Apollo Global Management, one of the world's largest alternative asset managers and provider of retirement solutions. We're talking with Jim at a truly dynamic time. The global economy is experiencing an unprecedented surge in capital expenditures driven by the growth in AI, data centers, the energy transition, and infrast

It's a real pleasure to be here.

So I always like to start these sessions by asking what got people interested in business and finance in the first place. You started your career on Wall Street as a trader in the public markets, starting out as a fixed income trader, and then working as a high yield trader here at Goldman Sachs.

I did not have a typical finance background out of college. I did various jobs. I worked in the fishing industry in Alaska. And as I got out of Duke, I came to New York, interviewed for a few jobs. And when I walked on the trading floor, I just felt for the first time like this is the energy that I was looking for. And so it captivated me at a very early age. And I loved I played sports. I played sports in college. And I found the competition, the energy, the engagement, the intensity was something that I just quickly got into. And I feel like that's a real gift to do it, to find it when that

You were on the trading desk, but what did the trading desk teach you about risk that still influences you today at Apollo?

Yeah. I think it's dealing with issues front and center. When you're on a trading desk, if there's a challenge or a problem coming to the surface, you can't put it off to tomorrow. It's true engagement. It's confronting challenges quickly, making the decision with the information you have at that point in time. We'd all like to get a lot more information to make the right decision, but you don't have the luxury to that. And a trading desk forces you to deal with marks, to deal with bad decisions, to deal with problems right away. And I think that's a reason why on Wall Street, a lot of leaders

Yep.

And so when we think about Apollo today, we really have a discipline and a fundamental focus on purchase price, creation value, and that permeates everything that we do. Now, that started as a private equity mantra, purchase price matters. But the whole business of our credit business, our hybrid business, our insurance business, Athene and Athora, that permeates literally everything we do.

Yeah. That mark to market mentality is valuable. And in fact, we talked earlier about you reading our former CEO's book, Lloyd's book. He talks about that a lot, that people on the trading floor would say that their marks were accurate. And he'd say, great. Get me a bid.