Marc Rowan on Private Markets, Software Repricing, and Capital Allocation
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10 stocks right now in The US are nearly 50% of the S and P, and they're all levered to the same trend. The same thing is happening in the global fixed income market. And so if you're an investor and you're looking for diversification, there's no place to get it other than private markets. Great companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, Andoroll. Every one of those companies is private, multiple trillion dollars, and yet most investors have zero exposure to them. Andreessen wrote this piece over a
decade ago that software's heating the world, and that feels more true than ever as AI proliferates all parts of the economy.
We operate under the assumption that every job is going to be replaced or enhanced. 2025 was just proof of concept that data centers and chips and energy were all needed. 2026, the market is starting to recognize that if this continues, everyone who is an investor is going to be
In 1990, Mark Rowan walked out of Drexel with his belongings in a cardboard box. Within a year, Apollo was managing $6,000,000,000 What started as a distressed investing firm in the aftermath of a financial crisis eventually became one of the world's largest alternative asset managers, spanning private credit, retirement services, and financing for some of the largest industrial and technology shifts underway today. Now another transition is happening. AI, robotics, energy infrastructure, and data centers are creating enormous new capital demands, forcing finance and technology to converge in
Mark, thank you so much for joining us and for hosting us here at your office.
Nothing better. My absolute pleasure.
I thought we'd start by maybe going back in time. You joined Drexel coming on Wharton, I believe, 1984. What did you see in the firm at that time?
It was an interesting thing. Everyone who had come out of my program at Wharton had basically gone to Goldman Sachs. Yep. What struck me about Drexel's business, which was financing entrepreneurs, financing new companies, is that you didn't really need to know all that much about finance. You needed to know a lot about business, because these companies were not the exons of the day or the top notch companies of the day. They were companies where legitimately there were questions on the business model. I was always much more interested in business than I was in the nuances of finance and public
I think one of the most remarkable things about the diaspora from Drexel, especially in that period, is just I mean, you can almost trace every major credit firm back to that kind of cohort of people. Was there something about the culture, maybe the focus of your clients at the time, that sort of shaped that sort of incredible kind
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