Leon Black Is Back

leon black
Leon Black remains Apollo’s largest shareholder, although he is no longer involved with the company: Instead, he is focused on his own family office, Elysium Management. Photo: Demetrius Freeman/Bloomberg/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
January 19, 2025

Leon Black, the founder of Apollo Global Management who stepped down from the company in early 2021 following back-to-back revelations about his ties to the late pedophile Jeffery Epstein and a long-ended affair, recently earned a series of vindicating legal victories. First, Guzel Ganieva, Leon’s onetime paramour, lost her appeal in her defamation lawsuit against Black, initially brought by the Wigdor law firm on her behalf. Last year, in a two-part series, I wrote about how Ganieva got Leon to pay her $21 million over 15 years in exchange for her silence about the affair—a confidentiality agreement that she violated after receiving her first $9 million over six years, in March 2021, in a series of tweets that claimed he had “sexually harassed and abused” her.