According to the publicity materials, with which I heartily concur, “The book is a deeply reported account of Apollo Global Management with unparalleled access to controversial co-founder Leon Black. The book traces Apollo’s rise as a pioneer in the world of private equity and private credit. At the center is Black, a financial genius and aggressive dealmaker whose strategies generated enormous returns, extreme personal wealth, and redefined Wall Street’s appetite for risk. Cohan draws on Black’s first-hand account to draw back the curtain on his career and life, including his financier father’s suicide, his trip to Russia with President Trump, and his own account of the relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (whom he paid $158 million) that eventually forced him to resign as C.E.O.”

Money to Burn comes nearly three years after the publication of Power Failure, my bestselling book about the rise and fall of GE. As longtime readers of Dry Powder know, I had unrivaled access to not only Black but also Marc Rowan, Josh Harris, and a wide cast of characters who divulged why they built Apollo and how—despite Leon’s downfall and Josh’s departure—the firm continues to reinvent Wall Street in the post–Great Recession era. (If you’d like, you can preorder the book from Penguin Random House, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Books-A-Million, Audible, and on my own website, WilliamCohan.com.

And now, back to Ackman…

While I was away, Bill Ackman, Gen X’s self-styled, would-be Warren Buffett—a.k.a. the Oracle of Bro-maha—struck again. I’m not talking about Bill kicking off the roadshow on Monday for the long-awaited combined I.P.O. of his hedge fund management company, Pershing Square Holdings, and his new fund. Nor do I refer to his latest attempt to buy Universal Music Group for around $65 billion, a roughly 80 percent premium. Instead, I’d draw your attention to Bill’s 2,500-word rant on X about the stunning dysfunction within his family office, Table, and what happened when Bill tried to clean house.

Earlier this month, Bill informed his 2 million followers on X that, despite the risk of sharing too much information, he was turning to them for advice on how to deal with his family office situation. “I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest,” he wrote. Apparently, Bill created Table 15 years ago to manage his personal investments. And over the years, as the value of his investment portfolio grew, so did the number of Table employees on the operational side, with expenses growing even faster. Eventually, Bill wrote, he became concerned that “all was not well” at Table. He deployed his nephew, a Harvard graduate who had done a “superb job” at Bremont, the British watchmaker that Bill owns, to “figure out what was going on.”

No surprise, the presence of Bill’s young emissary made people nervous. He met seriatim with each Table employee and “got an earful,” according to Bill, about all the things that had gone wrong. Bill decided the “first step” in trying to right the ship was to defenestrate a third of the team, including the president, while retaining the remaining “excellent talent,” who were apparently desperate for new leadership.

The layoffs seemed to be going smoothly enough until Bill fired Table’s in-house lawyer, a woman he refers to as “Ronda.” She had been at Table for two years and done a fine job, he wrote, but he had decided an in-house lawyer was no longer necessary. He offered her three months of severance, but she demanded two years, which came to about $2 million. Bill objected, understandably, and tried to meet with Ronda, but she refused. Instead, Bill said, her lawyers at a Silicon Valley firm sent him a “threatening” legal letter claiming that she was a victim of “longstanding issues” of “harassment and gender discrimination” and that her termination was a result of “unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her.” Ronda’s lawyers warned Bill to make a genuine settlement proposal or face litigation.

Needless to say, Bill did not take kindly to the threatening legal letter, which I found somewhat ironic, given the 75-page letter his lawyers sent to Business Insider in 2023 after the company published articles about alleged plagiarism by his second wife, former M.I.T. professor Neri Oxman. Indeed, Bill himself is no stranger to a bit of lawfare to get what he wants.

The legal letter also fingered Bill’s nephew specifically, claiming that during the time he was interviewing Table employees, he “made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [he] made remarks about female employees’ ages (‘Tell me you are nowhere near 40’), physical appearance (‘Your body does not look like you have kids’), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (‘Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?’).” Bill noted that when he first heard about these allegations, he encouraged the Table president to get his nephew some “workplace sensitivity training.”

For his part, the nephew told Bill that the remarks were taken out of context and were not received in the way the lawyers portrayed them in Ronda’s letter. The one who arranged for his sensitivity training, it turns out, was Ronda, who was also head of H.R. compliance at Table. Bill wondered aloud to his X followers why, in that role, Ronda had failed to keep a record or “[raise] an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true.”

But Bill was just getting warmed up. His X screed went on to speculate that the timing of Ronda’s attempt to extract a larger severance was suspicious, given the start of the process for his twin I.P.O.s. Was she hoping he would settle for some immaterial (to him) amount rather than have Wall Street question what was going on at Table in the middle of his roadshow? He further suspected that Ronda had struck because she was one of the few people who knew he was in a weakened condition, dealing with the ongoing family trauma of an adult daughter’s medical crisis, which he disclosed for the first time publicly in the X post. (He had shared this information with me more than a month ago, but it was obviously too personal to report.)

Bill argued that Ronda was already “vastly” overpaid—more than $1 million a year plus benefits for three days a week in the office and carte blanche to work remotely all summer. “Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on,” Bill continued, “she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to*-good-to-be-true [*sic] category.”

To get the money she wanted out of him, Bill alleged on X, she likely invented the harassment allegation. “She may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at Table for 30 months,” Bill wrote. “She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly.” (Where would she ever get that notion?)

Ronda, Bill assured his followers, had underestimated him. He was going to fight “this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other C.E.O.s to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it.”

So far, Bill’s post has been viewed 11 million times, eliciting more than 10,000 responses, including from Chamath Palihapitiya, the billionaire All-In podcast co-host and onetime SPAC king, who supported Bill’s hardass approach. Chamath used to settle such claims, too, but he “finally got fed up with it and drew a hard line in the sand with a bunch of folks who sued me for profits they didn’t deserve. They lost. I won. I will never settle again. Only fight.”

Donald Trump Jr. also weighed in: “Agreed 100% 100% 100% this nonsense has to stop.” And someone named Q-Cap wondered what I myself, frankly, had been wondering. “With all due respect,” Q-Cap wrote, “why would you air this out to the world from all places here on X. This is like cheating on your wife and then asking a stripper for relationship advice. Fun to read though.” Replied Bill, “There is a method to my madness.”

I pinged Bill to ask him to elaborate. He was between meetings meant to rally the I.P.O. underwriters’ sales forces and declined to comment about Ronda or his X post because of the potential for litigation. My own sense is that Bill, who’s worth around $9 billion these days, took this dispute to a public forum because he is pissed that Ronda (and those like her) thinks she can shake down a billionaire with nothing more than a threatening letter. At the very least, Bill surmised, she may have hoped to settle her claim somewhere between the original offer of three months’ severance and her $2 million counter.

Bill may win this one, unlike what happened with Business Insider. Ronda, meanwhile, has removed any mention of Table from her LinkedIn profile, I’m told. Whether her now-very-public imbroglio with Bill and his family office will dampen her chances of getting a new job elsewhere as a general counsel, who knows? She has yet to file a lawsuit against Bill or Table. As for Bill’s nephew, he’s still working away at the family office.

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