The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 59 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Elliott secured Caesars bankruptcy date agreement to trigger CDS payout
“And he had been running very tough negotiation with Apollo and struck a very, very tough deal because he knew that Apollo needed an ally really badly. And so he got all sorts of goodies, including a convertible preferred security, as well as one of these well-…”
Kleinman: Private equity cannot scale like credit due to concentrated dealmaking
“There's only so much you can deploy in private equity. When you are making six or eight consequential decisions a year, there's only so much capital you can deploy on that basis. In the credit business, instead of buying a hundred million of this particular bo…”
Kleinman: Asset management growth is constrained by origination, not capital
“The whole industry thinks in terms of capital formation. I just got to raise more capital and I'll deploy it. We flipped that on its head and said, no, the limiter of our growth is not capital. We've never had a situation where we've had good ideas and haven't…”
Caesars' B-7 loan eliminated its maintenance covenant and parent guarantee
“And they offered them very, very generous fees, among other things, to participate in this transaction that accomplishes three things. One, it's gonna give them some liquidity to refinance out some of their other debt. Two, it's going to remove the most onerou…”
Examiner found $5B in potential claims against Caesars and PE executives
“Richard Davis, a former Watergate prosecutor, chosen as an examiner at the beginning of the case and gets deep access and interviews, you know, 75 different people who are designing and behind these transactions. Goes through millions of documents with a team …”
Caesars restructuring centered on fraudulent conveyance accusations over property transfers
“The mass tort in the case of Caesars is the accusation of fraudulent conveyance in these transactions where many of the top properties of the Caesars opco ended up in these affiliated entities where Apollo owned them, and they were out of the hands of Creditor…”
Apollo and TPG transferred Caesars casinos to bankruptcy-remote entities
“Apollo and TPG executed a series of these complex asset deals, asset transfers, financial engineering, where more money is put in the business. They buy casinos from the existing Caesars and Harris Opgo, all in an attempt, ostensibly, to Keep everybody's inves…”
Caesars restructuring became a PE roadmap rather than a cautionary tale
“Caesars ended up being less of a cautionary tale and more of a roadmap, and the reason for that, I think, is very simple. People realized that after this deal, Apollo raises a twenty-five billion dollar fund, and the LP community didn't really penalize them, a…”
Kleinman: Apollo was first to house private credit and PE together
“We were the first folks to come out of the GFC saying, well, we should have private credit business and a private equity business under the same roof.”
Kleinman: Apollo will roll out lower-leverage active equity strategies over next 5 years
“My only point is there are lots of ways that over the next five years, we will begin to bring other forms of equity to investors that isn't necessarily private equity, i.e. Levered equity buyout type capital that gives Premium to the longterm S&P with more sta…”
Kleinman: Apollo bought Bridge Investment Group to expand real estate
“Obviously, with rates moving and cap rates moving, we, this year, went out and bought a fifty billion dollar real estate Asset manager called Bridge, and that's now an area we're starting to redirect and lean into because the relative pricing has repriced ther…”
Charles: Only Ares, Apollo, Blackstone, and KKR reach Level 10 scale
“There's only six firms at level 10, and they are enormous. They look more like Goldman Sachs than they look like Arctos. Aries, Apollo, Blackstone, KKRA, it's the biggest of the big.”
Fund Managers' Purported 'Trade Secrets' Are Already Known to Competitors
“It is amazing to me how often managers say, oh, I can't tell you that because that is a trade secret or that's our secret. It is not a secret from anyone. All of your competitors know it. Let's say that Apollo told me that. I could call Carlisle and they'd be …”
Apollo raised record PE fund following Caesars bankruptcy loss
“And while it was a Huge loss for Apollo and TPG. Their reputations of being able to fight for their LPs allowed them to immediately after the conclusion of the bankruptcy and the confirmation in 2017, two years later, they raised the largest private equity fun…”
Rubenstein: Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, Apollo make 95% of profits in developed markets
“In the end, if you look at the large firms that we're now talking about, and I'll use the four big ones, Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo. They make 95% of their money in the developed markets. I'm counting China and India, I suppose, is developed for this…”
Apollo, KKR, and Oaktree Lack Meaningful Differentiation in Distressed Debt
“Is Apollo and KKR and Oak Tree, what's the difference? And the answer is, there's not a lot of a difference.”
Apollo's move to monthly portfolio marks is a win for credit transparency
“Apollo came out, we're going to mark every month. That's a good move.”
Kleinman: Apollo reaches $1T AUM with half from captive insurance capital
“We'll end the year pro forma for an acquisition right around a trillion dollars. Half of that, five hundred billion of that is our own captive insurance capital. One out of every two dollars we invest is for our own balance sheet, our own company.”
Kleinman: Global CapEx Wave Forces Corporates to Seek Alternative Financing
“We're in a point in the CapEx cycle like we've never seen, certainly in my career, where companies have to spend so much money between the energy transition, the digital transformation, the re-globalization of moving assets around given the new world order. Co…”
Kleinman: The best risk-return in a company is often debt, not equity
“It was a pretty novel concept that sometimes the best risk return in a company is not the equity. It could be the preferred. It could be the debt of a company. So be prepared to express that.”
Kleinman: Private equity outgrew its historical culture of extreme secrecy by 2020
“Private equity is a secret of business. Information was power. Information was kept very close to the vest. The less the outside world knew about what we did, the better. We had grown up in a very non-communicative way, both externally and internally. When pri…”
Kleinman: Post-GFC alternatives industry completely ignored investment-grade credit
“We had to figure out how do we earn excess return in AA, in single A, in triple B, which no one in the alternatives industry was thinking about at the time. That left the space wide open for us to be able to go do that.”
Kleinman: Apollo will not raise fund capital without balance sheet participation
“But if we don't have a home on the Apollo balance sheet that thinks that's an interesting risk return, I'm not going to go out and raise that money because that may be right for the asset management business, but that's not right for what we're trying to do in…”
Kleinman: Apollo's aggressive reputation could not scale with broader financial ambitions
“It was around that timeframe where it started becoming clear if we wanted to keep growing and keep being a bigger part of the financial system, that wasn't going to work. You can only do that for so much.”
Kleinman: Apollo Can Deploy Up to $20B in a Single Financing Deal
“And because of our scale, we're not showing up at 205 hundred million at a time. We can show up at three, five, 10, twenty billion dollars at a clip and speak for that level of capital to be able to do that with big IG counterparties.”
Kleinman: Apollo penalized hiding bad deals early, not making mistakes
“At Apollo, you historically didn't get in trouble for doing a bad deal. You got in trouble for not talking about it, 1218, 24 months before you hit the wall.”
Kleinman: Apollo held virtually no high yield debt in late 2021
“If you looked at our entire footprint at the time, we had virtually no high yield on the Apollo platform.”
Kleinman: Apollo is the largest investor in every product offering
“We now are the largest investor in basically every product offering we offer out.”
Kleinman: Financial incentives fail without perceived multidirectional reciprocity across teams
“If all the benefit went from this direction to that direction, I don't care what the financial incentives are, people would throw their hands up and say, I'm not doing that. But because the system is a flywheel, and our people see the benefit flowing in all di…”
Kelly: Retail Access to Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo is a Great Evolution
“But I think it's tremendous that individual investors now get access to the likes of Blackstone and KKR and Aries and Apollo. These are tremendous firms. It's a great evolution for all individual investors.”
Contagion Risk Interconnects the Top 8 to 10 Alternative Asset Managers
“If something happens to Blackstone or Apollo or KKR, we're going to get the same question. What does your exposure look like? How do you guys think about this? So it's, yeah, there's an interrelatedness of eight or 10 of these companies for sure.”
Breitfelder: Caring and psychological safety unlock peak human potential
“And as the coach, if you care about your players, you create psychological safety for them. And you help them do the inner game work to clarify their mind. Then you're unlocking their full potential.”
Breitfelder: Alternative Asset Managers Were Late to Human Capital Practices
“So asset management was late, and I think Alts was also late as a group of companies.”
Breitfelder: Talent and Culture Problems Can Be Solved Like Deal Team Problems
“The talent culture problems can be approached in exactly the same way. And I think that's worked really well.”
Breitfelder: Effective managers apply the platinum rule, not the golden rule
“The platinum rule is actually taking the time to understand what that person needs from you.
Like, what do they need?
How do they want to be treated?
What drives them?
What's their story?
What's coming from their background and what they're contributing?
And h…”
Breitfelder: Focus development on turning A-minus skills into A-plus strengths
“Going from an A- to an A+, is where we should put all our energy. And going from a C to a B matters as well, depending on what your job is. But if you're a C at something, the path from C to A plus is really long, really hard, really steep. The path from A min…”
Breitfelder: Allocators must assess asset managers' human capital at three levels
“So I'd be asking about at the three levels, the organizational level, what are you doing as an organization to achieve outperformance over a long period of time? Like what are those practices? How do you run your investment teams? And how do you make sure you'…”
Breitfelder: Leaders without a concrete self-improvement plan leave value on the table
“If you are not walking around with a list of one to three things where you are, you know you need to get stronger and better, and you're not being vulnerable asking people for feedback, and you're not working a plan, you're leaving way too much value on the ta…”
Brown: Blackstone, Apollo, and Ares are competing to brand private wealth alts
“The Blackstones, the Apollos, the Aries, all these firms see the high stakes game of capturing that wealth, and they're going to compete for it and be the brand.”
Brown: Top asset managers are building thoughtful, low-fee products for wealth channels
“The sophistication in the product innovation that these large asset management firms are working on, whether it's an Apollo or Franklin Templeton, a Hamilton Lane, Blackstone, of course, comes to mind and others. They're really designing very thoughtful, low f…”
Stavros: Top PE firms each control up to one million employees
“Or in a more concentrated way, could you convince Blackstone, Carlyle, TPG, Apollo, Aries, Warburg, Pincus, Bain, a handful of companies which each control half a million, million employees.”
Apollo aligned with Elliott and GSO to pressure junior creditors
“They go into bankruptcy with this deal with Elliott. They very quickly get a deal with the GSO group, and that is supposed to create all kinds of pressure on the most junior debt holder, which is the Oak Tree Appaloosa second lead bondholders.”
LPs bought GP stakes to share in economics they helped create
“I think in general it was that strategic element of there were a lot of large We'll say institutions that were looking to have a closer relationship. And so whether it was a large pension looking to get a better allocation and just economic relationship with, …”
Rubenstein: Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo lacked global footprints when Carlyle expanded
“Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo really hadn't built international businesses, honestly, at that time, as we were beginning to do it.”
Kleinman: Apollo Bought Compass Minerals Under 6x EBITDA, Made 5x Return
“We bought it at under six times enterprise value to EBITDA, but because of the nature of that business, much of its business went into highway salt. You were able to scale the business. It was a surprisingly more stable business than you would have thought, an…”
Kleinman: Apollo rarely used public stock for M&A as originally anticipated
“The one thing that I would have thought we would have done more, having a currency for acquisitions, was one of the reasons we went public. It hasn't materialized in the way we would have thought at the time. We tend to do a better job building our own busines…”