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Marc Rowan
KEY THREATS:
Loyalty Oaths Mass Censorship Private Equity Vulture Debt Collector If your school is considering a loyalty oath to Donald Trump, direct your loudest swears at its author, Marc Rowan. Before writing it, he made his billions through Apollo, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. But siphoning money from indebted hospitals, overcharging pension funds, and bankrupting numerous companies is his business—the Wall Street exec’s real passion is ruining students' lives.
After donating $1 million to Trump's campaign, Rowan personally drafted the unconstitutional "Compact for Higher Education" which the president is now using to blackmail universities into rolling back civil rights and ending academic freedom to do anything his billionaire buddies don't like. It's no wonder a neighbor told the press that "If Marc Rowan was on fire, I wouldn't piss on him."
NET WORTH
CEO
Apollo Global Management
OTHER COMPANIES
LINKED TO
Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, Mitch McConnell, John Thune, Tony Blair
AGE
63
STATE
NY
PART OF
Political Ideology
Totalitarian Censor
- Fueled by a desire to destroy and remake higher education into a billionaire brainwashing factory. In January 2025 said: “I think we are going to see seismic changes in the standing of universities… Go back and look at who the leading universities were in Europe in the 1930s, in the 1940s. They don’t exist any more. It is not that hard to destroy a university. It just takes a period of time.”
- Wrote the “National Academic Compact,” a loyalty oath that the Trump administration is attempting to force on universities in order to restrict funding, undo civil rights protections, and crush dissent. “And so I put pen to paper at the end of last year and wrote what has become the national academic compact.”
Controversies
- Widely hated in Montauk after spending 6.3 million dollars to buy a beloved lobster shack, which he tried to raze and rebuild as part of a plan to gentrify the town with new businesses, and violating environmental law in the process. His series of lawsuits forced the town into a protracted legal battle, during which he’s courted ultra-wealthy vacationers.
- Tried to rebrand Apollo with a less “ruthless” image by: wearing sweaters instead of suits, and moving his office to a lower floor in the building. He then engaged in a ruthless 8 year litigation vendetta against his own former protégé, while mostly continuing the same business practices.
- Worked for three different people who went to jail for major financial crimes, which he has publicly joked about: “I worked directly for Dennis Levine, who went to jail, […] I then went to work for Marty Siegel, who also went to jail. I then moved out to California to work for Mike Milken, who also went to jail.”
Obscene Spending
- Owns a $13 million lakefront Connecticut mansion, a $26 million oceanside Hamptons mansion, and an $8 million NYC condo with views and direct access to Central Park, which he can shuttle between on his private jet.
- Rowan’s true total wealth is unknown due to a set of obfuscating financial entities, such as RWN Management, the MJR Foundation, and Alchemy Group Holdings.
Enabling:
Mass Censorship
Rowan is obsessed with controlling the lives of students and educators. Before writing the “Compact for Higher Education” loyalty oath Trump is trying to force universities to sign, he used his position as Chair of the Wharton Board of Advisors to attack the University of Pennsylvania. From attempting to silence free speech and cancel programming via false accusations of antisemitism, to funding a Republican Senator who launched a Congressional Investigation of the school.
This push for censorship reaches far beyond one school. Rowan also claims credit for Donald Trump’s 2019 executive order altering the interpretation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to classify anti-Zionism as antisemitism. He boasts that the executive order is the basis of today’s lawsuits charging schools with violating Title VI for allowing free speech critical of Israel.
Mass Debt
The other half of Rowan’s two pronged assault on student freedom is money. Rowan donated $50 million to create the Penn Wharton Budget Model, a key weapon against student loan cancellation. This could be related to the fact that his firm Apollo owns the largest student debt-producer in the country: the University of Phoenix. Don’t think he’s any better to his Ivy League Alma mater either: during his 7 years on Penn’s Board of Trustees, tuition went up more than $15,000.