Money, Hubris and Jeffrey Epstein: The Fall of Leon Black, w/ William Cohan

22:58You know, when I first brought up Epstein, we were having lunch in his office, and he went over to his jacket pocket and pulled out a handwritten list of all the people who were involved with Epstein, many of whom you just cited. what was he doing for all those people? That remains one of the biggest mysteries, right? You know, for Leon, of course, he asked for, and Apollo commissioned what became known as the Deckard Report, which was a deep dive into Leon's relationship with Epstein. He said he asked for that because he, quote-unquote, knew he had done nothing wrong. The Deckard Report did not find any wrongdoing.

23:38They found that he paid him$158 million.

23:41Kara Swisher:Yeah, let me be clear. Black insists the money, he's noted in this book, was for legitimate business dealings related to tax and estate advice. He even told you, quote, I've never been that sophisticated tax-wise. They're always dumb when they need to be. More shockingly, he also told you he never added up how much he had paid Epstein. How do you square that with his financial acumen and making claims like these? Because it's obviously hurt his reputation, I think, probably fatally. Oh, yeah. Because no one understands how a guy who could be as clever and savvy and is sharp-elbowed and is sophisticated and is successful on Wall Street doing deals, could make himself vulnerable to this guy, or could have created a tax structure with Wall Street lawyers that ended up not working, and then he has to go to Jeffrey Epstein, who's not even a lawyer, who's an autodidact, and find a solution that actually worked.

24:38And Leon and I spent a lot of time on this, and I talked to many lawyers who were involved in this. You know, he did have a problem with his tax and estate planning, even though it was done by a very sophisticated lawyer who was supposedly an expert in this. He went to Epstein. Epstein looks at the documents. He was no tax and estate expert, and I explain it in the book. He came up with a way to have the whole document set, redrafted in a new way to eliminate the potential tax liability by Leon, in effect, having been given$400 million that he wasn't entitled to, giving that back. and that allowed for a sufficient consideration for the documents to be redrafted without this problem and then ended up saving Leon$2 billion.

25:33And, you know, it has never been challenged by the IRS. I know Ron Wyden talks about it all the time and thinks there must be something wrong with it. But Epstein's solution in just this case was very clever, very insightful, and then vetted by, you know, the Paul Weisses, the Sullivan and Cromwells, et cetera. and they all basically signed off on it. And I've never been able, I mean, I looked pretty hard, Kara, as you would expect me to do, to see whether there were any flaws in all that, that party line. And I have not been able to challenge it. So he had a good idea.

26:09Kara Swisher:But how did Black justify why he continued to work with Epstein for roughly a decade after his initial guilty plea? I mean, just that he was saving him a lot of money? Like, there's a lot of smart people that don't sleep with minors. Right. So here's the justification from Leon, and I lay it out in the book, of why he kept working with Epstein even after his guilty plea for having sex with a minor. He said, one, that Epstein told him that the girl slash woman showed him an ID card that showed she was older than 18. Yeah, the old excuse. Of course, the old excuse. Okay. So Leon said, okay, that was kind of like good enough for me.

26:52Number two is he thought, okay, he paid his penalty, even though we now know it was incredibly lenient and kind of a joke. He paid his penalty with society. And I believe in giving people second chances. And then he trots out to me, and maybe it's true, you know, he gave Martha Stewart a second chance. He gave Al Taubman a second chance. He gave Sam Waxel a second chance. All, you know, either convicted or pled guilty to crimes. You know, he's given Mike Milken a second chance and a third chance and a fifth chance. So he believes in, you know, this is what he told me. I believe in giving these people second chances.

27:34They're my friends. I'll give them second chances. I didn't know about all of this criminal activity well beyond the having sex with the underage girl. So I didn't know about that. So he was a friend of mine. He helped me solve this tax problem. He then, you know, wormed his way into Elysium, his family office. He helped me buy boats and planes and artwork and sell them all in tax-efficient manners. He did not have, he had just like an agreement to work together. He did not have any written contract with all the other things that Epstein was doing for him over many other years. And then when the Deckard people totaled it up and it added up to$158 million, that was apparently news to Leon because he had never added it up before.

28:23Kara Swisher:So he just was paying the bills. So as more details emerge about Black's tie-step scene, you know, as you noted, he asked Apollo's board to hire outside counsel to review their relationship. And the report exonerated him of any wrongdoing. But, and this is a big but, you didn't buy the review findings. And I got a read, which you wrote at the time in Vanity Fair. Nice try, Leon. You must think we're pretty stupid, gullible, or insane to believe the tale you spun to the investigating firm. You sat down with him multiple times through this book. What would you say now? I still think that people are incredulous about the amount of money he paid to Jeffrey Epstein and the reason for that.

29:01So, and I remain incredulous, and I kind of asked him myself, and he knows. He knows he read the Vanity Fair thing I wrote, and he knows I'm skeptical. it is still an incredible amount of money. You know, one of the two main parties to this whole matter is dead. So, you know, absent any evidence to the contrary in the three million files, and I've been through a lot of them, especially when it involved Leon, and, you know, Epstein ranted against him in these crazy emails, Kara, and then Leon never responded to the emails.

29:41Kara Swisher:To Epstein. To Epstein, that's right. And so, you know, despite everybody being incredulous, and people are, people are still incredulous, as am I basically, but, you know, I don't have any evidence to refute what he is saying. Why do you think he did it? If it was not, he helped me with my taxes. No, he helped me with all sorts of things. It wasn't just the taxes. He helped me with all sorts of things. Right. And he's a smart guy with these things. You know, Leon, you know, I get it. You know, you start talking, I don't know whether you've done your own estate planning, but when you start doing that, you know, it becomes very bizarre.

30:18And you can't even figure out what you've done even the moment you leave the office of the lawyer who you've just been working with.

30:24Kara Swisher:I'm pretty clear on what I've done, actually. Okay, well, you're smarter than the average bear. No, but it's not that. I don't have that much money. But did your views change at all after you worked on this book with him? I mean, a lot of people have a lot of theories as to why he did this. And obviously, Les Wexner, there's a whole gang of theories around him, including his— And Glenn Dubin, and you name it. I mean, there are plenty of people who have been unexplored. I mean, Leon has been explored more than most people. Deckard did do this report. I obviously pressed him on this repeatedly. We talked about it at length and on the record.

30:59I remain incredulous that he would pay$158 million to this guy and not realize it, and that there was not kind of like more to it. But I don't have any evidence that there was. Now, he obviously had women on the side, and he got in trouble with one of them, and maybe others. There's been other allegations made against him, not just, you know, Gagneva, but two other women as well. And the lawsuits have been thrown out, basically.

31:27Kara Swisher:Right. So when and why did their relationship end with Epstein? Because if you read these insane emails from this guy, this verbal diarrhea, late at night, he was just constantly harassing Leon for more money. And as Leon said, he thought that the advice and what he was paying for with Epstein was tax deductible. It turned out not to be tax deductible. So he thought he was paying with$0.60. He wasn't. He was paying with$0.100. dollars. So I think he just got pissed off at Epstein with his relentless, you know, desire for more and more money. And he said, that's it. You're out of here. So why do you think Black agreed to be interviewed for this book, given that you basically called him a liar in the pages of Embedity Fair?

32:13Maybe because he knew I was going to write the book anyway. He wanted to get his story out there. I've chronicled other Wall Street firms. I was a Wall Street banker. He reached out to me, era. I didn't even get a chance to call him up. He reached out to me and said, you're writing this book. I assume you want to talk to me. And I said, of course. He couldn't have been more open with his time and on the record, relentlessly on the record. You know, you know with Wall Street types. They don't like to be on the record. They don't like to be on the record.

32:42Kara Swisher:They'll tell you everything off the record. Right. Was he trying to prove something? What motivated him? I think he would like a Milken-like redemption if he could get one. I don't think he's going to get one. Because, I mean, Milken pled guilty to crimes that he was later pardoned for. That's a whole other thing. Don't get me started. But, you know, he had prostate cancer, and he has obviously been very, very helpful to that whole cancer drive. He's also, Milken is probably smarter with the media than Leon has been. Right? They don't question a thing that he says. You know, he won't even talk to me because I don't suck at that teat.

33:23Leon has kept most of the media standoffish, and rightly so. They've been cruel to him.

33:29Kara Swisher:Because the minute Epstein is mentioned, you know, Gates is a similar way, right? We don't know what he did. Larry Summers, all of them. So in the wake of revelations about Epstein, also revelations that he had years-long extramarital, the Russian woman paid her millions of dollars to stay quiet about it. I love how people are so mad. I'm like, of course you'd pay her to stay quiet. What else would you do, like, if you wanted them to be quiet? But Black resigned as CEO of Apollo and as chairman of Apollo's board in March of 2021. And yet, he hasn't exactly been canceled. He's still on the board of trustees at MoMA.

34:00Kara Swisher:He still has ties to the Met. What's been the impact on him? Because Epstein stays on people. I'm thinking of Gates, Clinton, Summers, as you said. He had to leave certain things. And, you know, Gates is trying to reemerge, right? with comments about AI. Scary! Right. Leon has, it's stuck on him a lot longer than pretty much everyone else. The sum of money he paid him, as we discussed, is much higher than anybody else by a large margin. There was the Deckard Report, which is a public report. He's got Ron Wyden. He's in the files a lot. He's in the files a lot. But again, never answering the crazy things and never corresponding.

34:44I mean, if Larry Summers had just not responded, he would not have been canceled. No. Okay, so Larry, you blew that. And then asking him for dating advice.

34:54Kara Swisher:Yes, yes. Nice one, Larry. Classy. Keep it classy, Larry. Yep. Don't ever change. But, you know, Leon has Ron Wyden crawling up his ass. He's now got Comer crawling up his ass. He's supposed to go back and give— Let me just, for people who don't understand, the Epstein files were released by the DOJ earlier this year, some of them contained even more disturbing allegations against Black, including multiple allegations of assault. We're not going to share the details, but Black strongly denies the substance of all of them. And as you said, the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Finance Committee have been looking into Black as part of their obscene investigations.

35:29Kara Swisher:So, what is the biggest question that reigns unanswered about his involvement? Well, you know, Wyden is just skeptical about the whole 158 and what it was for. By the way, He says it's 170, not 158. I'm not sure where he gets that number, but he's sticking with it. He's been sort of, quote unquote, exploring how billionaires don't pay their fair share of taxes. And he thinks that Leon is, you know, exhibit A. So that's Wyden. Wyden is relentless. And Comer now is after Leon's NDAs. And he's thinking that, you know, he must have been involved, you know, gotten advice from Epstein on the NDAs. He's threatening now to hold Leon in contempt of Congress.

36:09if Leon doesn't cough up these NDAs, you know, of which there may not be others besides the ones he's, he obviously shared the Gagneva one because that was public because of lawsuits. He's offered to share a second one. I don't know what that is. But Comer thinks there are all these other ones. And meanwhile, he, you know, with an NDA, you know, that means two people signed it, right? at least. And if Leon unilaterally gives it to Comer without permission from the other person who signed it, that's breaking that contract. So he can't do that. So he's in a bit of a standoff with Comer. Comer is, I think, also wants to run for governor of Kentucky.

36:50And this is like maybe his political stepping stone for that. He's threatened Leon with contempt of Congress. He's supposed to appear on September 3rd for an involuntary deposition. So the two of them are really at loggerheads at the moment, literally in real time.

37:07Kara Swisher:Where does this leave him? Leon? Yeah. He's still the largest shareholder in Apollo. He told me he has more than a billion dollars in his philanthropy to give away, and he struggles to give it away because there's the Leon Black taint. His art collection is astounding. Absolutely one of the most incredible I've ever seen. he's on GLPs so he's lost weight he looks better he wears Ray-Ban sunglasses like somebody I know on this call when he's striding the halls of Congress to go to his testimony he hangs out you know in the Hamptons he's got his private jet flies around the world I mean you know his son Ben is in the Trump administration one of his other sons works at Apollo I mean he could be worse he's worth$15 billion.

37:53Kara Swisher:So what did you take away from this book? Why him? I love writing these incredible stories about these incredible characters. So that's one thing. I mean, I just love to get into who they are and their personalities and why they've done what they've done and all the supporting cast. So that was, you know, I just knew it was a great story, Cara. And then another big part of it was, as we alluded to before, was how Apollo has changed Wall Street because of what Mark Rowan has done with Athene and this whole private credit bonanza. And we don't really know how it's going to play out yet. And a lot of people are very worried that it's going to lead to the next financial crisis.

38:30So for those two reasons, I wanted to write the book. I got lucky that this whole Epstein blew up and there was 3 million files that I never even thought I'd have access to, many of which involved Leon.

38:42Kara Swisher:So you were working on it before this, right? Correct. Oh, yeah. Has Leon read this book? I think he's just getting his copy today. How do you think he comes off? Fair and balanced. I hate those words because they're Fox News laden, but he's had his say. He explains it all in detail. He laid out the case. Laid out the case. The other side of it is dead. So this might stand for a while until the other three million files come out, which will probably be a never thing. Well, never say never. We'll be back in a minute.

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40:29Kara Swisher:So other business news. Let's get to some other stories because you and I text a lot and talk about different things that are happening. Now, Wall Street is still very bullish on artificial intelligence despite ongoing fears of a bubble. All of the Wall Street is buoyed by AI and tech, essentially. Anthropic is preparing to go public soon and hoping to beat SpaceX's record-breaking IPO just a few months ago, though not a particularly successful IPO for people who got in right at the start, except the very start did great. Anthropic is also expected to tell investors it sees more than$30 trillion in potential revenue, an eye-popping figure.

41:04Kara Swisher:Talk a little bit about what's going on with Wall Street and AI right now. A valuation bubble of epic proportions. Epic proportions. Absolutely insane. And if people don't get sobered up by that SpaceX IPO, then I can't help them at this point. I mean, now it's creating valuable infrastructure that we will need for this. I mean, AI is not going away. Just like the internet wasn't going away, we needed the infrastructure and that every company that was part of that infrastructure in building it went bankrupt, but we still use the infrastructure. The same thing is happening in effect now. Way too much capital, as you and Scott have talked about many times, is being invested in this area at ridiculous valuations.

41:48So, I mean, people are just going to lose a lot of money and they never learn. They keep making the same mistakes over and over and over again. You know, and I'm old enough now where I've lived through 10 of these mistakes. And, you know, they just have to learn on their own. Kara, lead the horse to water. You can't make them drink.

42:06Kara Swisher:So how realistic is the$30 trillion in potential revenues? Sounds like you think not realistic. Someone there brought it to me. And I just said, get the fuck out of here. I mean, how realistic are data centers on the moon? Right, right. Probably more realistic than this. But inevitably, as you noted, there'll be a market correction. There always is. it doesn't mean it will burst necessarily, but even former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has been sounding alarm about the, quote, unlimited appetite for exposure to positive AI revenue story. What, if anything, could prompt a course correction?

42:37Kara Swisher:And what would that look like when you're thinking about it? Because we all know it's coming. You know, people always think they know what's going to be the trigger for a correction. Very few people know. It comes out of left field. It's probably the last thing you expect. But what always is the same, Cara, is that it triggers a loss of confidence. And since Wall Street is nothing but a confidence game, once that confidence is lost in this euphoric concept, which at the moment happens to be AI and data centers and ridiculous valuations, then it's just like, oh, my God. SpaceX is a$30 stock suddenly.

43:16And what were we ever thinking by valuing it at$225 a share? I mean, hindsight is 20-20. Investors never figure it out. And now there's this move to allow people, when they're 401ks and pensions, to invest in private equity and private credit and all these crazy things. Please don't do it, people. I know this is not investment advice. It never is with me. But please, don't fall for the shiny object yet again.

43:45Kara Swisher:So what are the big signals at this moment? Everyone's always talking about red flags, big signals. flashing red, you know. I mean, it's going to be some sort of revenue miss or profit miss at NVIDIA or Anthropic or SpaceX. Turns out to be a big old dive. I'm telling you, if SpaceX goes to$30 a share, as some people have predicted, you know, then that's going to be the wake-up call. Frankly, I think there could be repercussions if, you know, our friends at Paramount and Warner Brothers, if that deal falls apart. because if that deal falls apart,$31 a share plus whatever ticking fee goes away, and Warner Brothers becomes a$10 stock.

44:30Kara Swisher:Yeah, yes, right. And Paramount Skydance becomes a$1 stock, and Larry Ellison is out billions, not that he may care. Oracle keeps falling. I mean, it's going to add up. It's like a string of whatever the opposite of string of pearls is, a string of calamities. Right, right. Well, speaking of that, just one of the people trying to get out of it in this stock has been people consider undervalued. Meta has also agreed to pay$17 billion to settle a landmark teen social media addiction case. Other cases against Meta are still playing out in the courts. There's lots of them. Talk about why they settled.

45:03Kara Swisher:And, you know, just for people who don't know, the same attorney general who's plaguing Paramount was right in the middle of this case. He had a great case. It's a big win for him. Big win for him. I have warned the Paramount people this guy is really smart. And he has the leverage on them. So talk a little bit about this, why Meta settled. I get it. They had to. Because they were going to lose. They were going to lose, and it could have been hundreds of billions of dollars. $17 billion sounds cheap to me. Yeah, well, it's a lot. It's a lot of money. It's not a little. Yes, it's not a little. It's not a little, but it's a rounding error on their market cap.

45:37Kara Swisher:Right, exactly. And now I don't know what this stock is doing today. It's probably trading up with the settlement. So, you know, Mark Zuckerberg slips the noose again. Right. So, for now. For now. And by the way, it was criminal what he was doing to our children. Yes, 100%. So, explain why they did it and why did Bonta and the others settle from your perspective and what it means for their stock. Why they settled? Because why not? I mean, they got$17 billion. We're talking about it as a big win politically and financially for Bonta. It gives him, I think, even more power over the Ellisons and the peace guy situation.

46:15Same guy. And so this guy is riding high. And he could have let it go to the jury, and he could have won more money and maybe gotten even a bigger victory. Could have lost. I don't know why he would have lost. Maybe the jury would have awarded less. So sometimes you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And, you know, he comes and we're talking, we're singing his praises now.

46:40Kara Swisher:Right, right. So what does that mean for the power of these AGs on the companies? Because just for people that know, Rob Bonta is the California attorney general, and he's pushing back against the governor and the mayor of Los Angeles. And he's been very vocal about the Paramount deal this week, saying they're basically leaking liars. I think that's pretty much what he said. But what happens now, because this is not just one case, there's dozens. And many people feel this is the cigarette moment for these companies. And it should be, because those crimes are similar. I mean, I hope this leads to a dramatic change in the way that algorithm works.

47:17And not just that algorithm, frankly, all of these crazy algorithms. I'm so sick of what I see in my X feed, and I don't know how to get out of it.

47:26Kara Swisher:You can stop using it. I know, I know. You've told me to do that many times, but it's my only social media. Go on threads, or then you're still with Mark Zuckerberg, right? I know, I'm a Luddite. So I hope it leads to serious reform and it's long overdue. So we also appear to be careening towards a devastating trade war with Canada. Canada announced it will propose retaliatory tariffs on hundreds of U.S. products, including steel and appliances, and Trump is threatening even higher taxes on Canadian exports right now. The market hasn't reacted too much to the escalating threats. What do you make of that?

48:00Kara Swisher:And is it because they assume taco, Trump always chickens out, or what's happening? How do you assess right now his grip on the economy, if it is indeed a grip? Look, Trump and Mark Carney don't get along. And I love Mark Carney for it because he doesn't suck up to Trump or kowtow to Trump. An experienced investment banker, right? Oh, my God. The guy has got the most incredible resumes. He's head of the Bank of England, head of the Bank of Canada, ex-Goldman. I mean, the guy, Prime Minister of Canada, the guy is an amazing politician and leader. And he's standing up for his country. And for Trump to pick a fight with Canada is absolutely ridiculous.

48:43And another example of Trump going off the rails is if we needed another example. Tariffs are taxes on the American people. This tariff thing is ridiculous. you know we might recall that tariffs led us into the great depression once upon a time have we forgotten that yes of course we've forgotten that smooth holly my friend yeah

49:06Kara Swisher:so when you think about this when you look at these things tariffs iran gas prices inflation wall street has done well and i've had wall street people say hey it's all going up but i'm like okay you're not the american public necessarily what do you see ahead with especially with trump two Two words, Cara, bond market. Bond yields are backing up, you know, despite the great Scott Besant trying to, you know, stick his finger in the dike. Very stupid. So to speak. Don't try to second guess the bond vigilantes. The bond market is saying something very important here, like deficits matter, debt matters, the Iran war matters, the closing of the Strait of Hormuz matters, gas oil prices going up matter, your reckless grift matters, your stupid ballroom matters.

49:58All these things matter, and you're ignoring, you know, you're blowing up the American economy. You're hastening the time when the dollar is no longer the reserve currency, and you're not doing a damn thing about it. And if you have to refinance parts of this$40 trillion of debt, you're going to need bond buyers to do that, and they're going to do it, but they're going to require a higher interest rate. And we now spend more on interest expense than we do on the military spending, which is unfathomable at one point. We spend more than a trillion dollars a year now on interest expense, and it's only going to go up higher because interest rates are going to continue to go up.

50:37Kara Swisher:Until what happens? Until, you know, no one rings a bell at the top of the market, Cara, until we lose confidence and we have a crisis. And then that's where Wall Street, yeah, because they're all like, it's all good. I'm like, not for today. Okay, sure, why not? Yeah, it's not all good. And they know it's not all good, but they're not going to say it. They're not going to say it. So every episode we get a question from an outside expert, yours is about the insurance company Athene, which was under Black's Apollo and went public before Apollo bought it back. Hi, I'm journalist and author Bethany McLean and former Vanity Fair colleague of Bill's.

51:13Kara Swisher:Hi, Bill. So maybe sanguine isn't the right word, but your book isn't alarmed about Athene either. Mark, Walter, and Guggenheim are obviously in the headlines every day now. Would Apollo Insider's view that model as having crossed a line that Apollo slash Athene don't cross? Or is Walter's empire simply a cruder, less carefully disclosed version of Apollo's model? Great question. It is a great question because Bethany is so smart. Explain who Mark Walter is. Mark Walter is head of various companies in and around the Guggenheim empire that owns the Dodgers, owns insurance companies, did own the Lakers until somehow Jared Kushner's brother got a hold of it with Bob Iger.

51:55Don't even ask me how that was possible. I don't understand it. So obviously, Mark Rowan thinks he's built a better mousetrap with Athene. he thinks he's solved the you know long-standing problem on wall street of borrowing short and lending long which is you know one of the major reasons we have financial crises but i do explore at the end of my book and god bless people if they get there i think it's an incredible story uh cara but you need to get to the end to to see the questions i raise about this model and whether if these annuitants who are promised 5 % to 7 % interest a year decide they want their money back, it will be like a run on the bank.

52:40It will be like Silicon Valley Bank. It will be like, you know, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. And then it'll take down the whole private equity, you know, juggernaut for 10 years.

52:54Kara Swisher:10 years. Wow. Whoa, look at that. Yeah, tell me that's how long it takes to recover from these things. So it could be the same thing. It's just a more sophisticated. It could be. It could be. Mark, of course, says it isn't. And lots of people say it isn't. And not every one of these models is the same. The good thing is here, they'd have to go through a lot of hoops to get their money out. They can't just go to their ATM machine. I get it. Still. Still. Runs on the bank. They're still the same. Loss of confidence is a loss of confidence. Yes, exactly. So the through line through both the book and some of the other big stories of Wall Street right now, we just talked about a seemingly bottomless appetite for risk, despite the fact that we're not that far removed from the 2008 financial crisis.

53:31Kara Swisher:Meanwhile, Americans are getting rocked by higher gas prices, higher grocery prices, tariffs, the high cost of housing and health care. And Wall Street, as I noted, is doing okay. Okay. How has the continued success of private credit firms like Leon Black's Apollo and others reshaped Wall Street's appetite for risk? And what does it ultimately mean for the rest of us? Well, we have an affordability crisis. We have a huge growing gap between the rich and poor. None of those things are good. People are up in arms about data centers at the grassroots level. And yet we keep plowing ahead with them and spending more and more capital.

54:07And Wall Street has just committed$500 billion to NVIDIA so that NVIDIA's customers can do more data center stuff. You know, Mark Rowan would say, we are investing our private capital dollars in senior secured debt. So, you know, if you're worried about senior secured debt, you might as well just drop off a cliff. Because that means all the equity will be wiped out. All the subordinated debt will be wiped out. All the preferred stock will be wiped out. And all these companies will be going up in flames. And his argument is, that's ridiculous. And you know that's ridiculous. We're senior. We're secured.

54:45We're good underwriters. Yes, well, that's true. But, you know, Silicon Valley Bank invested in treasury securities. They still went out of business and were liquidated because it was a run on the bank. So loss of confidence is a loss of confidence. Doesn't really matter sometimes how good your assets are. Because if you can't liquidate them to meet the redemption demand, so what?

55:09Kara Swisher:Yeah. So very, very last question. What story or person do you think deserves more attention? Who are you putting your gaze on? Ken Griffin. He's the wealthiest guy on Wall Street. He's even wealthier than Schwarzman. He's spying up all of Florida, half of Manhattan. He's an art collector. The guy is controlling empires. He hasn't really gotten the treatment. He doles out his interviews to CNBC where they treat him with kid gloves. You know, he's never really explained himself or his businesses. And, you know, he's one of the most powerful people on Wall Street. who has not really gotten his full investigation yet.

55:49Kara Swisher:Yeah, that's true. That's true. Anyway, it's a great book. Liam Black, these characters are really fascinating, and this is a great book. And I really appreciate all your thoughts, Bill. And keep listening, reading him on Puck. He has the best coverage. We argue a lot about things, but I always learn from Bill, which is, I mean, argue in good ways, but I always learn a lot, and I really appreciate all you do. I appreciate you having me on, always. Thank you.

56:17Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Nishat Karwa, Michelle Alloy, Catherine Millsop, Madeline LaPlante-Duby, Megan Bernie, and Kaylin Lynch. Special thanks to Rosemary Ho, Corinne Ruff, and Julia Sharp-Levine. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're keeping it classy. If not, you're falling for that shiny object once again. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network and us.

56:51Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Thursday with more.

56:59Kara Swisher:Thanks again to Odoo for supporting this show. Odoo wants to be your ultimate all-in-one, fully integrated platform to handle everything. Seriously, everything. inventory, CRM, accounting, HR, and much more. No more shopping around or settling for expensive services that can only handle a fraction of your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.