Who is Marc Rowan, the billionaire Wharton grad who led the campaign to topple Penn’s leaders?

In October, billionaire investor Marc Rowan began urging University of Pennsylvania alumni to cut their donations in response to what he described as university leaders’ tolerance of “hate and racism” by pro-Palestinian scholars. The campaign ignited donor and alumni pressure that contributed to the resignations of Penn president Liz Magill and board chair Scott Bok last weekend.

The effort has moved into its next stage. On Tuesday, Rowan sent a final daily email from his office as chief executive of Apollo Global Management in New York City laden with complaints, suggestions, and articles he finds relevant to the 47 current members of Penn’s governing board of trustees. He said Penn trustees need to alter the school’s mission and academic and governance practices if its next president is to last longer than Magill.

The daily missives were a part of a broader campaign, including interviews on CNBC and other outlets and videos that supporters have posted on social media, that helped mobilize thousands of donors and alumni to send Penn their own complaints, including calls to fire professors and sanction or expel students whose speech they say threatens Jews.

Rowan’s campaign has inspired other Jewish alumni and allies to write in. “For years, generous donors have given to Penn with no strings attached,” four children of the late Flyers owner Ed Snider wrote in a Nov. 29 note citing Rowan’s letter. But the “donor class,” they added, is “no longer willing to fund the destruction of American values that made their success possible.”

About 16% of Penn’s 10,000 undergraduates identify as Jews — a much larger percentage than in the general population but only about half as many as when Rowan and many of his donor allies were in school, according to data compiled by Rabbi Gabe Greenberg of Penn’s Hillel Jewish center.

Here’s more about Rowan, who was a Penn trustee in the late 2010s, before leading Penn’s Wharton business school advisory board.

Rowan was valedictorian of his Florida high school, finished Penn in 1985 with a bachelor’s and a master’s in business administration (summa cum laude) from the Wharton School and the equivalent of a year of law school. Rowan joined Drexel Burnham Lambert, the investment firm that led financing for the junk-bond deals that transformed American business in the Reagan era.

Three of Rowan’s bosses at Drexel Burnham Lambert went to prison for insider trading, he told Bloomberg LP in a profile. That includes the company’s top moneymaker, Michael Milken, a Wharton grad who had his name removed from a donor board in the school’s main lobby after his conviction. Milken was pardoned decades later by President Donald Trump.

Rowan donated $50 million to Wharton in 2018.

He also has contributed to politicians of both U.S. parties, especially Republicans, including $1 million to the Trump Victory campaign before the 2020 election. He was listed as one of the “50 most influential Jews of 2021″ by the Jerusalem Post, citing his donations to Israeli school, immigrant, and film groups.

In 1990, as Milken’s junk-bond operation fell apart, Rowan joined a group of former Drexel Burnham Lambert bankers led by Leon Black and including Josh Harris, the future Sixers and New Jersey Devils owner, in founding a new investment firm, Apollo Global Management. Harris and David Blitzer, billionaire partners in pro sports management company Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, are also on the Wharton advisory board that Rowan has mobilized to get the attention of Penn’s board.

Apollo is one of the largest U.S. investment companies. The publicly traded firm has pumped more than $600 billion into a wide range of industries on behalf of clients, including the Pennsylvania state pension systems (PSERS and SERS), charging lucrative fees despite sometimes-mixed results, while making its founders wealthy.

Rowan has credited his Wharton education with preparing him for Apollo deals, including its early, profitable reorganization of Executive Life, a giant failed insurer.

Like Berkshire Hathaway, the well-known investment company headed by multibillionaire Warren Buffett, Apollo uses capital generated from insurance businesses to invest across a range of industries. Under Rowan, Apollo has rapidly expanded its role beyond private equity, as a “private credit” lender competing with banks to lend to big corporations and dealmakers.

Apollo has invested in solar energy, children’s entertainment, aerospace, movies, education services, and in real estate companies, such as the firm that financed the last purchase of Philadelphia’s Hahnemann Hospital before its 2019 bankruptcy and shutdown.

Last winter Apollo helped raise $1.8 billion for music investor Concord, which sells bonds backed by continuing sales of albums from Pink Floyd and other music acts popular when Rowan was young.

It has bought into health-care providers such as the LifePoint hospital group, leading Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen to list Apollo with other “vulture capitalists” profiting from government aid while cutting services. Senate Democrats have called on Apollo and its rivals to testify at planned hearings on “questionable financial transactions.”

Apollo has made enemies in its efforts to squeeze cash out of mature industries. Last winter, lawyers for Nucor, the largest U.S. steelmaker, accused managers at Apollo-controlled Phoenix Resources, a suburban Philadelphia-based steel-mill servicing firm, of cutting maintenance and workers while using bankruptcy protection in an effort to break its contracts and impose higher prices for its services. Lawyers for Apollo and Phoenix said their actions were justified.

Leon Black stepped down in 2021 following a review of his relationship to the late convicted sex offender and money manager Jeffrey Epstein. Rowan won a power struggle with Sixers owner Josh Harris and became head of Apollo.

Rowan took control of a highly profitable business that he had helped build. The company earned $1.7 billion, after paying common shareholders $1 billion in dividends, in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, on revenues totaling $26 billion.

While fees vary year to year, the Pennsylvania public school investment fund, PSERS, which has invested more than $1 billion with Apollo since the mid-2000s, paid over $48 million to the firm in 2021 alone.

Rowan’s own fortune totals $5.9 billion, according to Forbes’ yearly listing of U.S. billionaires.

Among the billionaires who expressed solidarity with Rowan’s critique and threatened or withdrew funding:

Faculty leaders have been ringing loud alarms about donors bullying universities.

Journalist Moe Tkacik, who has reported on private equity firms, including Apollo, cutting jobs and services at small-town hospitals, in a November article in the left-leaning American Prospect accused “Rowan’s oligarch fellow travelers” of foisting “a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions upon the University of Pennsylvania” that uncomfortably mirrored the pro-Palestine boycotts that pro-Israel lawmakers have now restricted in more than half of U.S. states.

Dan Rottenberg, a Penn grad, veteran journalist, and author of more than a dozen books, including a guidebook to Jewish genealogy, called the Wharton insurrectionists “financially sound but intellectually bankrupt” and faulted former president Magill for her desperate last-minute efforts to placate them.

Marc Schwarz, a Haverford lawyer who has represented academics fired for pro-Palestinian activism (but not, he says, if they support Hamas), called the movement to oust the board and CEO “more cancel culture. It’s hypocritical, but they are too rich to be embarrassed.”

In his Dec. 12 email from his Apollo address to Penn trustees, Rowan started out conciliatory — “I believe we are all united around creating a positive path for Penn” — then called for further changes in Penn’s “culture,” which “has allowed for preferred versus free speech” and “distracted” scholars. He has not encouraged donors to resume giving.

Rowan wants Penn’s board to consider:

Regarding faculty, Rowan asked:

Rowan also raised issues familiar to Republican critics of President Joe Biden, who enjoyed close ties to Penn. He wrote that the board needs to weigh clarifying the degree to which foreign gifts to colleges should be disclosed — warning that the answer “could jeopardize its tax-free status.”

He also asked whether Penn is a U.S. or a “global” institution and whether its “current political orientation” leaves the school vulnerable to “political realignment” in Congress.