Leon Black just sold another slice of your past, and you didn't even notice.
The private equity titan, whose name most Americans couldn't pick out of a lineup, announced the sale of a majority stake in a company you've absolutely heard of. It's the latest in a quiet campaign of acquisition that has quietly reshaped the American consumer landscape, and it raises a question nobody in power seems willing to ask: how much of daily life should be owned by a handful of extremely wealthy men?
Black made his fortune at Apollo Global Management, the firm he co-founded in 1990. Over three decades, Apollo became one of the largest alternative investment firms on earth, managing hundreds of billions of dollars. Black's personal net worth has hovered in the ten-figure range. He stepped down as CEO in 2021 amid scrutiny over his ties to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a connection that reportedly cost him his seat on the board of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the respect of many in his social circle. The payments to Epstein, totaling over $150 million for financial and estate planning services, remain one of the more uncomfortable footnotes in modern philanthropy.
But here's what rarely makes headlines: while the public was fixated on the scandal, Black's money kept working. It bought up companies that make the things you touch every day. Apollo's portfolio has included Chuck E. Cheese, the restaurant chain where millions of American kids have celebrated birthdays. It has included Michaels, the crafts store that anchors strip malls across the country. It has included ADT, the home security company, and Cox Media Group, which owns television and radio stations in major markets. It has included the Venetian resort in Las Vegas. It has included, at various points, companies that manufacture the packaging for your food and the uniforms for your kids' Little League team.
This is not a conspiracy. It's all in the SEC filings. But it is a pattern, and the pattern is this: a small number of private equity firms—Apollo, Blackstone, KKR, Carlyle—have spent the last twenty years buying the mundane infrastructure of American life. The birthday party. The hobby. The safety system. The local news. These are not glamorous assets. They're the opposite. They're the things people buy without thinking, which is precisely why they're so profitable. When you own the thing nobody thinks about, you can raise prices, cut staff, and extract fees, and most customers won't even know who to blame.
And when the debt-loaded company eventually buckles—as Toys "R" Us did, as Payless did, as dozens of others have—the private equity owners walk away with their management fees, and the workers and communities are left holding the bag. The pattern is so well-documented that even the industry's defenders have stopped denying it.
There's a deeper rot here. Black's ties to Epstein should have been disqualifying for a man who wants to be remembered as a patron of the arts and a steward of American enterprise. Instead, he retreated to his yacht, his art collection, and his family office, and waited. The money didn't disappear. The deals didn't stop. The world moved on, because in America, wealth doesn't just buy things—it buys forgiveness.
Meanwhile, the actual consequences of this consolidation play out in living rooms and strip malls. The Chuck E. Cheese where a kid had her fifth birthday is now a line item in a fund that a pension in Denmark owns a piece of. The local TV station that used to send a reporter to the school board meeting is now a cost center to be trimmed. The crafts store where a grandmother bought yarn is a leveraged asset whose rent is renegotiated every quarter. None of this is illegal. All of it is a quiet transfer of power from communities to balance sheets.
The real story isn't Leon Black. It's the system that made him and keeps making more like him. America has decided, without ever voting on it, that the basic texture of daily life is a commodity to be bought, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder.
We should be able to name the men who own our birthdays. We can't, and that's the point. A society that doesn't know who owns its own daily life has already surrendered something it can't buy back.