Giant buyout firm Apollo Global Management is telling workers to stay home on Friday as it braces for a nasty protest at its New York City headquarters – and the beef is over CEO Marc Rowan’s support of President Trump’s clampdown on woke politics at university campuses, On the Money has learned.
In recent days, about 1,000 employees at Apollo’s offices at 9 West 57th St. were sent letters advising them to work from home on Friday to avoid being targeted by the demonstration, which has been planned for weeks, according to people with direct knowledge of the matter.
It’s an omen of what’s in store for New York City now that we have a mayor-elect who can’t bring himself to condemn rabble rousers who in recent weeks have chanted slogans like “from the river to the sea” and “Israel does not exist.”
Downtown businesses were already ramping up security measures after a mass shooting at the headquarters of another private equity shop, Blackstone. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s association with radical groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and attacks against big business is expected to spark even more protests at the offices of some of the city’s largest employers, business leaders say.
A spokeswoman for Apollo declined to comment. A rep for The Professional Staff For Congress couldn’t be reached for comment.
People close to Apollo say security at the building is bracing for a possible large turnout out of an excess of caution; it has significantly ramped up its security and has alerted the NYPD. One problem they face is a new city law effective last month that mandates uniformed police to “accommodate” protests as a First Amendment right as long as the event doesn’t turn violent.
“To be honest (Apollo has) no idea if there will be two people, 20 people or 200 people showing up to this thing,” this person said. Other businesses operate out of the same building and have been advising their employees to take similar precautions.
The activist group, called “The Professional Staff Congress,” has been touting its plans on X to “protest Marc Rowan.”
Their big gripe: Rowan recently has become an adviser for the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” a reform effort that hands out “preferential” federal funds to colleges that move away from left-wing dogma across their curricula and administrations.
Rowan, writing last month in the New York Times, said the university system “is broken” and that “talented domestic students and scholars have been crowded out of enrollment and employment opportunities by international students.”
The buyout baron likewise ripped the “high degree of uniformity of thought among faculty members and administrators” across many campuses today, which he said “can result in a hostile environment for students with different ideas.”
The compact would address this by “prohibiting discrimination, harassment and intimidation of students; neutrally enforcing ‘time, place and manner’ guidelines for protest activities,” and force colleges who want aid to refrain “from taking institutional positions on political controversies unrelated to a school’s core mission, while encouraging all members of the community to speak out and debate in their personal capacities,” he wrote.
The White House has only recently begun to engage universities on the compact, but top colleges claim the effort stifles academic freedom. The Professional Staff Congress says it represents 30,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York and the CUNY Research Foundation.
According to its website, it goals include “advancing the professional lives of our members, enhancing their terms and conditions of employment, and maintaining the strength and educational excellence of the nation’s largest urban public university”
Rowan, who is worth approximately $6 billion, has lately emerged as one of Wall Street’s most prominent critics of left-wing politics in academia, including what he believed was the caving of administrators to antisemitic campus protests after the Oct. 7 massacres.
His campaign included attacks against his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, that led to the resignation of its president Liz Magill and Chairman Scott Bok. Rowan, a graduate of the university’s prestigious Wharton School, alleged that the school condoned protests that celebrated violence and threatened Jewish students.
