It started as a distressed-debt shop picking through the wreckage of the 1990 junk-bond collapse. Thirty-five years later Apollo runs close to a trillion dollars and is trying to sell private credit to your 401(k).
Forty years ago Joe Mansueto sorted mutual fund reports on his apartment floor and decided regular people deserved the same research Wall Street kept for itself. The five-star rating that came out of it now shapes how trillions of dollars get invested.