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Harris was born to a Jewish family in 1965 and raised in Chevy Chase, Maryland. He attended high school in Washington D.C at The Field School. Harris graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1986, and then received his MBA from the Harvard Business School as a Baker Loeb Scholar. He wrestled in college.
He began working in the mergers-and-acquisitions department at Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1986 and worked there for two years before leaving to get his MBA at Harvard. After graduating, he initially worked at Blackstone for two months before co-founding Apollo Global Management with Leon Black and Marc Rowan in 1990.
Harris and Rowan were named Buyout Pros of the Year for 2004 by BuyoutsInsider.com.
In 2008, Harris and his Apollo partners invested $2 billion into LyondellBasell before it filed for bankruptcy in 2009. When Apollo eventually sold their shares in the company in 2013, they realized a paper profit of $9.6 billion, the biggest profit ever from a private equity investment according to Bloomberg.
He is currently one of three managing partners of Apollo, along with Black and Rowan. Harris' role includes oversight of the firm's day-to-day operations. As of July 2020, his estimated net worth was $4.7 billion.
In 2017 Harris met with Trump officials to discuss infrastructure issues. In November of that year, Apollo Global Management loaned $184 million to Kushner Companies. Apollo spokesman Charles V. Zehren stated that Harris was not involved in the decision to loan to Kushner.
As of the end of the third quarter of 2020, Harris and his Apollo partners reported that the firm had $433 billion in assets under management.
