New York Yankees fan in 1986, Michael Arougheti ran a baseball card trading business, setting up tables at collectibles shows on weekends in suburban New York City. He made thousands but learned that flipping hundreds of cards for tiny gains was a better strategy than obsessively pursuing a rare Hank Aaron rookie card—which might be worth tens of thousands but was almost impossible to find. Since 2018, Arougheti has been the CEO of credit-focused alternative asset firm Ares Management.
Like other successful alternative asset managers, Ares has become a billionaire factory. Arougheti and cofounders Bennett Rosenthal, 59, and David Kaplan, 55, are all billionaires, byreckoning. Executive chairman Antony Ressler, majority owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, is now worth an estimated $6.6 billion.
Today’s incarnation of the firm began to take shape when Arougheti and Kipp deVeer, now the head of Ares Credit Group, and a team of colleagues including Ares Credit Group co-heads Michael Smith and Mitchell Goldstein arrived in 2004 and 2005 to build its private credit business. Twenty years ago, private credit was a foreign concept. Institutional debt investors generally bought bank loans packaged together and sold by investment banks in liquid credit funds.