When a Wall Street mogul reaches a certain age and net worth, imperatives besides making a lot more money start coming into play. That’s what appears to have been driving blustery, iconoclastic private-equity mogul Leon Black (net worth: $6.4 billion) in the last few years.

There’s art, of course. In 2012, Black paid nearly $120 million for one painting, albeit Edvard Munch’s rather famous The Scream. At the time, it was the most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction. Last May, New York’s Museum of Modern Art elected Black its sole chairman of the board of trustees. And in November, Black and his wife, Debra, gave $40 million to MoMA as part of the museum’s ongoing renovation and expansion project. As a result, there will now be a new Debra and Leon Black Family Film Center at MoMA. Estimates are that Black has spent nearly $1 billion on his art collection, rivaling that of Steven Cohen, the billionaire hedge-fund manager who also can think of other things besides making a lot more money.

Perhaps most important, there’s power. Black isn’t planning a Trump-like assault on the White House. He and his firm, Apollo Global Management—with about $280 billion of assets under management—are subtler than that. But Black, who leveraged his mentor Michael Milken’s downfall to build a private-equity fortune, is equally ambitious. In the past year or so, on behalf of their investors, Black and one of his senior partners, David Sambur, have quietly assembled 29 local television stations, stretching from Spokane to Boston. And they have a hankering for more.

For Black, as for many other Wall Street moguls, TV represents more than just a pure-play economic opportunity. Apollo has figured out that local television is a relatively stable business that can put lots of the firm’s capital to work—on which it receives a 2 percent fee. It is a consolidating industry, which makes it an obvious target for private equity. But Apollo must also know that controlling local television stations brings with it a healthy dollop of power, especially when it comes to statewide political races, such as those for governor or the U.S. Senate. Having a measure of influence over the governor’s house and the U.S. Congress is good for all of Apollo’s businesses across a variety of industries, from chemicals and food to education, natural resources, and media. Black himself has been very active politically over the years, contributing roughly $600,000 in around 368 donations to political candidates—mostly incumbent U.S. senators—on both sides of the aisle, according to opensecrets.org.

That’s where the local television-station empire comes in, at least according to one theory of the case. After agreeing to buy Northwest Broadcasting, Inc. and its 15 local television stations from its founder, Brian Brady, for around $384 million (a multiple of about 9.5x cash flow), Apollo agreed to scoop up a majority stake in Cox Media Group’s portfolio of 14 local television stations for $3.1 billion, at a multiple of around 11x cash flow. (As part of the Cox deal, Apollo got Cox’s seasoned management team as well as three newspapers and three radio stations in Ohio.) The two deals are part of Apollo’s strategy to become one of the largest owners of local television stations nationwide, in a bid to perhaps rival Sinclair Broadcast Group and Fox Television, which itself was created in 1996 after billionaire Ron Perelman scooped up a group of local television stations and sold most of them to Rupert Murdoch.