Blackstone

“Yes, there's a Steve Schwartzman brand, and he definitely built the Blackstone brand using that. But I think no one would say that Blackstone would not move on as an institution. So I always say, I think they pulled it off from a brand perspective.”

“Having said that, I'd be pretty critical of some of the efforts to try to internalize and do it directly. Not that the people who are doing it aren't great, but if you look at Blackstone, I don't know how many people they have in the private equity department …”

“But they were first fund investors with Excel Ventures, with Blackstone, with Berkshire Partners, just a long list of firms that were excellent firms. They were there in fund one.”

“Now, I think in Europe or in Asia, I think there are still cheap LBO opportunities, right? So a firm like Bain or Blackstone, they're still seeing opportunities to do really attractive buyouts ex-U.S. But within the U.S., you can't.”

“Going back to energy storage, in the last three months, we've seen both energy capital partners and Blackstone make big moves, and that's sort of saying, okay, what are we doing here? This is not oil and gas.”

“But if you really want to get to mega scale and run hundreds of billions of dollars and make it a business, you have to over-orient and over-index on fees and not really focus that much on carried interest.”

“And then you have guys like Blackstone who just can raise money like no one else. And then they have some really smart people and they still have, you know, the best returns in the business, but they have good returns. And that a lot of people are happy to inv…”

“Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo really hadn't built international businesses, honestly, at that time, as we were beginning to do it.”

“Blackstone built a very big real estate business. I think it's the most profitable business.”

“In the end, if you look at the large firms that we're now talking about, and I'll use the four big ones, Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo. They make 95% of their money in the developed markets. I'm counting China and India, I suppose, is developed for this…”

“When Carlisle first went public, we were well known, but we weren't as highly valued as Blackstone because we had not focused on fees that much.”

“So to really look at the history of stakes, you have to go back a good 30 plus years to when Blackstone sold a minority stake to Nico Securities in 1988. And this was Just after their first fund was launched, and they sold a 20% stake at about a five hundred m…”

“I think there's certainly more pressure to change the business model once you go public. And I think we've seen that with Carlisle, we've seen that with Blackstone, a greater focus on fee-related earnings, on growing the number of strategies.”

“And within a few years, the business snaps back and Blackstone goes on to make fourteen billion dollars or something like that. And it's arguably from a gross dollar value, the greatest private equity investment ever.”

“There are Many well-known institutional alternative asset managers who have now really reoriented their entire businesses around the wealth channel and the high net worth channel. Blackstone, of course, being one, Carlyle being another, KKR, but it's not limit…”

“I think we were Blackstone before Blackstone became Blackstone. We had private equity, we had hedge funds, we had credit, we had private mezzanine debt, so we had the asset classes covered, and I think we were there in a really interesting time.”

“Or in a more concentrated way, could you convince Blackstone, Carlyle, TPG, Apollo, Aries, Warburg, Pincus, Bain, a handful of companies which each control half a million, million employees.”

“The Blackstones, the Apollos, the Aries, all these firms see the high stakes game of capturing that wealth, and they're going to compete for it and be the brand.”

“The sophistication in the product innovation that these large asset management firms are working on, whether it's an Apollo or Franklin Templeton, a Hamilton Lane, Blackstone, of course, comes to mind and others. They're really designing very thoughtful, low f…”

“You need to, as somebody with a retirement account, know about Blackstone, Cardile, etc. You should, because these are kind of the equivalent of those big tech names that I talked about. It's big finance, or it's what I call, you know, mainstream active asset …”

“I don't want to go compete against Blackstone and Brookfield in real estate on price. We're going to lose all day long. But if we can compete on duration, we'll do that.”

“The irony is the stronger the firm, the harder that assessment is. So it's harder to assess people actually out of Goldman or Blackstone or some of the really great firms, because it's just harder to tell was it them or was it the firm. If somebody just did an…”

“John Gray is arguably the best real estate investor of my lifetime, right? And I say arguably because somebody may disagree with me, but I, you'd have a hard time finding someone who would disagree with that statement, I think, generally. One of the best real …”

“The infrastructure of it is a little bit reminiscent of the Apple, IBM computer debate of the nineties, where it's like you were never incented to buy an Apple product if you were a corporate purchasing person, because you got no penalty for buying IBM and you…”

“If something happens to Blackstone or Apollo or KKR, we're going to get the same question. What does your exposure look like? How do you guys think about this? So it's, yeah, there's an interrelatedness of eight or 10 of these companies for sure.”

“One of the examples that I was looking at was Blackstone's acquisition of Apria Healthcare, which ultimately had to enter into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department because of allegedly selling medical devices that were never actually us…”

“I think second is confidence when not to be interesting. I think certain institutions, Yale, MIT, have the resources to always be interesting. Everything they do is interesting. But for something without resources, without that access, maybe the answer is an E…”

“The funds at the top of the game are still, I think, doing really well there, but they've been there for 20 years. KKR, Blackstone, Carlisle. The next tier down, if you're a twenty billion dollar fund, a fifty billion dollar fund, and you don't have the same b…”

“There's only six firms at level 10, and they are enormous. They look more like Goldman Sachs than they look like Arctos. Aries, Apollo, Blackstone, KKRA, it's the biggest of the big.”

“Blackstone has a team of hundreds of people. Blue Owl, hundreds of people, KKR, Apollo, hundreds of people to serve the Wealth Channel.”

“Blackstone, about 40 years old, started with 300,000 dollars of capital under management. They're now over a trillion dollars of assets. About a fourth of that, two hundred fifty billion or so, comes from the wealth channel today.”

“When we were in the midst of negotiating the acquisition, we saw it as an asset that we could unlock, but it was really interesting period of time in 2002 1001, whenever it was, Blackstone, because of their early lead in the market, had a roughly 60, 65% marke…”

“There are now four or five firms, including Blackstone and Aries, that have probably 30 or 40% market share at the top of the stack.”

“But I think it's tremendous that individual investors now get access to the likes of Blackstone and KKR and Aries and Apollo. These are tremendous firms. It's a great evolution for all individual investors.”

“REITs would be trading at a significant discount to NAV because people were selling public real estate stocks to buy the technology stocks. Conversely, those stocks did better when the technology stocks blew up.”

“I joined the group when it was on Fund Two. The group only had 12 professionals.”

“When Bcred had 7.9% of redemptions, they thought about, listen, we're gonna do everything we can to get everyone their money back.”