Blackstone: Schwarzman's BlackRock Regret, Hilton and the GLP Warehouses

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Blackstone began in 1985 when Peter Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman left Lehman Brothers with $400,000 in seed capital. The name is a bilingual pun: schwarz is German for black, and petros is Greek for stone. The firm started in mergers and acquisitions advisory, working on the 1987 merger of E.F. Hutton and Shearson Lehman, then pivoted after the Black Monday crash of October 1987 to raising private equity funds, with Prudential Insurance and the General Motors pension fund among the early investors. It also partnered with Larry Fink on the venture that became BlackRock, then sold that stake to PNC Financial Services in 1995 for $240 million, a decision Schwarzman has publicly regretted.

The 2000s brought club deals: the $11.3 billion SunGard buyout in 2005, then the largest tech buyout ever, required a consortium of seven private equity firms, followed by Equity Office for $37.7 billion in 2006 and Hilton Hotels for $26 billion in July 2007. Weeks earlier Blackstone had gone public, selling a 12.3% stake for $4.13 billion, and that permanent capital funded a post-2008 buying spree of physical assets, from SeaWorld parent Busch Entertainment to the Willis Tower and Motel 6. It formed Link Logistics and paid $18.7 billion for GLP's U.S. warehouse portfolio in 2019, then moved into Ancestry.com, Bumble, data centers and music rights. In late 2022 its $125 billion real estate trust BREIT restricted withdrawals, and in July 2025 a gunman killed four people at its Park Avenue headquarters, including senior managing director Wesley LePatner.

• Blackstone advised on the Shearson Lehman and E.F. Hutton merger before it ever bought a company.
• Early real estate deals included the Days Inn and Super 8 hotel chains.
• Hilton was bought at a 25% premium to its all-time high stock price, months before the 2008 crash.
• The Spanx deal was run by an all-female Blackstone team that installed an all-female board.
• A 7% stake in oat milk brand Oatly triggered customer backlash and boycotts.