Blackstone is an American alternative-asset manager and the largest private-market asset manager. It was founded by Stephen Schwarzman. Together with Apollo and KKR, the three firms have $2.6trn of assets under their control, up from $570bn a decade ago.
BlackRock, now a separate company, opened in 1988 as part of Blackstone. They broke up in 1994, and for decades thereafter represented alternative visions of finance: Blackstone focused on private markets and institutional investors, while BlackRock pursued public markets, low fees and retail investors.
In 2017 Blackstone launched the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT), a property fund with a minimum buy-in of $2,500, a perpetual lifespan and monthly redemption windows. BREIT limits quarterly share repurchases to 5% of its net asset value. By 2025 it had grown to a NAV of $54bn. In November 2022, amid market ructions, many BREIT investors tried to withdraw their money; the trust could return only 43% of the capital requested and was still limiting withdrawals more than a year later.
In 2021 Blackstone launched the Blackstone Private Credit Fund (BCRED), a business-development company offering retail investors exposure to private credit. Pitched at wealthy individuals, BCRED now manages $70bn of loans; were it a bank, it would be America's 34th-largest. Close to half of its $30bn of borrowing is from big banks. Fully 26% of BCRED's loans are to software firms, mainly owned by private-equity funds.
In 2025 Blackstone raised $8bn for its joint-largest real-estate fund, which hunts out distressed commercial properties.
Blackstone has taken minority stakes in insurers in exchange for managing their assets, giving it $237bn of insurance assets under its watch. It originated $35bn in investment-grade lending in 2024, destined for the insurance balance-sheets it manages. Barclays offloaded a portfolio of credit-card debt to Blackstone. Blackstone is working with Vanguard and Wellington Management on products mixing public and private debt for retail investors.
Blackstone's largest single BDC, launched in 2021, manages an astonishing $83bn of investments. In March 2026 it redeemed 7.9% of its shares—above the standard 5% cap—partly by injecting $150m of cash from its staff. Blackstone is also a big lender to data-centre projects.
Blackstone said 7% of its total assets under management were in the software industry—calculated across its vast asset-management operations.
I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell ... their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ.