Blackstone Might Reach Its $1 Trillion Goal Four Years Ahead Of Schedule
January 30, 2022 | Kevin Dowd | Forbes
At an investor day way back in September 2018, firm president Jon Gray put a number on Blackstone’s vast ambitions. Gray and his colleagues would aim to reach $1 trillion in assets under management by the year 2026, he declared, up from $439 billion at the time—a leap that would take the biggest private equity firm in the world into even more rarified air.
“You may ask … have you tapped out? Are you hitting some ceiling? The answer to that is a definitive ‘no,’” Gray told his shareholders.
In the years since, he’s been proven correct. In fact, he’s been proven more correct than even the firm’s most optimistic backers might have guessed.
Blackstone reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2021 this week. The numbers included a stunning $150 billion leap in the firm’s asset base in a mere three months, taking that number to $881 billion. Blackstone now expects to reach $1 trillion in assets at some point in 2022—four years ahead of its original timeline.
“We had our best performance in our history, and we continue to broaden our platform, investing with retail investors, insurance and so forth. And that’s giving us powerful momentum and record results,” Gray said in an interview with Bloomberg.
As Gray indicates, the firm’s dedication to perpetual capital is one reason for its explosive growth. About half of the cash that came into its coffers during the final quarter of the year was due to insurance deals that will see Blackstone begin to manage assets on behalf of Allstate and AIG. Rivals Apollo Global Management and KKR have also both pushed their chips into the insurance sector in recent years, although in different ways.
