An interview with billionaire president and COO of Blackstone, Jonathan Gray. In this interview, Jonathan discusses the future of Blackstone and the new investment strategies it is implementing. Jonathan also talks about scaling and the economy.

Video length: 00:20:03

Video Segments:
0:00 Introduction
0:23 While reveal so much about your strategy?
1:24 Better quality earning?
2:03 Why is it important to be the biggest?
3:51 Risk of being so large?
5:42 4 horseman in alternative investing?
8:05 Collision course with Blackrock?
8:57 One trillion under management?
10:50 Importance of permanent capital?
12:10 Growth?
13:03 Capital Markets?
13:41 Debt given to the street?
14:16 How would you price it?
14:30 Do what TPG does?
15:14 New funds?
16:01 Leasing?
16:36 Quants?
17:25 What economic signals are you getting?
18:17 Europe?
18:51 Why don’t you do what WeWork does?
19:31 Are you raising funds to take advantage of Trump’s tax cuts?

Transcript

Blackstone as you know. But others may not hold its first Investor Day in four years on Friday and revealed a lot about its future. A new initiative in life sciences that you’re talking about. An expansion into Asia a tilt toward growth in technology and emphasis on permanent capital and a bunch of specific funds you plan to raise. Why reveal so much about your strategy.

Well it had been a while since we sat down with investors and we wanted to give them a comprehensive update and a lot has changed that Blackstone since four plus years ago. I think the biggest thing that’s changed is just the way the firm is expanded. If you went back really even further the firm was more focused let’s say in private equity and real estate private equity. And we’ve seen this proliferation of things we do all built on the back of delivering great performance for our investors. We’ve delivered great returns that’s given us the confidence of investors and they’ve allowed us to expand our platform. So as you said we’ve got a bunch of different initiatives we can talk about some of those but we’re excited about those. And we also wanted investors to understand that the nature of our company is changing. We’re moving as you mentioned to perpetual capital long term vehicles and that’s leading to not only accelerated earnings but an improvement in the quality of our earnings quality because more of it is.