Stephen Allen Schwarzman (born February 14, 1947) is an American investor, private equity manager, and philanthropist. He is the chairman and CEO of the Blackstone Group, a global private equity firm he established in 1985 with former US Secretary of Commerce Pete Peterson. His personal fortune is estimated at $10.2 billion as of January 2017. As of 2017, Forbes ranked Schwarzman at 113th on its World’s Billionaires List.
He chairs President Donald Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum.
Early life and education
Schwarzman was raised in a Jewish family in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania, the son of Arline and Joseph Schwarzman. His father owned Schwarzman’s, a former dry-goods store in Philadelphia.
Schwarzman attended the Abington School District in suburban Philadelphia and graduated from Abington Senior High School in 1965. He attended Yale University during the same period as George W. Bush, one year behind him (both were in the Skull and Bones society) and graduated in 1969. He then went on to Harvard Business School and graduated in 1972.
Investment career
Schwarzman’s first job in financial services was with Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, a now defunct investment bank. After business school, Schwarzman started working at the investment bank Lehman Brothers, where he reached the rank of managing director at age 31. He eventually became the head of Lehman Brothers’ global mergers and acquisitions team. In 1985, Schwarzman and his boss Peter Peterson started Blackstone, which originally focused on mergers and acquisitions.
When Blackstone went public in June 2007, it revealed in a securities filing that Schwarzman had earned about $398.3 million in fiscal 2006. He ultimately received $684 million selling part of his Blackstone stake in the IPO, keeping a stake then worth $9.1 billion.
Schwarzman is chairman, co-founder and largest shareholder of Blackstone Group, a New York-based private equity firm. The publicly traded company managed $439 billion in assets as of June 30, 2018. The billionaire has collected more than $5 billion from a combination of stock sales, dividends and compensation.
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