Blackstone Videos Show Two Sides of Firm

At 40, transition from Schwarzman to Gray

A mock Blackstone commercial that is part of the firm’s holiday video features “Jersey Mike’s” pitchman Danny DeVito saying, “Are you sick and tired of the volatility and lack of diversification associated with the public markets?”

One of the big business stories of the year is the leadership handoff in progress at Blackstone—which manages $1.2 trillion—to Jon Gray from Steve Schwarzman.

Bloomberg last month had a long piece about it, illuminating and entertaining in its own way.

Also illuminating are a couple of videos.

The first is a conversation between Gray and Schwarzman about the firm’s 40-year history, culture, and traditions. Schwarzman: “you’re going to have to maintain the culture that we have, you have to maintain the openness, inclusiveness, the meritocracy.”

Gray: “When people show up here, they are surprised now because they expect sort of this big, successful company where people are self-satisfied and so forth, and they get here, and they’re like, you folks are nuts. You work like animals, you care so much. You’re actually nice to each other, which is always surprising, but you have this drive and this push. And that is this special sauce, that, the amazing people, the sense of meritocracy…”

“Work like animals” is a reminder that capitalism cultivates the virtue of industry, of hard work. It reminds me of Michael Steinhardt’s comments in the 1969 book New Breed on Wall Street, by Martin Mayer, with photographs by Cornell Capa: “we work harder, until eight or nine at night.” Or of the Silicon Valley “hustle culture” trend of working “996,” “9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week,” as a New York Times article described it. (The flip side of it is Blackstone cofounder Peter G. Peterson’s memoir describing, as I put it in a 2009 review, “two divorces resulting from his workaholism.”)

The second video is Blackstone’s 2025 holiday video, which is intended to be humorous. Midway through is a mock Blackstone commercial featuring “Jersey Mike’s” pitchman Danny DeVito saying, “Are you sick and tired of the volatility and lack of diversification associated with the public markets? Of course you are…Blackstone may have the nonlisted, semiliquid institutional-quality perpetual products you’ve been looking for,” DeVito says, wearing a Blackstone bucket hat as the words “Private Equity, Real Estate, Credit, Infrastructure” show on-screen.