Schwarzman is chairman, co-founder and largest shareholder of Blackstone Group, a New York-based private equity firm. The publicly traded company managed $1 trillion in assets as of Sept. 30, 2023. The billionaire has collected more than $7 billion from a combination of stock sales, dividends and compensation.
Schwarzman's wealth is derived from the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm that had $1 trillion in assets under management as of Sept. 30, 2023, according to the company's website. Schwarzman owns about 19% of the publicly traded company, according to the company's 2023 annual report.
He sold Blackstone shares valued at about $675 million in the company's June 2007 initial public offering, and has collected more than $7 billion in compensation and dividends since 2004, according to an analysis of company filings and Bloomberg data. The value of his cash investments is based on these proceeds, as well as other insider transactions, taxes and market performance.
Schwarzman owns almost 5.8 million shares and units of PJT Partners acquired as part of the company's spin-off from Blackstone, according to its 2023 proxy statement. He gifted away his shares in Brixmor Property Group in 2016, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Schwarzman signed the Giving Pledge in 2020.
Peter Rose, a Blackstone spokesman, said the billionaire declined to comment on his net worth.
Stephen Schwarzman was born in 1947 to Arline and Joseph Schwarzman, who owned a dry-goods store in Philadelphia. After graduating from high school, Schwarzman enrolled at Yale University, where he was a member of the Skull & Bones society at the same time as George W. Bush.
He graduated from Harvard Business School in 1972 and took a job at Lehman Brothers, where he rose through the ranks to eventually become chairman of its global mergers and acquisitions department in 1983.
Schwarzman struck out on his own two years later. With former Lehman chief executive Peter G. Peterson, he founded the Blackstone Group. During the next two decades, the company evolved into the largest private-equity firm in the world. Blackstone sold shares in an initial public offering in 2007, at the height of the leveraged-buyout boom. He donated $100 million to the New York Public Library the following year.
Schwarzman, who serves as the company's CEO and chairman, has been married to Christine Hearst Schwarzman since 1995. He has two children from his first marriage.