Stephen Schwarzman, born in Philadelphia in 1947 and trained at Yale and Harvard Business School, co-founded Blackstone in 1985 with former Treasury Secretary Pete Peterson and a few million dollars of capital. The firm went public in 2007 and now manages over a trillion dollars across private equity, real estate, credit and infrastructure, making it the largest alternative-asset platform in the world.
Blackstone's scale has turned it into a structural lender, landlord and operator across many developed and emerging markets, and Schwarzman himself has become a sought-after interlocutor for governments and central banks on private credit, the financing of energy transition and the role of alternatives in pension-fund portfolios.
He has been an active philanthropist in education and science, including the Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua University, the Schwarzman College of Computing at MIT and the recent Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities at Oxford.