The Blackstone Grouping was little known outside Wall Street until 2 events in 2007 catapulted it onto the public stage: the lavish sixtieth birthday party of its CEO Steve Schwarzman and the firm's IPO a few months later on. They advertised to the broader earth what Wall Street had long known – that Blackstone had eclipsed better known private equity firms such as KKR and the Carlyle Grouping, both in size and profits. Past so Blackstone owned all or function of fifty-one companies which together employed 500,000 people and raked in $171 million a year in revenue.

Xiii years after, Blackstone has far outpaced its traditional rivals, diversifying more successfully and alluring far larger sums from investors, including pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. In 2020, it manages $564 billion in assets. In addition to its traditional leveraged buyout business, it is i of the earth's largest real estate investors, and has branched out to infrastructure, insurance and lending.

KING OF CAPITAL: The Remarkable Rise, Fall, and Rise Once again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone (Crown Business; Oct 2010) tells how how Schwarzman and his co-founder Pete Peterson, starting with simply one secretary in 1985, built a powerhouse that weathered the financial crisis successfully fifty-fifty as other institutions crumbled.

The book recounts Blackstone's evolution through fits and starts, disastrous early on investments and internal clashes. It not only reveals the personalities behind the house but as well the larger forces at work in the corporate and financial worlds that transformed private equity from a scattering of upstart investment boutiques in the 1970s and 1980s into a mainstay of the financial world, backed by billions from public pension funds and other institutional investors.

Today, the volume argues, Schwarzman and his counterparts represent a new brood of backer, a cantankerous between the great bankers and corporate chieftains. Like banks, their firms provide capital, but dissimilar banks, they take control of their companies. Like sprawling global corporations, their businesses are diverse. But different corporations, their portfolios of businesses change year to yr. Moreover, because they buy companies and sell them a few years after, they exert an outsized influence on the economy and the markets.

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that private equity firms are "strippers and flippers" that loot companies of their best assets and get out them hobbled. Instead, information technology contends, private equity provides crucial capital and a unique, transitional form of ownership that in many example allows companies to undertake necessary changes.

Simply offset and foremost information technology's a story about a company and the people who built it:

■ How Blackstone formed the money managing director BlackRock—which now manages $half dozen.3 trillion in avails—and then lost it in a dispute over money.
■ The crisis Blackstone faced around 1990 after an exodus of seasoned partners left its upper ranks alarmingly thin.
■ How the egotistical Schwarzman proved however to be a shrewd entrepreneur, hired others with personalities as big as his ain and recruited a star from the outside to presume the twenty-four hours-to-twenty-four hour period reins at the business firm.
■ The internal debates about whether to take the company public in 2007 in the face up of fierce political opposition in Washington, D.C. (An excerpt of this chapter in the Wall Street Journal's Deal Periodical blog in 2010 describes the motivations for the IPO.)
■ The key investments that established Blackstone's reputation and earned it billions in profits—and the misguided deals that cost it hundreds of millions.
■ How Blackstone and other private-equity firms have defied their image as gamblers and "barbarians at the gate" and proved to be much more than prudent during the nail years than other financial institutions such as Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. And how Schwarzman's innate cautiousness spared Blackstone some of the losses rivals suffered.

It also probes in depth many of Blackstone's almost important investments, spectacular and disastrous, including:

■ Transtar (U.S. Steel'south transportation subsidiary) and UCAR (Marriage Carbide's carbon electrodes business concern) — early deals that helped the establish the business firm as a apparent buyout investor.
■ Edgcomb Steel, a metals fabricator that nearly defaulted on its first debt payment later on Blackstone bought it — a deal that traumatized the young business firm and cost ane partner his job.
■ The disastrous investment in two German cable systems in 2000 that toll the firm $300 million in a year.
■ The German language-American chemical maker Celanese — a 2003 investment on which Blackstone and other investors made five times their money, or $ii.9 billion.
■ Disinterestedness Function Backdrop, where Blackstone found itself in a public bidding war and paid top dollar for existent manor at the peak of the market place in 2007 — and immediately sold two-thirds of it, just before the market turned.
■ Travelport, the parent of Orbitz.com, which had been cobbled together rapidly though mergers merely had never been integrated.
■ Merlin Entertainments, a U.K.-based operator of amusements and theme parks, including Legoland and the London Eye, that Blackstone has built into a major international company.
■ Freescale Semiconductor, a huge, badly timed investment in 2006 that threatened to toll Blackstone hundreds of millions of dollars.

More than excerpts and quotes.