Latest news with #StephenSchwarzman
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE US billionaire dubbed 'the most powerful man on Wall Street' denies neighbours' claims he's plundering Wiltshire's underground water to fill his nine-million-gallon lake
A US billionaire's dream of creating a grand English country estate in the tradition of 18th Century landscape designer Capability Brown is facing a backlash from neighbours convinced he is tapping into their water supply. American financier Stephen Schwarzman bought the magnificent Conholt Park in Wiltshire – described as one of the finest shooting estates in southern England – for £82million three years ago. He has funnelled millions of pounds into transforming the 2,100-acre estate's parkland by building a huge lake that will hold more than nine million gallons of water. But The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Mr Schwarzman, dubbed the most powerful man on Wall Street, is under fire from neighbours who believe he is using a borehole to extract groundwater to fill the lake. This, they allege, could lead to water shortages at their own properties because they rely on a shared aquifer. There is also anger at plans to 'enhance' the estate's pheasant shoots, with local sources claiming Mr Schwarzman is preparing for up to 500 birds to be shot a day. 'I don't like what he is doing,' one local shooting enthusiast told the MoS. 'That's not sport.' Last night a spokesman for Mr Schwarzman, 78, the boss of Blackstone, one of the world's largest private-equity funds, denied the lake is being filled by a borehole and said the estate was instead using a 'highly sophisticated water collection system' that carries rainfall into the lake. The estate will also comply with all local regulations over the organisation of bird shoots and follow recommendations by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust about bird stocks, the spokesman added. Mr Schwarzman's blueprint, approved by Wiltshire council last July, involves extending the mansion's south lawn, planting hundreds of trees and creating a 'ha-ha' (a sunken fence). Sources close to the tycoon, who is worth an estimated £32 billion and is married to Christine, a lawyer, say he loves the UK and highlight how he has donated around £200 million to the University of Oxford. But his relationship with some Wiltshire neighbours became strained after his landscaping scheme began and construction lorries allegedly started thundering along the narrow roads surrounding the estate. Relations soured further when excavators completed the construction of a lake, covering three acres. Farmers and landowners became suspicious by the sight of the lake filling up with water after it was finished in early March – despite months of dry weather. The MoS understands a neighbouring country estate has written to Conholt's managers on behalf of nearby farms demanding reassurances that groundwater is not being abstracted to fill the lake. One resident claimed the lake already appeared half full, adding: 'How could it have filled that much if it's not being filled from a borehole? It's the farmers around who are so worried as these resources are not infinite.' Another long-standing resident told the MoS: 'I've built lakes in the past during my time in agriculture and I can tell you it takes a hell of a lot of water to fill one that size. In recent months we've had pretty much no proper rain. This is why people are confused and there's mistrust.' A local farmer said: 'The worry is that if the aquifer runs dry then loads of people round here are going to have nothing coming out of the tap. We've got livestock – they'll have nothing to drink.' Last night Mr Schwarzman's spokesman said the lake is only 27 per cent full and claims that a borehole was being used to fill it were 'false'. They highlighted planning documents which detail how the lake will be filled 'through rainfall and a drainage system'. The new drainage system collects rainwater from the main house, outbuildings and paved areas, which then flows downhill into the lake, the spokesman added. 'The lake was installed under full compliance with planning regulations to ensure local residents' water supply would remain unaffected. Groundwater extraction is not being used to fill the lake.' They did concede that on a very limited number of occasions water from a borehole on the estate had entered the lake. This had been when water was used to test a new drainage system or, on one occasion when a faulty valve led to leak that lasted for a weekend. The volume of water was very limited, they said. The planning documents show Mr Schwarzman wants shooting on the estate to be 'further developed and enhanced'. A spokesman for Mr Schwarzman said the estate will be used for shooting 28 days a year 'as opposed to local commercial shoots which operate more than 70 days per year'. The spokesman added: 'The new owners of Conholt Park are committed to the restoration and preservation of a landmark estate of national heritage importance. 'Every aspect of the project is advancing with the highest regard for local planning regulations and a steadfast commitment to environmental stewardship. Any suggestion to the contrary is false and misleading.'
Boston Globe
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Publisher and podcaster Zibby Owens will help you decide what to read this summer
Owens also runs an eponymous publishing company; owns Zibby's Book Shop in Santa Monica, Calif.; and hosts literary salons and retreats around the country, including around Boston. She's also a writer and editor herself ('On Being Jewish Now,' an anthology featuring Jewish writers reflecting on identity; 'Bookends,' a memoir centering around the death of her best friend on Sept. 11). Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up She's been candid about her connectedness — Owens grew up in Manhattan; her dad is businessman Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group — but she's also really vulnerable about the universal struggles that level us, from divorce with four little kids to self-image issues to identity crises, and she amplifies a variety of voices on her platforms. We chatted about rejection, self-discovery, and summer reads. Advertisement Sign up for Parenting Unfiltered. Globe staff #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ Subscribe * indicates required E-mail * You went to business school at Harvard. What took you down this road? Books have been the throughline of my own story forever. I fell in love with reading with 'Charlotte's Web.' I started to cry and was forever hooked on reading as the way to think and feel and cry and laugh. You probably know this from your sons, and I know from my kids: You can develop a love of reading, but some people are just born readers. I was just one of those born book lovers. I had my first miniature book published when I was 9 by my grandparents. One of the essays was 'Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers,' about a set of twins in a haunted house. Another was how the doughnut got its hole in the style of Rudyard Kipling. They did a limited print run of 20 books and gave it to me on my 10th birthday. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I eagerly handed out my books to my teacher and all these people I cared about. I had an essay published in Seventeen magazine that I wrote when I was 14 about how I felt in the wake of my parents' divorce and how I had gained a bunch of weight over the course of one year. I interned at Vanity Fair, and I realized after a day that there was no path from editorial to quickly becoming an author. I realized professionally that there was no easy path to being an author. Advertisement I went to business school, and two weeks after I got there, my best friend died on 9/11. She had been my college roommate, and it changed my point of view on basically everything. I realized that 'life is short' is not just something people say. Literally, she was here one minute; gone the next. I was unpacking all her clothes and [thought], I might as well do the things that I want to do in life before it's too late. After business school, I took a year off to freelance full time and write a book full time, a fictionalized version of what happened with her and me. I got an agent. It ended up not selling. My dreams of being the youngest published author in the world had faded by then. It wasn't until I got divorced — fast forward, I'd ended up having four kids — I suddenly had all this time, every other weekend. I started writing a bunch of essays. The essays led me to want to try to publish a book again, because I honestly was so humiliated by my other book not selling that I didn't try to write fiction for over a decade. You know, I write about families, parenting, and how hard it is to find community. It's very easy to feel like we're out there alone, doom-scrolling at 11 o'clock before we fall asleep. Using books, you've been a conduit for creating community with 'Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books,' which I know is now 'Totally Booked.' What do you hope that people get from these podcasts? Moms like me were so busy. We'd talk about books, but a lot of people didn't have time to read them. We didn't want to feel like we were totally missing out. I used to rip magazine articles out and share them with friends before Facebook. Advertisement I wanted to give women like me a free pass. You can be a non-reading reader and still maintain that piece of your identity. I feel like so much identity can be stripped away when you're a parent, especially with young kids. By interviewing the people who wrote the books, I felt like I was at least giving people a way to stay in touch with that piece of themselves. It was with a sense of humor, a wink, and a nod. Obviously, it was not going to be The New Yorker podcast. It was supposed to be the way you would talk to a friend, which is sort of how I do most things in life, whether it's a social media post or the tone of an anthology I'm curating, or my own memoir. It's authentic and close. I feel like people who are attracted to that end up being similar in some ways: They're nice people who want to connect and want to laugh at the craziness of life. Part of the name change is: My kids are a little older now, I don't feel like I'm that frantic young mom that I was, and so many people were deterred from listening because of the 'moms' label. I didn't want that to happen anymore, especially because I don't talk about parenting books, per se. Zibby Owens. James Higgins ©2025 What's the author criteria for your podcast? Most of the books are contemporary fiction, memoir, or nonfiction designed to help me see the world or myself a little more clearly. I don't do science fiction. I want to read books that help me live my life better. Advertisement In this cultural moment, which is fraught in so many different ways, what's your sense of who's buying and consuming books right now? This is not exclusively, but older women and young women — people who, I think, are really trying to find their place in the world: young women who are coming of age; out with their friends and not quite settled, and then women who maybe are empty nesters and feel a little bit unsettled — those life stages when you have a little bit more time and more willingness to be led. I feel like those two groups of women read the most and certainly shop the most often. A lot of the men who come into the store are looking for information on something like education or nonfiction. Women are looking more for escape and connection. As a writer, it's tough not to be hard on yourself. I remember hosting an event in Boston with famous authors and thinking, 'They're so much younger or more successful than me!' How do you put that in perspective, when you're interviewing people who are wildly successful authors? That's such a fun question. When I was writing, before 'Bookends,' I just kept pitching, and I would get a rejection and close out of email and sit down with another author who was a mega-bestseller with tears still on my eyelashes. I thought: Maybe this is not going to happen for me. I have to live with that. We all get choices about what to do with our limited time here. I started to realize that maybe the value I bring to the world is not in the books that I write. Maybe there are other things that I'm called to do. I try to justify it that way. If I were only writing full-time books, I would get more done. But I'm not only writing full-time books. I'm doing a million things that I also love, and so are you. Everything is a tradeoff. Advertisement This is just the way I was made. I'm not made to be a novelist, only sitting at my desk in a fictitious world all day. I love doing that, but I can't do that exclusively. What are you reading? I'm doing a series of live shows right now, so I'm prepping for all of those. I'm finishing Jeanine Cummins's book 'Speak to Me of Home' [about three generations of women connected by their Puerto Rican heritage]. And also 'Greenwich' by Kate Broad, which is quite delicious, although I have to say: I'm probably 70 pages in and I'm like, 'Who dies? Somebody is supposed to die! Who is it going to be? We still don't know!' I'm also prepping [to feature] 'What My Father and I Don't Talk About,' the anthology from Michele Filgate [about the complexity of the writers' relationships with their fathers]. I know you don't talk exclusively to moms, but we're a big part of your audience. How do you hope people feel after listening to your podcast or going into your bookstore? I hope that I help them navigate the world a little more easily and with a sense of humor. They're not alone in anything they're going through, no matter how isolated they might feel. All they have to do is open the next book, and they realize that. Anytime they feel that sense of loneliness or isolation or overwhelm or 'less than,' they can read and immediately feel better, or they can listen to a podcast and glean something about the human experience that maybe they would have missed. Interview was edited for clarity. Kara Baskin can be reached at
Argaam
13-05-2025
- Business
- Argaam
PIF infrastructure returns doubled: Blackstone CEO
Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman said the firm's infrastructure partnership with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund (PIF) initially aimed for an average return of 9%, but ultimately delivered 17.5%. Speaking at the Saudi-US Investment Forum, he described Riyadh's infrastructure and road upgrades as 'remarkable.' He added that the city has grown eightfold since his first visit in 1991. Schwarzman said Blackstone is prioritizing data, especially the global development and ownership of data centers. The firm is working to secure multiple sites for data centers over the next five years. PIF signed final agreements with Blackstone in October 2017 to launch a joint fund focused on U.S. infrastructure. PIF committed up to $20 billion as an initial investment, according to Argaam 's data.
Forbes
10-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
In Targeting Carried Interest, Republicans Sadly Only See The Success
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 18: (EXCLUSIVE COVERAGE)Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman as he ... More visits "Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street" at Fox Business Network Studios on September 18, 2019 in New York City. (Photo by) It's easy to forget that Blackstone Group co-founder Stephen Schwarzman didn't start out as a private equity investor. Private equity is what he and co-founder Pete Peterson (1926-2018) migrated to after successful investment banking careers. In private equity, they saw that 'you could really improve the companies you bought.' What brought Schwarzman and Peterson to private equity rates serious thought as President Trump encourages House Republicans to raise taxes on carried interest. The higher taxes would penalize performance, which means they would in effect raise the cost of going into the proverbial burning building to save it. That's what private equity investors not infrequently do when they put investor capital to work. See again why Schwarzman got into private equity in the first place. As opposed to raising a fund for him and Peterson to invest in blue chip corporations, they would find the businesses in trouble, the ones on fire in a figurative sense, and that the typical investor had given up on. They would improve businesses that were at times at death's door, and they would be compensated for reviving businesses not expected to make it. Which is a long way of saying that carried interest is the opposite of income exactly because carried interest is so hard to attain in the first place. Translated, 'carried interest' is much more than a performance-based fee, it's a performance-based fee that rewards private equity managers for doing the dirty work of investing, of fixing what appears unfixable to most. It's what is paid out to the manager of a private equity fund after the manager has compensated investors in their fund at a pre-set rate. In other words, if private equity investors succeed in achieving returns agreed to in advance for investors based on successful investments made in businesses that aren't blue chip, carried interest is their compensation for doing so. Yet as you're reading this, Trump and Republicans are contemplating raising the tax on carried interest. They see the earnings of private equity managers, and plainly view them as an easy source of abundant tax revenues. What they miss is that the attainment of the carried interest they're so eager to tax at higher rates is anything but easy. Evidence supporting this claim can be found in occasionally enormous returns paid out as 'carried interest.' Put another way, if it were easy to buy ailing companies before turning them around, then carried interest would reflect the previous truth via reduced payouts. Carried interest is high in the rare instance that it's achieved precisely because it's so difficult to achieve. Trump and the Republicans would be wise to contemplate this truth before taxing the bright, shiny object. The simple, crucial truth is that capital goes where it's treated well. Which means if Republicans raise the tax on extraordinarily difficult to achieve carried interest, the marginal cost of for private equity investors to enter the proverbial burning building will rise. Seriously, why risk not just capital but enormous amounts of time and energy for activity that members of Congress are contemplating taxing as typical – and yes – ordinary income? Schwarzman answers the above question. As he noted in his incomparable memoir, What It Takes, 'Once you succeed, people only see the success.' It's so true, but it's also so sad. Formerly the party that cheered economic achievement and its myriad societal benefits, the Republicans have become the party that sees success as just another thing to tax.
Reuters
17-04-2025
- Business
- Reuters
Buyout barons are finance now, for good and ill
NEW YORK, April 17 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Private equity is supposed to be patient when public markets panic. Yet for shareholders in Blackstone (BX.N), opens new tab, KKR (KKR.N), opens new tab, Apollo Global Management (APO.N), opens new tab and Carlyle (CG.O), opens new tab, it's proving hard not to get swept up. The buyout barons, now self-styled as alternative asset managers, claim to represent a new and in many ways superior answer to traditional financial business models. The stock market, though, hasn't reflected that idea during the recent tariff-induced turmoil. Private-capital groups like to argue that they're relatively insulated from market swings like the one unleashed by U.S. President Donald Trump's April 2 announcement. Buyout managers, for example, re-mark their asset valuations coolly quarter-by-quarter, ignoring daily gyrations. And their portfolios are tilted towards services-based industries like information technology and healthcare, which should be less sensitive to trade wars. In 2023, some 30% of private equity's assets sat in IT, according to MSCI. They're also light on tariff-sensitive consumer and materials businesses – and increasingly invested in long-term, steady, inflation-protected infrastructure assets like toll roads and data centers. Meanwhile, debt-market dislocations tend to boost the managers' private-credit arms, which now account for more assets than the traditional buyout divisions of Stephen Schwarzman's Blackstone, Henry Kravis' KKR and Marc Rowan's Apollo. A similar shutdown in liquid financing markets in 2022 turbocharged the alternative debt providers: buyout deals now use direct lenders rather than bank underwriters by a ratio of over 8 to 1, boutique adviser Configure Partners reckons, opens new tab. Despite it all, the quartet's shares have fallen by 12% to 24% since 'Liberation Day' – worse than the S&P 500 (.SPX), opens new tab insurance and banking indexes, which are down 5% and 10% respectively. In other words, when stock-market investors are gripped by fear, Schwarzman and Kravis's firms trade much like the rest of the financial system – or worse. There are good reasons for this. As Carlyle boss Harvey Schwartz noted in his annual letter, opens new tab last week, the number of U.S. private firms has multiplied six-fold to more than 6,000 over the last two decades, meaning that buyout shops inevitably reflect a broader swathe of a now-slowing economy. Carlyle also reckons that private credit is a $1.8 trillion market, equivalent to 10% of the total credit, opens new tab extended by all U.S. commercial banks. The sheer size makes it unlikely that direct lenders would be able to dodge any wave of corporate defaults. So does the fact that private credit has spread from its mainstay of leveraged buyouts and mid-sized corporate lending into various types of asset-based finance, stretching from securitized student loans to buy-now-pay-later products and beyond. Meanwhile, companies sitting in private-equity portfolios tend to carry high debt loads, with nearly 14% of those rated speculative-grade deemed by Moody's to have weak liquidity, versus less than 5% for other private firms. Managers used 2024 to push off maturities, with debt due by the end of 2027 falling 60% to $211 billion between the end of 2023 and November last year, according to Configure. But slowing revenues, rising inflation and higher interest rates could still cause a cash crunch for some. High-yield credit spreads, or the extra return over benchmark rates that investors require for holding risky debt, have risen by a full percentage point since early March to over 4%, according to the ICE BofA Index, opens new tab. Tariffs also snuffed out any lingering hopes of a 2025 dealmaking renaissance. Buyout barons sit on $3 trillion of unsold assets, which now look even harder to shift. Private-equity owners offloaded almost $90 billion of businesses in the first quarter, which was up 17% year-on-year but a third down from 2021's peak, according to LSEG data. The rest of 2025 will probably be worse. Analysts have lowered their estimates for Blackstone's haul from portfolio company sales this year by nearly a fifth since April 2, according to Visible Alpha. The lowest of the broker forecasts puts the figure back at last year's lugubrious pace of just over $800 million, which was half 2021's level. All of this leaves fund backers, known as limited partners or LPs, starving for cash. They can find relief by selling their stakes in private equity or credit funds on the secondary market. Conversations about these deals are picking up, people familiar with the matter told Breakingviews, though mooted prices have fallen a bit below the roughly 90% of face value that was commonplace before the tariff barrage. And the timing of Trump's broadside makes these trades even harder. Liberation Day came just after managers' quarterly valuation adjustments, which means the reference prices for any secondary sales are now out of date. The LP liquidity crunch may stifle future fundraising for Carlyle, Blackstone and the rest. So would a possible move by major global investors to trim their U.S. exposure in the wake of Trump's volatile policymaking and a sliding dollar. Some of the private-capital industry's biggest backers are Canadian, Australian, Dutch and Saudi Arabian pension and sovereign wealth funds. Many of the same players will also be suffering from the shrinking value of their public equity portfolios, which can create problems for their private assets. LPs, particularly pension funds, often aim to only have a certain percentage of their portfolios stuck in illiquid assets – a proportion that mechanically balloons when the stock market crashes, in a phenomenon known as the denominator effect. Major pension funds now hold billions more than they bargained for in private equity, according to S&P Global, opens new tab, making them unlikely to commit fresh cash. True, alternative asset managers are still fundamentally different from traditional financial companies like banks and insurers. Blackstone, KKR, Apollo and Carlyle do not depend on the capital of flighty depositors who can withdraw money at any time, and any writedowns on their equity or debt portfolios are primarily a problem for customers rather than shareholders. But for Kravis and Rowan's groups, taking insurance assets and liabilities onto the companies' own balance sheet has muddied the waters. Strikingly, the stock selloff didn't discriminate much between insurer-owning KKR and Apollo and asset-light Blackstone. After years of muscling aside Wall Street, maybe it's no surprise that private-capital firms now get caught up in an indiscriminate anti-finance trade.
