Private Equity Then and Now

  • 00:00Private equity. It's been around a while, but it hit the big time back in the eighties when the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco put Henry Kravis up on the big screen. I'm talking about putting a mountain of money into everybody's pocket right now since the go go days of elbows, private equity and alternative investments more broadly have come a long way. The big guys like Kravis, KKR, Steve Schwartzman's, Blackstone, David Rubinstein's, Carlyle and Jim Colter's TPG have gone from being the upstart Pirates of Finance to an entrenched and important part of the establishment. And along the way have been joined by a wide range of others, including the likes of Kim Kardashian. I've often said that private equity is the highest calling of mankind. Why did it take you so long to realize that and to join the private equity world? I finally got talked into it once I came to that realization. In the process, private equity has grown enormously, accounting today for some $12 trillion in assets, with Blackstone now managing over $1 trillion in assets all by itself. KKR, about half that and Carlyle about a third. And they've taken somewhat different paths with Blackstone's emphasis on its access to private data that may not be as readily available to public markets. I believe I will reinforce and further the advantages advantages of private market investing relative to public market investing. Why is that? Well, I think the reason for that is it's actually pretty simple. Public market investing, which relies obviously on publicly available data, that sort of data will be increasingly and further commoditized in an AI world. The value of that sort of information and data and ability to mine insights from that and have pattern recognition coming out of that both longitudinally and across your business. That will only be further enhanced to KKR as big move to Asia and stakeholder capitalism. Our founders, Henry Kravis and George Roberts, they internally, they pioneered the private equity business and they said if we were 22, we would go to Japan right now because that's actually where you're seeing some of the real movement in creating some opportunities. Look, private equity is not perfect. Capitalism's not not perfect, but this is a superior way of operating a company in every respect. But those most involved say they've only just begun. We have a very long term view on building the business. You know, we don't just want to be a very good asset management company. That's in addition to that, we want to build really one of the great companies in the world that is very enduring. That is Steve Schwartzman's vision and it permeates, you know, our culture and everything we do. And.

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