BlackRock, Blackstone – what’s the difference?
It’s a question that a lot of folks – journalists included – don’t seem to be crystal clear about after President Trump made a bombshell pledge last week to crack down on big private equity firms who have bought up huge chunks of the US residential real estate market.
That’s why BlackRock – the world’s biggest money manager run by Larry Fink with some $14 trillion in assets — has built a “rapid response” crisis team to, among other things, distinguish itself from Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm run by Steve Schwarzman, On The Money has learned.
The big message: BlackRock is not the firm that’s hoovering up all the houses and allegedly creating a nationwide affordability crisis. You’re probably thinking of that other firm.
On Wall Street, mind you, there’s zero confusion about who is who. BlackRock, whose voluble CEO Fink is a fixture on financial TV, is the asset-managing giant that seems to own a massive slug of just about every public company you can think of.
But it’s Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman – who was often photographed alongside the president during Trump’s first administration – who is now in the crosshairs of the White House over his habit of scooping up single-family homes.
The problem, BlackRock officials tell On The Money, is that they’ve been getting inundated with social media accusing the money manager of profiting on the backs of average Americans. And it’s not just a bunch of dudes in their mom’s basement slinging mud at the firm. Celebrities and influencers – right-wingers among them – have joined the confused BlackRock bashing, spurred by Trump’s recent calls to address the affordability crisis by ending the buying of single family homes, they tell On The Money.
“You wouldn’t believe how much of our day is consumed by this bullshit,” said one executive at the big money manager.
The official cited, for example, an X post from September by comedian Rob Schneider which stated “The administration must stop the single home buying hoarding monopoly and GIVE A TARIFF or TAX on the companies that are SPECULATING and turning YOUNG PEOPLE into FOREVER RENTERS; BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street.”
To set things straight, BlackRock’s new crisis team has set up a social media account @BlackrockFact. Following the news from Trump, the team swung into action posting that “Other US Investment firms are buying single-family real estate – BlackRock is not one of them. We do not buy individual houses.”
Yes, the trolling reached new heights last week after the president posted on his social media site, Truth Social, that he is “immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it. People live in homes, not corporations.”
Those steps have yet to materialize and, people at Blackstone tell me, they won’t make a dent in the home affordability problem — even if Trump gets congressional buy-in to do it. That’s because the buying, I am told, is taking place in markets like the Sunbelt where lack of housing stock isn’t a huge issue.
Truth be told, there are good reasons why the two companies get confused. In fact, their names are similar because they were once the same company. Fink, after leaving his job as a trader at a big Wall Street bank, started BlackRock as an asset-management subsidiary of Schwarzman’s PE firm back in the late 1980s.
A few years later in 1994, while BlackRock was growing, Fink decided to buy himself out. The rest is history. Schwarzman has often lamented this given the size of the business Fink ultimately created. The two have maintained a somewhat interesting rivalry, although Schwarzman clearly isn’t hurting, with a net worth of $48 billion, according to Forbes.
Still, it might be time to understand the difference between a rock and a stone.
