Stephen A. Schwarzman

Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO

Stephen Schwarzman was born in Philadelphia in 1947, studied at Yale University and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. He worked at Lehman Brothers, where he rose to managing director for mergers and acquisitions, and in 1985 co-founded Blackstone with Peter Peterson on initial capital of 400,000 dollars. The firm grew into the world's largest alternative asset manager. In 2013 he gave 100 million dollars to establish the Schwarzman Scholars programme at Tsinghua University in Beijing, in 2015 endowed the Schwarzman Center at Yale, and in 2019 gave 150 million pounds to the University of Oxford, the largest single gift the university had received since the Renaissance. He is the author of What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence, published in 2019.