Blackstone Hits Dealmaking ‘Escape Velocity’

With more than a trillion dollars of assets under management, Blackstone is the size of a G20 nation. Fittingly, its earnings report on Thursday featured some big, big numbers.

There are the usual suspects: inflows of $71 billion in the final quarter, which pushed its capital base to nearly $1.3 trillion, yet another gargantuan record. Meanwhile, quarterly distributable earnings rose 4% year over year to $2.2 billion, impressing analysts who favor the free cash flow proxy metric. But the most crucial figure might just be the still-big-but-slightly-smaller $956 million, which is what the firm earned in net realizations from investment exits. That’s a 59% surge year over year, and enough for President Jon Gray to declare that the dealmaking environment has finally achieved “escape velocity.” But if you ask Wall Street, merely rising above the upper limits of the atmosphere isn’t impressive enough.

Let’s Make A Deal

Nobody is happier about the exit uptick than Blackstone executives, whose realized performance compensation reached $1.1 billion overall last year, a 15% uptick from 2024 and the highest figure since 2022. Of course, not all exits are created equal. Net realizations for Blackstone’s real estate and private credit arms accelerated 415% and 185%, respectively. But its private equity arm’s net realizations increased just 5%. Shares of Blackstone slipped 2.6% on Thursday as traders proved unenthusiastic.

Still, the asset manager is betting that a revived IPO market sets Blackstone up for success in 2026:

• According to sources who spoke with the Financial Times, Blackstone is expected to deliver Copeland, the industrial refrigeration group it acquired for $9.7 billion in 2023, and sandwich shop Jersey Mike’s, which it bought a year ago for $8 billion, to public markets this year. 
• The optimism and suddenly frothy IPO market is fueled in no small part by the recent successful IPO of Blackstone-backed medical supply company Medline, which debuted in December at a $55 billion valuation after Blackstone acquired it for $34 billion in 2021.

“Medline was a symbolic moment,” Gray told the FT. “A lot of the criticism at the time was that you couldn’t exit these deals, but I do think this IPO definitely says that you can.”

The River Of Wealth: Whatever reservations Wall Street seems to have aren’t stopping the flow of money into the firm. Total inflows for 2025 reached $239 billion. Just over half steered toward its credit and insurance unit, while its wealth management unit drew $43 billion, its highest mark in three years.