Tony James

And so that was the choice I made.

And Steve, as I say, I was originally not going to do it, but Steve was very convincing and he lived up to everything.

And it was a great partnership, I have to say.

I mean, we worked really well together for 18 years.

Yeah, I mean, Blackstone was in private equity and real estate, in hedge fund, fund of funds, and a tiny credit business, and then an M&A business and a restructuring advisory business.

All those businesses were kind of subscale a little bit.

The private equity business, they'd raised a fund and had made a couple of disastrous investors that were within a year write-offs with about a third of the fund.

The advisory business, the M&A business was down

50% or 75% from its peak and not going up.

The fund-to-funds business was tiny and not very profitable.

And the real estate business was, again, a small business.

So there were things to do to grow all those businesses.

And

What I'm prouder of, honestly, than moving the AUM from $16 billion to nearly a trillion is the market cap of the company because, you know, AUM is just AUM.

And AIG had just put $100 million into Blackstone for 10% of the company and the rights to invest in our funds.

So...

At best, it was worth a billion dollars.

And when I left, it was worth 170.

So that's 170-fold value increase.

And while we're growing the business and increasing the value, our IRR and all our funds went up.