Tony James

And the people running that business then were solid insurance company debt investors.

But they were perfectly happy with the business of the scale that it was and really didn't see a lot of ways to drive it.

At Blackstone, we wanted to have a few large businesses.

We didn't want to, some other firms have gone to a million little businesses, little popcorn stands there.

We wanted to have a few big dominant businesses.

And so, as I mentioned before, that a lot of the leadership of the groups needed to be changed.

This was one of them.

You could, you know, sometimes an acquisition, especially if you have a lot of the purchase price contention on future earnings and this and that, it's almost like a, you know, a team hiring.

You see this all the time in tech, right?

You have all kinds of big tech companies buying smaller companies to get the team.

So it's a little hard to say, was it an acquisition or was it a group hire?

But either way, I knew these were talented guys and I knew they were very ambitious.

And most of the purchase price was contingent on future success.

So I knew that we could...

You know, I thought we could build a big business around them, and we did.

We built a $100 billion credit business around them.

But GSO was the first, but it was only one of about a dozen acquisitions.

Oh, interesting.

We did a lot of acquisitions.

I mean, maybe the best acquisition we ever did was strategic partners or secondary business.