Tony James

But first of all, remember, Blackstone was my, like, since my third run, I had DLJ, I had Costco, which started the same year as Blackstone but became even more successful.

Yeah.

and then Blackstone.

And I felt like I'm kind of a peripatetic kind of person, and I have a lot of interests.

And I felt like there's something else out there.

I don't want to do this for the rest of my life.

I want to do it.

I want to do it well.

I want to build something I'm proud of.

but I've got more potential.

And so that was one thing.

And I just felt by then, and Steve's only four years older than I am, and I'm fine with that.

I didn't aspire to anything but what I had there.

Then too,

I have to say, leadership transition is the Achilles heel of any asset manager, in my opinion.

It's really not so easy.

And you don't even see the problems right away necessarily, but you might see them three, four, five years in.

So for me, one of my top priority, if I did a good job managing Blackstone...

All the statistics we talked about of the growth of AUM and market value and all that, that was fine.

But succession planning was one of them.