The business magnate Stephen Allen Schwarzman was born on the 14h of February 1947 in Huntingdon Valley located in the suburbs of Philadelphia as the son of Joseph and Arline Schwarzman. He was raised in a family following the Jewish tradition and his father owned a dry-goods store. Talking about his parents in an interview he said “My father was very bright. My mother had enormous drive. Put that together and that’s my gene pool.”
Stephen went to Abington School District and graduated from Abington Senior High School in 1965 after which he entered Yale University, taking part in the Skull and Bones society where George W. Bush was also a member and was a year behind him in studies. After graduating in 1969 he continued his studies at Harvard Business School and received his degree in 1972.
He married Ellen Philips in 1971 and had two children together, Elizabeth and Edward Frank, but the union didn’t last and they divorced in 1990. in 1995 he remarries with Christine Hearst Schwarzman, an intellectual property lawyer who was recently divorced and had a child from the previous marriage.
His first job after finishing his studies was at the Lehman Brothers investment bank and he rose through the ranks to become managing director at the age of 31. After this he was the head of the global mergers and acquisitions team and in 1985 he and Peter G. Peterson, who was at the time the CEO of Lehman, founded the Blackstone Group. The balance sheet for the creation of the firm was of $400,000 and the company has $290 billion in assets at the moment, with $7.5 billion in revenue in 2014.
The original orientation of the Blackstone Group was on mergers and acquisitions but over the years it became the largest private-equity firm in the world. At the initial public offering in 2007 Blackstone sold shares at the peak of the buyout boom and securities filings revealed earnings of $398 million in 2006 alone for Schwarzman.
When he sold a part of his stake in the company in the IPO he received $684 million and still had a stake that was worth $9.1 billion, so he attracted the attention of publications such as Forbes or Time Magazine who listed him as one of the 100 Most Influential People In the World in 2007. He was also awarded the Legion d’Honneur of France the same year and promoted to Officier in 2010.
One of his first important charity works was in 2004 when he donated a new football stadium for his former high school in Abington. It was entitled the Stephen A. Schwarzman Stadium to honor the gift. On March 11, 2008 he contributed $100 million to expand the New York Public Library where he acts as a trustee and the central reference building was renamed The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.
On February 13, 2007 Schwarzman celebrated the 60th anniversary with a large party at the Armory on Park Avenue and the event had guests such as Colin Powell, Michael Bloomberg who was at the time mayor of New York City, and Cardinal Edward M. Egan. The highlight of the evening was a live performance by Rod Steward that was discussed in the news afterwards since it was reported that he paid $1 million for it.
Blackstone invested in SeaWorld Parks in 2009 which was the main venue where the film Blackfish was taking place, a documentary about the killer whale attacks in the parks and the ethic problems arising with their captivity. Controversy began when Schwarzman stated that the trainer Dawn Brancheau was blamed for her death when she was pulled into a tank and killed by an orca whale in February 2010. He wasn’t briefed about the event and Blackstone released an official statement afterwards clearing the air.
Aside from being the CEO and chairman of Blackstone Group, Schwarzman served as an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Management and is a chairman of the board of Trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
He was very critical of the Obama administration plan to raise carried interest taxes, as many of the wealthy people of the country were, and made a comparison between the tax measures and the Nazi invasion of Poland, a remark that was highly discussed and for which he later apologized.
On April 21, 2014, Schwarzman gave $100 million to create a scholarship program in China called Schwarzman Scholars that was similar in structure to the Rhodes scholarship program and he announced a fundraising campaign for this purpose to try and double the sum. The program takes place at the Tsinghua University and is the largest philanthropic effort in the history of China to come from international donors, reaching the sum of $350 million at the moment.
Schwarzman occupies several other positions as well, being a member of The Council on Foreign Relations, The Business Council, The Business Roundtable, The International Business Council of the World Economic Forum and is also in the board of The Asia Society, The Board of Directors of The New York City Partnership and The Advisory Board of the School of Economics and Management at the Tsinghua University of Beijing.
He spent over $100 million on properties, having an apartment on Park Avenue (that is reported to have cost $37 million), a villa in Jamaica and huge estates in Hamptons, Palm Beach and St. Tropez. The apartment on 740 Park Avenue was previously owned by George Brewster and John D. Rockefeller Jr. being bought by Schwarzman in 2000 from Saul Steinberg.
Bloomberg named his one of the 50 most influential people of the year in 2014 and the following year Blackstone stocks his all-time highs. He always saw the market as a highly competitive arena and his business ventures are aggressive, saying that “I want war, not a series of skirmishes… I always think about what will kill of the other bidder.”
With an estimated net worth of $12.9 billion according to Forbes, Stephen Schwarzman says: “I don’t feel like a wealthy person. Other people think of me as a wealthy person, but I don’t. I feel the same as when I was a fifth-year associate trying to make partner at Lehman Brothers. I haven’t changed.”
