Jon Gray, president and chief operating officer of Blackstone, says what sets the firm apart from other investors is that “when we identify something, we go big.” The company Steve Schwarzman co-founded and still leads had only $750 million of capital when Gray joined at age 22; today he has more than $1.3 trillion under management to back the firm’s strongest convictions.
The size of the AI bet
Few investors have wagered as heavily on the AI revolution, which requires heavy funding for large language models and the data centers and energy infrastructure that support them. Yet uncertainty remains about future cash flows from such fast-moving technologies. Gray’s task is to prevent Blackstone’s pro-AI convictions from hardening into a consensus the firm would regret if conditions change.
Blackstone’s AI investments have so far been profitable, but they have been tested: like several rivals, the firm limited withdrawals from a flagship private credit fund earlier this year as investors worried about exposure to indebted technology companies.
Buying in a “good neighborhood” — but not falling in love
Gray says Blackstone likes to buy in “good neighborhoods”: environments where thematic tailwinds promise sustained growth and provide valuable insight into adjacent opportunities. This approach has led the firm to bet across sectors from defense to life sciences and on trends such as India’s growing middle class.
AI is the biggest gamble of Gray’s career, and he applies the same approach of expanding outward from an initial investment to identify neighboring opportunities. For example, acquiring a data-center company gave early visibility into hyperscalers’ voracious demand for compute, which in turn led to investments across an AI ecosystem — from contractors to cooling-equipment manufacturers.
Often these derivative exposures are a less expensive route to participate in a trend. Gray emphasizes the need to test the investment thesis at every step to ensure the firm has not simply “fallen in love” with an idea.
Risk management and hard assets
Blackstone is investing in AI with the awareness that “this may change,” looking for ways to limit downside if token costs fall or regulatory regimes tighten. By owning hard infrastructure and the “picks and shovels” of the AI buildout, Gray argues the firm will retain assets it can sell if needed.
The firm also cultivates a skeptical culture where doubters are encouraged to speak up at investment meetings — asking questions such as, “I know the last five times you’ve done this have been great, but are you sure?”
Open debate in a high-conflict business
Gray concedes that potential industry-wide disruption from AI has made Blackstone’s investment committee debates much harder. Today, he says, the hardest part of investing is understanding what professional services will be worth: what becomes a billable hour, what happens to information services, media, or software businesses. Some will thrive; others will be knocked out.
Decision-making at Blackstone is more centralized than outsiders might expect, Gray says. “We still run it like a small business in a lot of ways, because if the pizza doesn’t taste good — and the pizza, for us, is the net returns we produce for the customers — nothing else matters.”
Gray is central to Blackstone’s investment calls, spending weekends reading memos on potential deals to prepare for weekly investment committee meetings. He has little patience for colleagues who come unprepared: “If you haven’t read the materials, then you’re not even a player. You don’t have an ante at the table, you can’t play.”
He has trained himself not to speak first in those meetings and now tries to hear from all the players in Blackstone’s “orchestra.” Debates can become heated, but Gray, who describes himself as conflict-averse in a high-conflict business, insists criticism should never be personal. Leaders can be “hard on issues, soft on people” if they maintain openness and respect to reach the right answer through discussion.
Why private credit may avoid a ‘crisis-apocalypse’ scenario
Blackstone’s scale draws intense scrutiny, and media coverage of investors trying to withdraw money from its private credit funds earlier this year made headlines. Gray says he has seen similar episodes before, such as when the BREIT real estate fund faced redemption requests in 2022; the firm navigated that episode and investors who stayed in the fund did well.
He expects private credit’s performance over time to be “far better than the crisis-apocalypse” scenario imagined by market pessimists. There will be disruption, he concedes, but as a senior lender Blackstone believes equity investors would absorb most losses before the firm.
“Claiming that private credit was creating systemic risk and that these things were going to collapse wasn’t very logical,” he said. “It’s sort of odd that it became a credit story.”
The business rationale behind his ‘dorky dad’ videos
Gray has been well known in financial circles for decades — first for dealmaking that made Blackstone a leading real-estate investor and for the 2007 takeover of Hilton, which despite timing during the financial crisis turned into one of private equity’s most profitable deals.
More recently, Gray has developed a new kind of fame through short LinkedIn videos he records while running on business trips; those clips have been viewed by millions. He says their “dorky dad vibes” serve a strategic purpose: as Blackstone’s ambitions grow, the firm increasingly depends on funding from many individual investors and the endorsement of their financial advisers.
Sharing candid, on-the-run insights lets him communicate authentically at scale and show a human side, which matters because investing ultimately relies on trust.
Related announcement
Earlier this month Nvidia said it had partnered with Blackstone and five other Wall Street firms in a $500 billion financing initiative to help the chipmaker’s customers fund the cost of computing power.
