The Blackstone Group was little known outside Wall Street until ii events in 2007 catapulted information technology onto the public stage: the lavish sixtieth altogether party of its CEO Steve Schwarzman and the firm's IPO a few months later. They advertised to the broader world what Wall Street had long known – that Blackstone had eclipsed better known individual equity firms such every bit KKR and the Carlyle Group, both in size and profits. By and then Blackstone owned all or function of fifty-one companies which together employed 500,000 people and raked in $171 one thousand thousand a year in revenue.

Thirteen years later, Blackstone has far outpaced its traditional rivals, diversifying more successfully and attracting far larger sums from investors, including pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. In 2020, it manages $564 billion in assets. In addition to its traditional leveraged buyout business, it is one of the world's largest existent estate investors, and has branched out to infrastructure, insurance and lending.

KING OF Uppercase: The Remarkable Rising, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone (Crown Concern; October 2010) tells how how Schwarzman and his co-founder Pete Peterson, starting with just one secretary in 1985, built a powerhouse that weathered the financial crisis successfully even as other institutions crumbled.

The book recounts Blackstone's evolution through fits and starts, disastrous early investments and internal clashes. It non only reveals the personalities behind the firm but likewise the larger forces at work in the corporate and financial worlds that transformed private equity from a handful of upstart investment boutiques in the 1970s and 1980s into a mainstay of the fiscal globe, backed past billions from public pension funds and other institutional investors.

Today, the volume argues, Schwarzman and his counterparts stand for a new breed of capitalist, a cantankerous between the great bankers and corporate chieftains. Like banks, their firms provide capital, but unlike banks, they accept control of their companies. Similar sprawling global corporations, their businesses are diverse. But dissimilar corporations, their portfolios of businesses change year to year. Moreover, because they purchase companies and sell them a few years later, they exert an outsized influence on the economy and the markets.

This book challenges the conventional wisdom that private equity firms are "strippers and flippers" that boodle companies of their best avails and leave them hobbled. Instead, it contends, private equity provides crucial capital letter and a unique, transitional class of ownership that in many case allows companies to undertake necessary changes.

But kickoff and foremost it's a story about a company and the people who built it:

■ How Blackstone formed the money manager BlackRock—which now manages $6.3 trillion in assets—and and then lost it in a dispute over coin.
■ The crunch Blackstone faced effectually 1990 after an exodus of seasoned partners left its upper ranks alarmingly sparse.
■ How the egotistical Schwarzman proved nonetheless to be a shrewd entrepreneur, hired others with personalities as big as his ain and recruited a star from the exterior to assume the day-to-day reins at the firm.
■ The internal debates virtually whether to have the visitor public in 2007 in the face of fierce political opposition in Washington, D.C. (An excerpt of this chapter in the Wall Street Journal's Deal Periodical weblog in 2010 describes the motivations for the IPO.)
■ The central investments that established Blackstone's reputation and earned it billions in profits—and the misguided deals that cost it hundreds of millions.
■ How Blackstone and other private-equity firms have defied their epitome equally gamblers and "barbarians at the gate" and proved to be much more prudent during the boom years than other fiscal institutions such as Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch. And how Schwarzman'due south innate cautiousness spared Blackstone some of the losses rivals suffered.

It also probes in depth many of Blackstone's most important investments, spectacular and disastrous, including:

■ Transtar (U.S. Steel's transportation subsidiary) and UCAR (Union Carbide's carbon electrodes concern) — early deals that helped the establish the firm as a credible buyout investor.
■ Edgcomb Steel, a metals fabricator that nearly defaulted on its first debt payment subsequently Blackstone bought information technology — a deal that traumatized the immature house and cost one partner his chore.
■ The disastrous investment in two German cable systems in 2000 that price the firm $300 one thousand thousand in a yr.
■ The German-American chemical maker Celanese — a 2003 investment on which Blackstone and other investors fabricated five times their money, or $2.9 billion.
■ Equity Office Properties, where Blackstone institute itself in a public behest war and paid top dollar for existent estate at the meridian of the marketplace in 2007 — and immediately sold two-thirds of it, just before the marketplace turned.
■ Travelport, the parent of Orbitz.com, which had been cobbled together apace though mergers but had never been integrated.
■ Merlin Entertainments, a U.G.-based operator of amusements and theme parks, including Legoland and the London Middle, that Blackstone has congenital into a major international company.
■ Freescale Semiconductor, a huge, badly timed investment in 2006 that threatened to cost Blackstone hundreds of millions of dollars.

More than excerpts and quotes.