. He has lent a more-inviting and likable face to the company at a moment when buyout targets have become more fickle and vast wellsprings of capital, such as pension funds, more aware of social, environmental, and political concerns and controversies."He can say difficult things in a way where you end up liking him after he's had a very tough conversation," Schwarzman said.Blackstone billionaire Stephen Schwarzman defended his support for Trump.
They revealed sides of Gray that few people outside Blackstone have seen, including the tireless focus, drive to perform, and ruthlessness behind his calm and amicable exterior. By then, Gray was responsible for two of the largest real-estate buyouts ever, the $39 billion and $26 billion respective acquisitions of Equity Office Properties and Hilton, both in 2007, and had built Blackstone's real-estate investment business into a juggernaut. His counterpart, Chad Pike, was in London and presided over a European arm that was just a fraction of the size.
Instead, he went behind Pike's back and triggered a series of events that would force his colleague's ouster, according to the people familiar with the events. "Yes, of course, I did go to London. That's a fact," James said. "But you have too much drama around it." Blackstone, which was founded by Schwarzman and Pete Peterson in 1987 to handle traditional private-equity investments, had by then just unveiled a real-estate investment arm. Gray trained his focus on the group, believing its nascency and small pool of executives would give him a better chance to transition from a support staffer to a more important and lucrative role sourcing and executing actual deals.
"We had to develop our story," Whitney said. "Jon took some of our thoughts about what we do, fleshed it out, and made it look pretty good."Neither he nor his colleagues could know they were on their way to creating the biggest revenue engine at the firm.As the real-estate venture got off the ground, Gray showed a proclivity for spotting undervalued assets before they garnered widespread notice.
It was a formula Gray would use to complete a succession of multibillion-dollar deals that, in the span of less than a decade, transformed Blackstone from an obscure real-estate player into the industry's marquee investor. "What distinguishes him is his ability to telescope to the outer edges of the atmosphere and then close in on the Mariana Trench details of a situation and do it fluidly," said Roy March, who worked with Gray on some of Blackstone's largest transactions, such as Equity Office Properties.
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