Blackstone Inc. is an American “alternative investment” management company headquartered in New York City. (Would that be like “alternative facts”? Asking for a friend.)
~Alternative investment: any asset class outside traditional investments such as stocks, bonds and cash. Includes assets like private equity, hedge funds, real estate, commodities, venture capital and collectibles, often used to diversify portfolios and improve risk-adjusted returns.
Got that? Yeah, me, too . . .
Founded in 1985 as a “mergers and acquisitions” firm by Peter Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman, who are formerly of the now defunct Lehman Brothers. For many decades, Blackstone's private equity business has been one of the largest investors in leveraged buyouts while its real estate business has actively acquired commercial real estate across the globe.
~Private equity: an investment class where firms raise capital from investors to acquire and manage private companies or make public companies private, with the goal of selling them later for a profit. Such investments are generally in non‑publicly traded companies (not listed on a stock exchange) and are held for several years before being exited.
~Leveraged buyout: acquisition of a company mainly using borrowed funds, with the acquired company’s assets and cash flows serving as collateral to boost potential returns on equity.
Got that? Yeah, me, too . . .
Blackstone is also active in credit, hedge funds, infrastructure, insurance solutions and growth equity. As of Sept. 2025, they’ve accrued $1.2 trillion in total assets under management, making them the world's largest “alternative investment” firm.
Wow! Now for the Kelly connection . . .
Did you know Kelly Ayotte joined the corporate board of Blackstone in 2019? (She was already on several other corporate boards such as Caterpillar, which is a heavy equipment manufacturer and News Corp. owned by the Murdoch’s, to name two).
Did you know she made more than $2.5 million in total compensations from all the boards she sat on? As of 2024, in Blackstone stock alone, Ayotte owned more than $3 million.
Let’s revisit what Blackstone’s real estate part of the business does, they acquire real estate. They own more than 300,000 single-family homes across the country. Here in New Hampshire, Blackstone owns properties, hidden under partnerships and subsidiaries. They own student housing near the University of New Hampshire and Dartmouth College. They own an apartment complex in Nashua.
According to the 2024 NH Fiscal Policy Institute, rents for a two-bedroom apartment went up 30% since 2019. Nashua saw increases of more than 50%. That’s not helpful news for a state whose needs for affordable housing is estimated to require about 90,000 new housing units by 2040. It also doesn’t help that the state’s median price of a single-family home has increased by more than 75%.
Throw in the ever-unsustainable rising property taxes due to repealed sources of revenue for the state and the hated school voucher program that benefits wealthy families to the detriment of public schools, one has to wonder, how exactly are Gov. Kelly Ayotte and her Free Stater cronies in the legislature going to address the affordable housing crisis in the state? Especially with behemoth corporations such as Blackstone surreptitiously buying up single family homes and apartment complexes, turning them into overpriced money makers for themselves.
A good place to start would be a ban on corporate landlords.
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt