Blackstone reported its second quarter results today. They are pretty good. Bloomberg notes that distributable earnings are up 26%. CEO Steven Schwarzman declared it an “outstanding” second quarter and said it helped that Blackstone had decided to “lean in” to AI, thus becoming a “trusted partner at scale” to the ‘innovators in the ecosystem.’
This sounds great. And for the moment at least, it also looks like some great things are happening to Blackstone’s pay.
💥Follow us on WhatsApp for news alerts.💥
The chart below shows realized year to date performance compensation for Blackstone’s key segments in the first half of 2026 versus last year. Realized performance compensation mostly represents the carried interest that’s actually been paid to employees from businesses Blackstone has successfully exited.
As the chart above shows, it’s also been an outstanding start to the year for carried interest across most of Blackstone’s investing segments. Best of all for carried interest was multi-asset investing, which comprises Blackstone’s discretionary hedge fund allocation business, plus its multistrategy direct investment platform, which is Blackstone’s own multistrategy hedge fund. Real estate professionals also experienced a more than tripling of their carried interest payments.
Blackstone’s private equity professionals had to tolerate a mere 50% rise. Within private equity, it seems that infrastructure investors might best placed based on the chart below (which shows realized and unrealized gains in Q2 and the trailing previous 12 months.)
Source: Blackstone
The only segment where carried interest payments at Blackstone didn’t increase year-on-year in the first half was credit and insurance, where they fell 51%. This might be because private credit investments at the firm generated a not-so-outstanding return of 0.4% net during the second quarter.
Blackstone’s carried interest payments may decline in the second half of the year. In a footnote to today’s results, Blackstone says employees can get carried interest payments that are higher than expected in some quarters and offset by lower fee related payments later in the year.
Follow me on X. Follow me on LinkedIn.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.
Leave a comment