Blackstone Inc. (BX) Morgan Stanley US Financials, Payments & CRE Conference (Transcript)

Blackstone Inc. (NYSE:BX) Morgan Stanley US Financials, Payments & CRE Conference June 11, 2024 12:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Weston Tucker – Head of Shareholder Relations
Steve Schwarzman – Chairman and CEO

Conference Call Participants

Michael Cyprys – Morgan Stanley

Michael Cyprys

All right. Why don’t we go ahead and get started here? For important disclosures please see the Morgan Stanley Research disclosure website at morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. Also note that taking of photographs and the use of recording devices is also not allowed. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. With that out of the way, good afternoon, everyone.

Thanks for joining us here at the Morgan Stanley Financials Conference. I’m Mike Cyprys, Equity Analyst covering brokers, asset managers and exchanges for Morgan Stanley Research. And I’m just thrilled and delighted to welcome Steve Schwarzman, Chairman, CEO, Co-Founder of Blackstone. As you know Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager with over $1 trillion of assets under management.

Steve, thank you so much for joining us here today.

Steve Schwarzman

Well, I’ve got [$1 trillion] (ph).

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Michael Cyprys

We’ll get you afterwards. Let’s start off with the macro, setting the stage here. Blackstone has an immense portfolio around the world of companies, of real estate, of credit positions. Would love just to get your perspective, Steve on the inflation debate, the state of the economy, the state of the consumer. Maybe just take us around the world just in terms of where are you more optimistic and where should we be more concerned.

Steve Schwarzman

Well, I think the US for this audience here, is pretty well-known what’s happening. The economy is slowing its growth rate a little bit because of higher interest rates. Inflation we find to be lower than what the Fed is reporting. In particular, we think that their real estate numbers are significantly higher than what we are seeing in the real world. And so as a result of that, we have more optimism that rates will go lower at some point this year. The consumer is still doing pretty well. As stock markets go up, people tend to spend a percent of their net worth, not of their income.

So as people are mutually getting a little more prosperous, they’re spending some of that which is a little bit unexpected. But I think we’ll see the economy settle a bit. I don’t see any kind of recession. With our portfolio companies what we call our input costs, which is the cost of making products, is zero inflation. So I’m not one of those believers in the 8% long bond. I don’t see how that happens. So it’s just a matter of time. And nobody knows exactly when that time is, but I think we won’t stay at these inflation levels for a long time.

So that’s the US, Europe is already in their cycle of decreasing. Europe is not a fast-growing economy. US will probably do double Europe or more. And Asia isn’t Asia. It is different countries. So the superstar in Asia is India. And despite the Modi election, India has been our best investment market over the last 15 years. And it’s growing 6%. People there have gotten used to success. That’s always a good thing with an economy. People have more confidence.

Japan is actually undergoing regulatory reform. We would say it’s orderly. They would say it’s rapid. That’s the nature of change in Japan, but that market has done very well, and we’re quite active there. Korea is moving ahead. So the big issue there is China. And China has been having obvious difficulties with their real estate business, as well as some other strategic decisions they’ve made. I was in China late March. I think that’s bottomed out. So I don’t think there is downside from there, and it is just a question of how steep the U is as they come up. They report that they are still growing at 5%. Some of that was off a very low base. 80% of savings in China are in real estate and real estate was down very significantly. And that hurts consumer confidence because they don’t put their money in the stock market.

In China, it just goes into real estate. So when that goes down, their currency also goes down, which is just sapping confidence. But the government is putting plans in place to try and deal with that. And so that’s sort of what the world, more or less looks like. The Middle East used to be the most rapidly growing in the world, and prices are down there a bit. And of course, you have the conflict that the people are dealing with.

Michael Cyprys

Any particular areas of concern as you look around the world?

Steve Schwarzman

No. The biggest area of potential concern could have been China. And the concern there is, as we’re going through the decoupling of China from rest of world, that’s not good for global growth. So in a normal year, before the pandemic, 40% of global growth was provided by China. So China is like a really important thing. It is the second biggest country in the world, and it is being sort of more isolated from the perspective of developed worlds. So I worry about what the longer-term impact of that would be.

Michael Cyprys

Maybe could shift and talk about real estate. Commercial real estate has faced some cyclical headwinds with higher interest rates facing commercial real estate, as well as some secular challenges just around pockets of office and retail. So where are we in the real estate cycle? How do you think this plays-out? And where might Blackstone step in on offense?

Steve Schwarzman

Well. Okay, you hit it all. So the first thing to understand about commercial real estate is there are like lots of different subcategories of real estate. And they are all not correlated the way some of the media would have you believe. So on the unhappiness scale, when they say commercial real estate has really got a problem, that’s true in office. And in office you don’t have that problem with office buildings that are 10 years old or less.

You could see that on the west side here. Everything is sold out in Hudson Yards, high rates. It is the rest of office, so if you look at the rest of the office stock in the United States, it’s roughly around 27% vacant. So office buildings can’t really survive economically being 27% vacant. So you’re going to have very large losses in the equity for the office market.

There are a lot of investors who own office. Blackstone in 2007 when we went public with Morgan Stanley as our lead, we owned — 70% of our assets were office. When we went into the pandemic, we only had 2%. So basically, Blackstone pivoted and sold their office and bought warehouses. So warehouses, one of the best categories of real estate, our portfolio there is still going up, rent 6% high. And so if you own a lot of warehouses, you are a happy investor. You read the headlines and you say, what are they talking about?

It’s the same thing with student housing. It is in real shortage. Those are vibrant markets. Even the affordable housing market has held up much better and has increases in rent. So that can’t be what the world is unhappy about. Retail has not worked. At Blackstone, we don’t own retail. So when we look at commercial real estate, we are actually quite happy. People not as happy as we were. But in terms of the world of problems and headlines, that is completely overblown. So the other good thing that’s happening in real estate is, people have stopped building. So almost every asset class is down somewhere between 40% new construction and 70%.

So real estate is a simple business. It’s just about supply and demand. And if you stop building and the economy keeps growing out a few years, which will get real shortages, and you’ll have rents really pop and you’ll make a tremendous amount of money. So I’ve only been in this movie numerous times. And so what also continues is the people who write articles about this, because they keep seeing these office problems, keep saying that real estate is an awful thing. And that continues on because you’ll have problems with the debt in real estate for years to come, so you’ll be manufacturing bad headlines.

And in the meanwhile, to the extent that people have a generalized feeling that real estate isn’t so wonderful. It provides amazing opportunities for us because we’re the best-capitalized real estate buyer in the world. We have more money, and we are not shy to use it. When prices get beat down and the world asks the same question like, oh, my goodness. You’re in real estate. Must be terrible. And we look at it now and say, well, geez, this is like bottom land. And we’ve been buying pretty aggressively now particularly oddly, in Europe.

And what happened in Europe, this is why finance is so much fun, that if you built a real estate empire and use debt in Europe when interest rates were negative, you were basically paying nothing to borrow. And so now you are paying roughly 6%. So when you get to refinancing time, people look at your coverages and say, you’ve got to pay down debt for me to refinance you. And so what happens, there’s almost nobody who’s a buyer except us. And so we get phone calls from people in this position who say, would you like to buy this package of stuff? And we usually say, no. We only want to buy some of the things. We want your warehouses. We want your student housing. We want — here’s what we want. And we’ll take as much of it as you want to give us at our price.

And so what’s happening is they go back into the cupboard, and they come out with like all kinds of wonderful stuff in effect at our price. So why wouldn’t you buy this stuff? It’s not troubled. What’s troubled is the wrapper of the whole company, not the individual pieces of real estate. So half of what we’re buying in real estate right now is in Europe. And what happens is these sort of discontinuities start happening all over the place.

We’ve already done a number of big deals this year, and we’ll be net buyers for some time. So our attitude towards real estate is quite positive. And can you imagine being down 60%, 70% in construction in good areas? I mean this is how you really make money in real estate.

Michael Cyprys

Shifting gears. Blackstone has, in many ways, led and paved the way for the private market industry over the past couple of decades. You were among the first alternative asset managers to go public back in 2007, the first to be added to the S&P 500 and the first to cross $1 trillion of assets under management. We’re now seeing more private market firms go public. We’re seeing broader ownership of the sector and also a greater appreciation of the asset class. So Steve, would love to kind of hear your thoughts around where are we in terms of the institutionalization of the sector. And how do you think this evolves as we look forward from here?

Steve Schwarzman

Well, I think when I started what’s now the alternative asset class, there was no class. There were probably eight firms doing private equity, and now there are over 10,000. So I’ve sort of lived through a revolution. And when I started Blackstone, market share of institutions investing in private equity was less than 1%, and now it’s like 25%. And it’s 25% on top of a much bigger number, right? Because in the last sort of almost 40 years, look at what’s happened to the stock market. So it’s been an amazing growth asset class. And the reason is that, historically, you’d be able to make 500 basis points to 700 basis points more than the stock market without, surprisingly, a downside because we have a product now that we’re marketing through Morgan Stanley. I don’t know, Wes, am I allowed to mention the name?

Weston Tucker

[technical difficulty]

Steve Schwarzman

Okay. My lawyers won’t let me mention the name. Okay. Anyhow, we are selling tons of it. And so to do these things, of course you have to write a prospectus and that kind of stuff. So we looked at our historic record, and we found out that in individual deals in private equity, we’ve only lost money 3% of the time. Now think about — I’m talking to a group of investors. Are you right 97% of the time?

Weston Tucker

No.

Steve Schwarzman

That is the right answer. And people who run stock portfolios, if they’re 60% right, they think they’ve died and gone to heaven. And we’re like 97% right. So people who say that private equity is risky asset class, I don’t know who they’re talking to, right? Because it’s not risky. And if you can outearn on the upside, that’s how you get something like rapidly growing.

And each of the different alternative products exist because as a sub-asset class, they are outperforming public securities. And so that’s where Blackstone’s business is, owning those kinds of businesses, developing them, pioneering them, and we get enormous growth with that. And so you’re seeing it, Mike, as companies go public and they do some subset of what we do, whether they do it smaller or they do it years later.

And of course, it’s becoming more of an institutionalized asset classes, as well it should. I mean, sometimes they go to a country. And I actually was talking with the head of a country who wanted to increase the savings rate return for his country. And I said, what do you want to do? He said, I want to double it. And I said, that should be no problem. I said just change your regulations, we can do that for you. And then they’re changing their regulations, and we’re doing it. And so there are pockets in the world that haven’t been fully sort of penetrated.

And even in mature markets, like you can use the US or Europe, the retail investor, private wealth, they call it now, has got a few percent in alternatives. Why aren’t they at 25%? You can make more. You don’t have a downside. So I sort of feel a little like a frustrated prophet or something when you sit down with somebody and say, “Don’t you want to make more money? Isn’t that investing? Isn’t that what that’s supposed to be like?”

And they sort of give you that look, it must be risky. Well, it’s not risky. So let’s knock that one down. So why don’t you do it? I’m scared to change. And I know it takes decades over time. But you will see, I believe the private wealth market moving into this direction. And I talk to major firms like yourselves. Usually what they said, and this was 1.5 years ago, so gosh, God knows what the number is now. They said, geez, we want to have at least $100 billion with you. And the first time I heard that, I did something like, did I hear that right? And then I went, Thank you. And there are several companies that want to give you $100 billion. So when people say, geez, Blackstone, you’re so big. How are you going to grow? And that kind of stuff. I mean, this is just one of the many areas where you can see very substantial growth over time.

Michael Cyprys

It’s a good segue to my next question, which is just on that exact point. You crossed the $1 trillion of assets under management. And we often hear the same question as we’ve heard for many years with Blackstone is, does the law of large numbers suggest Blackstone is too big to grow? So how do you sort of plot the path here to $2 trillion of assets under management? And what do you see as the building blocks to get there?

Steve Schwarzman

Yes. Well, I’ve been asked that question since 1992. So we apparently find a way. One of the biggest — fastest-growing parts of our business now is private credit, and we have $421 billion in private credit. By the way, our sort of corporate credit, our default rate, I mean on one of our products that I can’t name that you sell, that a lot of you won’t, in credit has a default rate of 0.1%.

So all this stuff about risk, credit I find it fascinating to read this stuff, and then I look at what we’re doing. So private credit, ultimately, rates will go down here. But right now we can produce a 10.5% dividend, and a 13% to 14% senior secured return. Well, geez, shouldn’t you put all your money in that nothing? Good return. Some of it is tax deferred. I don’t know. I’ve been investing a long time, that seems okay to me. And so it’s okay to a lot of people. So that area has exploded with growth because people used to since 1982. Your default decision, if you had money, was put it in the stock market. And if you did that and just bought the S&P, it wasn’t so bad. And so it was really only two years ago where interest rates went up, and institutions and other people started looking at private credit and the returns you can earn. And when they realized you could vastly exceed all of your benchmarks that you needed for pension funds and other types of investors with virtually no risk, I mean, this is 40% levered and it’s secured. So you are seeing an explosion of people who are changing their asset allocation mix to get more of this type of exposure. And so one of the top I guess, two firms in the world that does this. So this is a lot of fun.

A second area that is really exploding with growth, and we think we can get to — and we said this publicly, I think, Mike, and if we haven’t, we’re now saying it publicly. We can take that [$421 billion] (ph), and we can turn it into $1 trillion just with private credit. So when you say you’re on your way to sort of $2 trillion, can you get there? The answer is yes. We have another thing going on right now that is really one of the strongest trends I’ve ever seen in my career, which is the creation of data centers. And this is all about AI. So if you’re not familiar with AI, other than whatever the hype is, it’s going to really be a revolutionary technology. And it’s just starting now. It’s in the first inning, and it’s not the bottom of the first. It’s the top of the first inning.

So what you’re seeing is almost nothing compared to the way this is going to evolve. And the way to think about it is, this is like Thomas Edison inventing the light bulb. And all of a sudden, people started building utilities. And they didn’t even know why they were building them because who knows what you could do with electricity? I mean, they never heard of, like, the record player or the refrigerator or the air conditioner. Or think about all the things you use for electricity, and for like 30 years, they just crossed the country with utility lines. And then somebody invented all these products that we use. And that’s what’s happening now. But instead of utility lines per se, although I’ll get to that, they need data centers. So those are the new utilities that are being built. And if you don’t have them, you can’t sell your product.

So there is an astonishing amount of money that is going into this area. My guess is that by 2030, which sounds like it’s far away, but we’re 2024 now, in the middle of the year, that you’ll have probably $1 trillion just in the United States for data centers, and there’ll be another $1 trillion outside the United States. So this is $2 trillion. And 60% of that, roughly, goes to this unknown company called NVIDIA. And that’s why it’s the second most valuable company in the world. Because today, they have a monopoly position on the semiconductors. And then you have to build the rest of it, it is like 40% for the shell and the rest of the data center.

At Blackstone, we’re the Number One in the world building and owning AI data centers. We bought a company three years ago for $10 billion, which, depending on how you measure it, has either grown 8 times in three years or it’s grown 17 times in terms of its rental income. I mean think about this. And this building boom is just starting. And so it’s so exciting because what you need is you need land and you need electricity. In the United States, we’re running out of electricity. It’s another really interesting theme. And you used to need water. But we’ve developed a technology where we can recirculate water so you don’t have to be located on sort of a river or something like that.

So we also are the largest private developer of renewables. So the way this is going to get powered is if your utility’s sort of running out, you are going to need a baseline of, like, natural gas or something else that’s predictable with renewables piled on top of it for green energy purposes. And so if you’re in those businesses, this is — there are many people doing this. And we have a huge land bank, and we have our electric ability to facilitate this. And so I can’t describe to you how amazing this is. If people show up with like $1 trillion of demand, and you’re one of the few companies in the world that can do this, this is like a very good day. And we’re going to — this kind of growth is, we already have $50 billion of this.

We are working on our second $50 billion building that. You could be looking at demand here, that’s — it’s really big. If you can see $100 billion today, what’s this going to grow to? And it’s going to grow to a lot more. So for us, for Blackstone as a firm, it is always fascinating. If you asked us four years ago, how do we get to $2 trillion, we might have had different answers, right? Interest rates hadn’t gone up. Private credit hadn’t exploded. Data centers were sort of not a really exciting place before ChatGPT. And all of a sudden, both of those areas have turned into really something, like really something.

And then we have other parts of our business like infrastructure, and that’s a rapidly growing area for us. Life sciences, which are going to really be transformed by AI. We buy Stage 3 molecules and develop them with big pharma companies and that business is going to really dramatically increase. So we still have all of our parts of private equity, and real estate is going to come back. And when that comes back, this happened to us in the global financial crisis. The people we competed with in the global financial crisis for the most part, either went out of the business, went broke, or had such a miserable performance that we just had the field to ourselves. And that’s going to happen again. And for example, or in this product, I can’t name because I’m not allowed to name any products in real estate, we’ve outperformed public REITs by 3 times. 3 times in seven years.

Do you think we know something about real estate? All right. And that’s a cyclical. And when that cyclical swings, there’s going to be a lot of growth there and a lot of really fantastic performance, certainly, relative to virtually anyone. I mean, that’s — I’m not trying to be a promoter. I’m just telling you what’s going to happen. Cause I’ve been in the movie, and that’s how it will play. So I’m really excited about sort of our prospects.

And we also — you all work in financial firms, so we’re sort of a financial firm. And the way that you prosper is having like amazing people. That’s what makes a great business along with great process. And we hire for our entry-level positions, we get 62,000 applications for 109 positions. So that’s like way less than 1% of the people. So I couldn’t get hired. It’s very depressing. So we might — we’re probably doing something wrong. But — and I met today, this morning, I talked to all the employees, because I like to do this, that we hired.

So we hired 163 people since January 2, I think. And some of these people are just so bright. I kept thinking, I wish I was one of those people. And it’s remarkable to be around people, and that’s what helps build a really robust, highly unusual culture of excited, ramped up, make it happen, what’s new let’s invent something type of people.

Michael Cyprys

Why don’t we turn to AI? You mentioned that. Why don’t we dig in a little bit there? Blackstone was an early mover in implementing an in-house team of data scientists. And Steve, you personally pledged more than $0.5 billion to MIT and Oxford to direct research to fund AI research there. Can you talk about the use cases that you see at Blackstone today? How do you see that developing? And then just zooming out more broadly, what’s the potential for AI to alter industries and even humanity over time?

Steve Schwarzman

Yes. Well, I’ll start with the second piece. AI does better with certain types of things for early use, as it evolves. There’s somebody in India just made a statement that in three years, there will be nobody in India doing any call centers. It will just all be gone. Because when you call a call center, you’ve got a problem of some type that you need help. Or you are ordering something, and that can all be completely 100% automated. And you’ll get the answer like much, much faster than somebody looking through some giant book of products, as the customer is describing what isn’t working right. And it will – you will just get an instant response. So there will be whole types of areas that are changed.

One of my friends in the travel business who said to me that because he was an early adopter, he said I can process something for one-third of the cost and do it instantaneously. And he said anybody who’s not me is going to have an extraordinary problem staying in business. So we’ll see if that happens. But for sure, he will gain very big share and other people will be really damaged. So I look at AI, and I said this to our portfolio companies as soon as ChatGPT sort of showed up.

We had a meeting with everybody on Zoom who runs our companies, and I said, listen, this is not a game for ostriches. You people who don’t want to change you are going to be damaged from either a little bit to severely. And if we are adopters and we want to do this, we will be the winners. And there’s no choice. You cannot wait. You have to be in this game, and I truly believe that.

And I was out at Microsoft for their Annual CEO Meeting, and they had all these big companies that were adopting AI and would allow Microsoft to show other people what the companies were doing using AI. And it was sort of interesting in one of the car companies. And they said, oh, yes, we do 6 things for them. They’re only letting you see one because this is going to change the way they design, manufacture and so forth.

So this will be going through the economy at an unpredictable rate because I do spend time with the people at these big companies who are designing AI. So on the one hand, they’re ramping up the power. In the second hand, they’re trying to figure out what to design at the same time. And so those design products will come out on an irregular basis. They won’t keep up with the incredible power of AI. And so this cycle for the next five years to 10 years will be really exciting, like really exciting.

So Blackstone, we use AI for a bunch of different things. We use it in our real estate business. You can see trends around different type of real estate that are useful. I think now they can write like two-thirds of an investment committee memo, something like that. But it’s like a magic trick that helps young people. We brought somebody on who was in charge of implementing AI at Walmart, a not insubstantial sized company, who’s done a great job.

He was in charge of it, and need to work with our portfolio companies to make the transition for AI. So we think this is like a core part of owning assets. And if you’re not in this game, you’ll be severely disadvantaged over time.

Michael Cyprys

Maybe a final question just in the interest of time here. Why don’t we turn to culture and leadership? Surely can’t have a topic — a discussion with you without turning to that sort of a topic. So just as the firm has grown in size and scope over the last couple of decades, how do you ensure that culture scales alongside growth? And maybe you could tie into that a number of the leadership transitions at the firm?

Steve Schwarzman

Well, we think about this a lot. I was just asked this question by these new employees this morning that I addressed. They said, how do you know if you’re too big? I said, well, you know. I said we look at it by unit, not the size of the company. The same way we look at funds, not by the size of all the funds added together, but every time we offer a new product, is that product scaled right? So we’ll know if we are too big if people at the firm are not excited.

Every meeting I go into, people are excited about what they’re doing, charged up. That means we’re not too big. And one way that happens is we run the firm in a very particular way. And every one of our big business areas, we call it private equity or we call it real estate or we call it credit or infrastructure, tactical opportunities or hedge funds, our senior people meet with that group every week on Mondays.

I have one seat. I sit in that seat all day. And every hour or 1.5 hours, a different group comes in. And there are probably seven of us, sort of our General Counsel or Financial Officer, Jon Gray, who, by the way is supposedly my Number Two. I think I’m Number Two. He’s so phenomenal. He’s 54, just an amazing guy. I think he’s been here, Mike?

Michael Cyprys

Yes.

Steve Schwarzman

And Jon is terrific. Jon and I are there. And so everybody in that group could have 250 people. Real estate has close to 600. You can even have less than 250. And we just sit there, and everyone in that group around the world is on that Zoom or in the room. And we talk about everything that’s going on in the business, every deal we’re looking at. And all of us are constantly looking around the room at the people who are there. It’s like making eye contact with all of your employees every week. And you could talk to them, and they’ll talk back.

And so there is a sense that this is a small firm because at firms that are smaller, you don’t see all the people like us. And we’ve done that for almost four years. And we can pick up on whether — even when there somebody is having a bad day. If you’ve seen somebody for like five years and, all of a sudden, they’re droopy or something, I’ll say to the person who runs that group, what’s wrong there? I mean, somebody could be sick. There could be a problem in their family. It’s not that they’ve like instantly stopped being interested in stuff.

And that way, we can deal with problems nobody even brings to us. So that kind of intimacy, if you will, by knowing us. But we also do one other thing, and then I’ll finish talking. We do a TV show every week to start the week. We call it BX, Blackstone TV. And it opens with rock and roll, and you can get a prize if you identify the song and the year it was popular. And then we have pictures. We have people who’s sending pictures, and we have themes like you and your pet. And so you get to see all these employees all over the world, or you climbing mountains. So we always get the Mount Everest people and the other people. You and your surfboard. So you get — you and your child, and children’s birthdays and weddings. And we have a separate one, engagements.

So what happens is you see people from all over the firm, all over the world every week. And then Jon goes over all the things that have happened in the week for the firm. And it is like being in a management committee meeting without the personnel issues. And it’s fascinating the range of things that we do. And then we have a guest speaker from the firm talking about something in particular. And then I end, and there is nothing left for me, basically.

So I’ll talk about this huge volume of things we do. I’ll pick three or four of them and tell people why they should function. And then I’ll either get movie reviews, talk about the Boston Celtics and what happened to The Mavericks, how did they ever get to the finals. And so I provide a little humor and sort of judgment, and we all have a good time. And that lasts for 45 minutes, and everybody is updated on what happened at the firm. So this kind of connection with everybody, we are like a very unusual place with — and the final thing is everybody we hire is a nice person. I worked at Lehman Brothers. I learned there are other things other than nice people.

And that’s one reason why they ended up blowing up. And so if you’ve ever worked at a place with people, like my first day at work, I was 24, I bought my first suit. I had the briefcase. I get to the elevator. It opens. There is a guy from Lehman Brothers who was like 15 years older than me, and he said, you look like one of the new people. I said, yes. He said, you’re going to love it here at Lehman Brothers.

He said, here at Lehman Brothers, we’ll never stab you in the back. We’ll just walk right on to you and stab you in the chest. That was my first day at work. I took the bus back up the east side. And my wife said, how was your first day? And I told her that story. I said it’s going to be really interesting. So we’re not so interesting at Blackstone. We use just the opposite of that because I was exposed to that.

And that makes us like a happy, productive, likable. We always get Best Place to Work and that kind of stuff. And we really care about our culture. Everybody can trust everybody. Everybody is meant to be successful. And this isn’t [indiscernible]. I mean, because we keep expanding, one of the advantages of that is that you’re not trapped into like a role. We keep expanding what people could do. So with that, I’ve overstayed my welcome. Thank you for finishing your lunch. I’m going to sort of follow your example. I think the price is right for lunch here.

Michael Cyprys

Well, Steve thank you so much for your time, insights and wisdom. Really appreciate you joining us today.

Steve Schwarzman

Great, Mike. Thank you.