Billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, an Abington native, founded private equity firm Blackstone with the late Peter Peterson in 1985, writes Sergei Klebnikov for Forbes.

Over the following decades, the firm has grown into the world’s largest alternative asset manager with over $1 trillion in assets.

The strategy that helped build the firm has also changed over the years.

“Firms like us were the pioneers of going into other alternative asset classes like real estate, hedge funds, and credit,” said Schwarzman. “We now have 72 different strategies for investing and when we started, there was one.”

One of the firm’s outstanding triumphs was its investment in Hilton in July 2007, when equities were at their peak.

“We knew we were paying a very large price for it, but we believed that there were at least two remarkable opportunities to increase Hilton’s profits,” he said.

This included expanding Hilton’s international presence.

“We felt that if we aggressively opened new hotels, did it from a management company point of view and had other people put up the capital that we could probably increase the earnings – just from that one activity – by some $500 million a year,” said Schwarzman.

Read the entire interview at Forbes.

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