Two Blackstone Executives Stand To Collect $2.3B by Going Public

Stephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson, who started Blackstone Group LP two decades ago with $400,000, stand to collect a combined $2.33 billion from the largest initial public offering by a leveraged buyout firm.The 60-year-old Mr. Schwarzman will receive $449.2 million for selling some of his holdings, leaving him with a 24% stake, New York-based Blackstone said yesterday in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Mr. Peterson, 80, who’s retiring next year, will get $1.88 billion and retain 4% of the company.Blackstone, manager of the world’s second-largest buyout fund, plans to go public as soon as this month after spending $199 billion to acquire companies since it was founded in 1985. The payouts to Messrs. Schwarzman and Peterson top those earned by partners at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and the founders of Google Inc. when their companies went public.“The world has shifted to private-equity and hedge-fund companies,” the chief executive officer of executive-search firm Challenger Gray & Christmas Inc. in Chicago, John Challenger, said yesterday in an interview. “That’s where the real money is and that’s going to draw talent.”Blackstone will have a market value of $32.4 billion, with 12.3% of the stock held by the public and China’s state investment company buying a 9.7% stake in a private transaction. Mr. Schwarzman’s holdings will be valued at $7.73 billion if Blackstone’s shares sell for $30 apiece in the IPO, according to the filing. Mr. Peterson’s remaining shares will be worth $1.31 billion.“The equity values are large enough that you can’t ask the junior partners to buy you out at full value,” the managing director of Morgan Joseph & Co. in New York and former chief executive officer of Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc., Frederick Joseph, said.Mr. Schwarzman made $398.3 million last year, according to the filing. Mr. Peterson earned $212.9 million. That tops the $54 million Goldman Sachs paid to its chief executive officer, Lloyd Blankfein, for running the world’s most profitable securities firm.Blackstone said in the filing the executives’s compensation is based on their ownership stakes and the firm’s fees and profits from its buyout, real estate, and investment funds.The value of Mr. Schwarzman’s stake would place him at number 32 on the Forbes magazine list of richest Americans, tied with the chief executive officer of News Corp., Rupert Murdoch, and the chairman of eBay Inc., Pierre Omidyar.In Goldman’s 1999 IPO, partners of the New York-based investment bank took home stock then valued at $63.6 million, with senior executives receiving as much as three times that amount. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page each sold about $41 million of shares when the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internetsearch company went public in 2004. They kept stock worth $3.2 billion.Mr. Schwarzman’s compensation fell short of his colleagues in the hedge-fund industry, where the average pay of the top 25 hedge-fund managers was $570 million last year, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine. The chairman of Renaissance Technologies Corp., James Simons, earned an estimated $1.7 billion, according to the magazine.The company plans to sell 133.3 million shares in the IPO at $29 to $31 each. At the midpoint of $30, it would raise about $3.83 billion after underwriting costs, according to the SEC filing. Underwriters may sell an additional 20 million shares depending on demand. China’s soon-to-be-formed State Investment Co. is paying $3 billion for its nonvoting stake, a 4.5% discount to the IPO price.Private-equity firms including Apollo Management LP, run by former Drexel Burnham Lambert banker Leon Black, and David Rubenstein’s Carlyle Group also are considering IPOs or private placements of shares.“Everybody is looking at it,” the managing partner of New Yorkbased recruiting firm Higdon Partners LLC, Henry Higdon, said. “People are looking at how to monetize their business if it’s private.”New York-based Fortress Investment Group LLC was the first manager of hedge funds and private-equity in America to sell a stake to investors, raising more than $634 million in February. Its shares have risen 38% since.Blackstone’s net income rose 71% to $2.27 billion last year. The company said it may post net losses “for a number of years” as it accounts for the cost of buying stakes from its executives. Blackstone estimated that it may amortize $4 billion of these costs, as well as about $3.6 billion of goodwill, over three to 10 years.The firm manages $88.4 billion, including $19.6 billion in its most recent buyout fund, the secondlargest after the $20 billion pool run by Goldman. The ascent began when Messrs. Schwarzman and Peterson left Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., where mergers and acquisitions specialist Mr. Schwarzman served as Mr. Peterson’s deputy.Mr. Peterson had served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and a U.S. Secretary of Commerce. Mr. Peterson plans to give away “a substantial amount” of his proceeds from the offering to charities, according to the filing.Messrs. Schwarzman and Peterson together assembled a roster of deal-makers including Hamilton “Tony” James, 56, who joined the firm in 2002 from Credit Suisse Group, where he was chairman of global investment banking and private equity.Mr. James, now Blackstone’s president and chief operating officer, will get $147.9 million for some of his stock and keep a 4.9% stake valued at $1.6 billion. He earned $97.3 million last year.J. Tomilson Hill, 58, the vice chairman who heads the company’s hedge-fund unit, will own 1.6% of the shares valued at $535.4 million, after receiving $22.1 million. He was paid $45.6 million in 2006.The chief financial officer of Blackstone, Michael Puglisi, 56, will retain a 0.7% stake worth $231.2 million after getting $13.4 million. He earned $17.4 million last year.Mr. Schwarzman’s total pay last year included $1.54 million in hourly fees for business use of the airplane he owns. Messrs. Peterson and Schwarzman jointly own a helicopter and Blackstone paid them $158,500 in hourly rates for business use.The company will pay existing owners about $610.4 million in “undistributed earnings” before the offering, Blackstone has said in previous filings, noting that the amount may change.The owners may also benefit from a change in the company’s tax basis, according to the filing. A reduction in taxes after the offering will allow the company to pay about $993.2 million to the owners over the next 15 years.The founders will receive 27.8% of the partnership units, which are both vested and unvested. Other senior managing directors will receive 45.8%, while American International Group Inc. will receive 4.5%, all of which is vested.New York-based AIG bought a 7% stake in Blackstone in 1998 for $150 million.LBO firms use a mix of cash from investors plus their own funds and debt secured on the target they buy to finance their deals. They typically seek to expand companies or improve performance before selling them within five years to other funds or investors in initial public offerings.

Two Blackstone Executives Stand To Collect $2.3B by Going Public

Two Blackstone Executives Stand To Collect $2.3B by Going Public

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