(Photo via YouTube screengrab)
One of the largest private equity firms in the world released a truly (and hopefully intentionally) awful new holiday video this week, apparently inspired by Taylor Swift’s “Eras” Tour. The cringe-inducing video released by Blackstone on Thursday almost immediately led to widespread roasting online. “holy shit what the hell was Blackstone thinking,” one person wrote. “THIS IS NOT THE SIMULATION I WANTED,” said another.
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Blackstone’s video, which seems designed to become a meme, begins with an “Office”-style mockumentary describing Blackstone President Jonathan Gray’s obsession with Swift’s tour. Gray says the company should go on a similar tour to raise $1 billion, when an executive says, “Jon, we managed to raise a trillion dollars professionally explaining our disciplined and thematic approach to investing.” (That was the punchline.)After his employees call him an idiot without realizing they’re unmuted (another punchline), they run it by billionaire CEO Steven Schwarzman, who says, “Go on tour like Taylor Swift but a Blackstone version? I love it!” while surrounded by dozens of copies of his own memoir. The comedy portion of the holiday video continues for about 4 minutes of the 5 minute and 55 second runtime before the music video begins. Blackstone CEO’s emerge from Volkswagen buses, wearing sequined outfits and dancing in front of green screens with low-fi 80’s inspired graphics, singing about market megatrends, boasting about managing a trillion dollars in assets and saying they “get ahead of AI” as a CGI robot raises the roof. The video was made public on Blackstone’s Youtube account, so the most generous reading is that the company wanted a self-aware addition to the archive of cringey corporate holiday videos. The company only briefly references its real estate portfolio in the video, which includes roughly 25,000 single-family homes and 300,000 rental units across the United States made up of student housing, affordable housing, and senior housing. What it conveniently fails to mention at all is that after a two-year self-imposed eviction ban, Blackstone sent hundreds—or maybe even thousands—of eviction filings in 2022.In fact, at a group of apartment buildings in Escondido County, Blackstone’s evictions allowed the company to raise rents by as much as 64 percent between September 2021 and March 2023, according to the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. In a call with investors in December 2022, Blackstone real estate head Nadeem Meghji celebrated the rent increases. “We’re also seeing a meaningful increase in economic occupancy as we move past what were voluntary eviction restrictions that had been in place for the last couple of years,” he said, according to a transcript of the call published by Insider.Happy Holidays!