Blackstone Inc.’s Joan Solotar spent most of the past decade focused on attracting money from wealthy investors as part of the private market giant’s race to manage $1 trillion in assets.
Now, after hitting a $250 billion fundraising target at her unit about four years ahead of schedule, Blackstone’s global head of private wealth solutions is setting her sights on an ambitious $1 trillion goal at her own business.
In the past five years, the wealth unit at the world’s biggest alternative assets manager has increased the amount of money it oversees by almost five-fold as part of an expansion drive across the U.S., Europe and Asia.
That’s helped to push the New York firm’s share price to a record this year and positioned Solotar as a pivotal figure at the company she joined in 2007, after running Bank of America Corp.’s equity research team.
Solotar, 60, spoke to Bloomberg on the future of private markets, what inspires her and what she’s learned leading her business at Blackstone, which last year hit its original target of managing $1 trillion in overall assets by 2026.
She spoke during Bloomberg’s Women, Money & Power event in London earlier this week. Her comments have been edited and condensed for brevity.
Bloomberg: Now that you’ve delivered on your $250 billion goal, what motivates you to keep going?
Solotar: What’s next is $1 trillion, I hope. We will continue to build this business into something even more scalable.
I put out the $250 billion target based on what I thought we would be able to deliver in a 10-year period, and we were able to achieve it earlier. As I go through our strategic plans and look at the opportunity set, I think we can double and triple that business over time.
It’s hard to know exactly what year — and many things have to fall into place — but around the world you’re seeing an increase in private market allocations from virtually 0%.
