Stephen Schwarzman
Net Worth: $38.2 Billion (Forbes)
- Following Trump’s 2024 election victory, Schwarzman was in talks with Howard Lutnick, co-chair of Trump’s transition at the time, to recommend appointees in the administration.
- Stephen Schwarzman is the chairman and CEO of private equity firm Blackstone. After the 2016 election, Schwarzman joined the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum, a group of Wall Street and corporate executives that acted as economic advisors to Trump.
- After initially calling for a “new generation” of Republican leaders in 2022, Schwarzman later endorsed Donald Trump in May of 2024. Schwarzman then contributed tens of millions of dollars to Republican- aligned PACs and congressional campaigns. In 2020, he donated $3 million to a PAC supporting Trump.
- In 2023, Blackstone-owned Packers Sanitation Services was fined $1.5 million by the Department of Labor for using child labor in meat processing plants. Packers employed 102 children, aged 13 to 17, that worked in overnight shifts, used hazardous chemicals, and cleaned dangerous equipment in the facility.
- Schwarzman received $1 billion in income in 2024 from Blackstone through $84 million in compensation and $916 million in dividends.
- Blackstone has extensive real estate holdings, owning “over 300,000 units of rental housing in the U.S., making it the largest landlord in the U.S,” according to a report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. A 2018 report found that Wall Street landlords like Blackstone evict tenants at higher rates and impose higher rent hikes than other single family landlords.
- In 2018 and 2019, Blackstone-owned Motel 6 paid settlements of $7.6 million and $12 million in two lawsuits after voluntarily providing its guests list to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without warrants.
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Billionaires in Trump World tracker.