Net Worth: $41.8 Billion as of April 2026 (Forbes)
Who is Stephen Schwarzman?
- 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, including $6 million to the Senate Leadership Fund and $4.6 million to the More Jobs, Less Government PAC. 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.
- In response to a New York State Comptroller inquiry into the matter, Schwarzman claimed Packers had “a strong corporate commitment to its zero-tolerance policy” of employing children.
- 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, and a total of $315 billion in real estate holdings.
- 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 2019, the United Nations’ housing advisor accused Blackstone of “wreaking havoc” in the global housing crisis through “aggressive evictions,” rent hikes, and excessive fees to tenants.
- Blackstone spent nearly $7 million to defeat a 2018 ballot measure in California that would have allowed cities to implement rent control laws.
- 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.
What does Schwarzman have to gain from the Trump Administration?
- In April 2026, Trump’s Labor Department proposed a rule that would allow 401(k) plans to offer alternative investments like private equity and cryptocurrencies while providing legal protections from investor lawsuits. The private equity industry had long pushed for the change, culminating first in an August 2025 executive order “democratizing access to alternative assets for 401(k) investors,” and, now, the proposed rule.
- The rule, if implemented, would give Blackstone access to a multi-trillionaire dollar market, introducing a high level of risk to retirement funds through extremely high private equity management fees and volatile returns. The firm’s stock price rose by 3% following the rule’s release.
- In the fourth quarter of 2025 alone, Blackstone spent $120,000 lobbying the Senate, House, and White House on the 401(k) rule.
- On July 15, 2025, Schwarzman’s Blackstone announced a $25 billion investment in data center and energy infrastructure buildout in Pennsylvania. Just eight days later, Trump signed an executive order titled Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure. The order directs the Office of Science and Technology Policy to provide financial support to qualifying projects and orders the Council on Environmental Quality to identify and create categorical exclusions for projects to avoid environmental review.
- Trump attended the July 15th Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit where Blackstone and utility company PPL Corp. touted their joint partnership to build out data centers in the state. Trump took credit for Blackstone’s and others’ investments and collected fawning praise from the executives of the companies, including Blackstone President Jon Gray who said Trump “[made] this AI revolution possible.”
- In February, Trump signed an executive order barring large corporate investors from buying up single-family homes to rent out. While the order would apply to Blackstone, it also contained an exemption that allowed companies like Blackstone to build, rather than buy, single family homes for rent. In 2024, Blackstone once again became a major player in the build-to-rent market through its $3.5 billion acquisition of Tricon Residential.
- Schwarzman has been a key negotiator for Harvard in the administration’s attempted strong arming over the university’s hiring and admissions policies, governance structure, and more. The university tapped Schwarzman due to his closeness to the President in an attempt to get a more favorable deal.
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Billionaires in Trump World tracker.