Blackstone S-1 Filing: That's a Lot of Money

The Blackstone S-1 filing is out, and it's gigantic -- 200 pages plus exhibits -- and entertaining. There is no way to get to everything in it in a finite amount of time, and others will mine it for weeks and months.

Nevertheless, among other things, we learn that the $78.7-billion asset manager raked in $1.1-billion in fees in 2006, up from half a billion last year, and from $320-million "way back" in 2002. The fund paid out $250-million in compensation last year to its 335 non-managing directors. That works out to $714k per minion -- which is pretty good pay, as far as minions go.

But the bigger comp number is payment for the 56 senior managing directors. That has been accounted for as partnership distributions, making that number separate and harder to parse. According to cash flows, capital distributions to partners were $1.5-billion in 2006, which works out to a smooth $27.8m per partner. Not bad money.

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In looking at the above figure it is interesting to see that Blackstone has added almost $9-billion so far this year. That is more money than the firm had under management back in 1999, and puts the company on pace to add $40-billion in assets this year.