Blackstone's Schwarzman Plows $197 Million Back Into His Firm

(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire Steve Schwarzman dominates Wall Street with his annual payouts, collecting $787 million last year. He turned around and put a quarter of that back into Blackstone Group LP.

The asset manager disclosed Thursday that its co-founder, 71, invested $196.6 million in Blackstone funds during 2017. That compares with the $161.8 million that Carlyle Group LP's Bill Conway invested in his firm's offerings, $43.3 million by KKR & Co.'s Henry Kravis and $15 million by Apollo Global Management LLC's Marc Rowan.

Blackstone in recent years didn't disclose the figure, instead subtracting fund distributions from contributions and sharing a net amount. Without the disclosure, Carlyle's three founders appeared to outpace their peers.

Private equity fund managers typically put some of their own money into their funds, in addition to contributions from the firms' balance sheets, to show outside investors that interests are aligned.

A surprise in Blackstone's disclosure was the second-largest personal contributor after Schwarzman: Jim Breyer, a non-executive director of the firm since 2016, added $88 million. The 56-year-old billionaire venture capitalist is best known for being one of Facebook Inc.'s earliest backers while at Accel Partners. He now runs Menlo Park, California-based Breyer Capital.

To contact the reporter on this story: Devin Banerjee in New York at dbanerjee2@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Elizabeth Fournier at efournier5@bloomberg.net, Michael Hytha, Devin Banerjee

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