Blackstone manages $1.4 trillion in assets. It has deployed $275 billion into data centers and digital infrastructure. It financed CoreWeave at $2.3 billion when CoreWeave had $16 million in revenue. Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman, in his own published memoir, wrote that a good investor must ask: 'Are they merely salespeople trying to persuade you of something that is not real?' Ed Zitron's piece uses that quote as a knife.
The article is a structured indictment, not a polemic. Zitron runs a documented list: Blackstone's Apria Healthcare paid $210 million in dividends the same month it settled a $40.5 million Medicare fraud case. Blackstone's Invitation Homes drew a seven-page letter from the UN's special housing rapporteur in 2019 for financializing housing and discriminating against Black tenants. Blackstone's Packers Sanitation employed over 100 children, some as young as 13, in meatpacking plants across eight states for three years. Two Blackstone SPAC deals with Bill Foley peaked at $185 and $260 per share and now trade at $5.51 and $9.16.
What makes this worth reading in full is not the conclusion. It is the architecture. Zitron connects Schwarzman's self-mythologizing memoir directly to Blackstone's positions in OpenAI, Anthropic, CoreWeave, and Google TPUs, arguing that the same pattern of backing insolvent-looking businesses runs from a student fridge rental company in 1969 to the entire AI infrastructure stack in 2024. The question Zitron is really asking: what happens when the world's largest landlord, largest private equity firm, and largest data center investor is also the entity underwriting the AI bubble?
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