The world’s most powerful business leaders enjoyed eye-watering pay bumps in 2025. And Blackstone cofounder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman had a particularly great year, taking home $1.24 billion last year, thanks to the asset management titan’s record profits.
It’s a 20% bump from the year before, the majority of which came from dividends, and almost reached his 2022 high of $1.27 billion.
Most of the 10-figure income stems from his roughly 20% stake in Blackstone, as Schwarzman boasts a relatively meager salary of $350,000.
And the billion-dollar haul is probably a welcome relief for Schwarzman whose net worth has been in free fall since September last year, when the CEO’s fortune reached a high of $60.3 billion. Today, his net worth sits at $44.2 billion.
Blackstone’s shares have struggled as investors grow wary of mounting pressures in private markets. But the recent turbulence is nothing new for the billionaire businessman who has spent decades navigating economic cycles—and he has some words of wisdom for others stepping into the stressful world of finance.
Schwarzman landed his first Wall Street job with zero finance education, before founding Blackstone
Schwarzman started his path to the CEO role at U.S. investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. He had just graduated from Yale, with no expertise in finance—but the short stint was his first foray into a now lucrative career.
“I somehow managed to convince the guy who was the founding partner to hire me,” the CEO told Blackstone’s summer analysts last year. “I didn’t really know there was stock, bonds. I never had an economics course. I never, of course, had an accounting course.”
For a period of time, Schwarzman left finance for a job in the Army Reserve, before pursuing his MBA at Harvard University.
Lehman Brothers became his next employer right out of business school; there, he worked his way up over a decade to chair the mergers and acquisitions committee.
Schwarzman then decided to do his own thing; he founded Blackstone alongside former Lehman Brothers colleague Pete Peterson in 1985 for less than $500,000.
The Blackstone CEO’s advice for budding professionals: Stress less and love your job
Fast-forward four decades later, and the 79-year-old CEO and chairman is still at the helm of the financial giant. But looking back on his career, Schwarzman advised young professionals against a work habit that completely wrecked his nervous system.
“Don’t put yourself under as much pressure as I was under,” the billionaire recently told Blackstone’s summer analysts. “I went for max everything … So I’ve absorbed a lot of self-created stress, and I still do it. But now my nerve endings are burned off, so it doesn’t bother me at all.”
In cofounding and scaling the world’s largest alternative asset management business, Schwarzman said he was “taking on the world” and attempting a feat that’s never been achieved.
While the pursuit can be incredibly exciting, the CEO warned that he was operating in a constant state of anxiety about his failures being blasted “on Netflix or something.”
And that’s something he doesn’t want for future generations: “I didn’t want my children to have that level of desperation every day, and fear of failure.”
