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> his own investors at Black Rock Blackrock does not at all operate the same as a private equity and it's a huge pet peeve of mine when people lump them in tog
by legitster 2y ago
> his own investors at Black Rock
Blackrock does not at all operate the same as a private equity and it's a huge pet peeve of mine when people lump them in together. Usually they are confusing Blackrock with Blackstone.
All Blackrock does is manage wealth and investments on behalf of individual clients. One of the ways they do this is by sticking private assets into funds for their clients. It's more akin to Vanguard than anything to do with private equity. There's no reason to believe BlackRock would be breathing down their necks when all they do is broker the funds on behalf of their clients.
Automattic DOES have private equity backers though like Tiger Global, Insight, ICONIQ, and more.
- lolinder 2y agoFair enough. /at Black Rock/d
- kbarmettler 2y agoThank you very much for this clarification!
- pclmulqdq 2y agoPeople often confuse BlackRock, an asset manager, with Blackstone, which is a private equity firm. However, I doubt Blackstone counts low enough to have bought part of Automattic. Blackstone also owns a considerable portion of BlackRock.
- jrflowers 2y agoI like how confident this post is. Blackrock absolutely has private equity operations which they do not hide even a little bit > Private equity is a core pillar of BlackRock’s alternatives platform. BlackRock’s Private Equity teams manage USD$41.9 billion in capital commitments across direct, primary, secondary and co-investments. https://www.blackrock.com/institutions/en-us/strategies/alternatives/private-equity https://www.blackrock.com/institutions/en-us/strategies/alte... They also do more traditional asset management, but saying they “do not operate at all the same as a private equity” is like saying that Jack In The Box “does not operate at all like a taco place” despite the fact that you can buy a taco at every one of their locations.
- legitster 2y ago> Our platform takes a holistic approach to investors’ private equity portfolios and is designed to offer strategies and solutions that align with client objectives and deliver persistent outperformance. I get your point, but again, they are doing this on behalf of clients. And 49b is less than a percent of their holdings. So I would still think of them as a brokerage. This would be like calling Uber a restaurant company just because they launched UberEats.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chii 2y ago> This would be like calling Uber a restaurant company just because they launched UberEats. an apt comparison. Some people dislike how ubereats operate. The dislike of private equity is not unfounded, but also the problems don't actually stem from private equity at all, but from bad/misaligned incentives. People tend to want to assume that private equity buying a business will retain the same incentive as the original owners - but the reason why PE would buy a business is _because_ the original owners weren't being perfectly efficient (aka, stingy). This has nothing to do with private equity per se, and has everything to do with capitalism at it's core.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago