Turns out Blackstone didn't have a lesson to learn from Taylor Swift

It's astonishing that you can be one of the most successful businesses in the world, employing some of the brightest people on the planet, earning fortunes for yourselves and your investors, and yet so tone deaf.

When it comes to empathy, you’re sadly lacking – so much so that an attempt to show your human side, to relate to ordinary folk, backfires spectacularly, only serving to highlight that you’re even more out of touch than anyone imagined.

Even then, you just don’t get it, hailing the video you produced as a huge success. True, it’s gone viral but clearly you don’t realise that many of those 600k instant hits you’re touting were actually viewers watching from behind their fingers, so unbelievably shocked were they.

That’s the conclusion to be drawn from Blackstone’s five-minute, Taylor Swift-inspired, seasonal greetings tape. It’s awful.

So much so that you have to wonder what is in the heads of its makers, what possessed them to include lines such as “we buy assets and make 'em better” and “great returns for institutions and private wealth solutions”.

Go on tour like Taylor Swift but a Blackstone version? I love it

Stephen Schwarzman,
Blackstone chief executive

Blackstone likes its employees to possess high IQs, but seemingly, EQs don’t count. Being intelligent is what matters. Being empathetic – well, that is too namby-pamby, not something that matters in the ascent to corporate riches.

The video opens with the president of the giant US private equity firm, Jon Gray, telling the board they should “go on tour like Taylor”. What follows is Blackstone’s super-rich asset managers dancing and lip-synching.

Senior figures in the company star, including chief executive Stephen Schwarzman, chief finance officer Michael Chae and global head of corporate affairs Christine Anderson.

When Gray says the firm should go on a similar tour to Swift’s record-breaker, to raise $1 billion as she has done, a colleague says: “Jon, we managed to raise a trillion dollars professionally explaining our disciplined and thematic approach to investing.” Boom, boom. Truly, he did say that.

Chief executive of Blackstone Stephen Schwarzman. Reuters

They run it by chief executive Schwarzman, who says: “Go on tour like Taylor Swift but a Blackstone version? I love it!” He’s speaking, surrounded by dozens of copies of his own memoir.

All credit to him, apparently for a smattering of self-deprecation, although is there any surprise that his book should languish on the shelves? Important, self-important, as he is, Schwarzman is no best-selling influencer.

Neither is he, nor anyone at Blackstone, Taylor Swift. She is so successful, and yes, she makes tonnes of money, because Swift connects. She wins hearts with her lyrics, her music and the emotion she conveys. Swift may be netting vast sums, but that’s because her audience relates to her. There is no chance of her singing about having raised a trillion dollars.

That, too, underlines how Blackstone really thinks – that Swift’s tour has earned a billion, but at Blackstone, they’re far superior, dealing in trillions not billions. All that attention on Taylor Swift? We’re the real superstars. You suspect the absence of popular adulation of the sort afforded to Swift cuts deep.

It’s possible to say the video is a “bit of fun”, a faceless investment behemoth stressing they’re “real”. That would be easier to justify if so much thought and cost had not gone into the production. This isn’t some light-hearted caper with an iPhone. It’s a slickly produced, carefully choreographed, tightly scripted number.

The reel took hours to prepare. Costumes had to be sourced, graphics drawn, executive diaries cleared. There were lines to be learnt. Presumably, each cameo required more than one take.

Surrounded by memoirs in a corporate setting, a stark reminder of the gap between executive self-perception and public empathy. Bloomberg

All to create a skit that resulted in the comments section on the YouTube link being closed down soon after it aired, such was the opprobrium.

If the aim was to produce a piece of private merriment for clients and staff, that may not have been too bad. But that was not the intention, as the posting on YouTube illustrated.

It was meant for public consumption, this from a corporation still remembered in the UK for the Southern Cross care home collapse. Southern Cross was the biggest care home chain in the country when it went down in 2012 with 31,000 vulnerable residents. Blackstone had been its owner, making hundreds of millions in profits, but exited ahead of the demise.

In the US, Blackstone is associated with the controversial eviction of student, affordable-housing and elderly tenants in thousands of rental units it owns.

Against this backdrop, singing along with Gray (£376 million last year in pay and dividends), Schwarzman (a record-breaking £1 billion) et al is simply not joyous.

The mockumentary should not have got off first base. Apparently, we’re told Gray went to a Swift concert with his daughters (in the best seats, presumably) when the idea came to him. That’s where it ought to have stayed.

Firms like Blackstone can do little right. Better not to tempt fate, then.

Yes, in the overall scheme of things it was harmless. But it did them no good.

It was irony. Here they should have heeded a valuable lesson. In 2009, Lloyd Blankfein, the then-chief executive of Goldman Sachs, decided to open the investment bank’s doors to a journalist from The Sunday Times. This, shortly after Goldman had been vilified in Rolling Stone as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”

The Sunday Times was to be the bank’s PR fightback. The session went well. The writer got to meet numerous Goldman employees and ask them anything he wanted. On the way out, as they stood by the lifts, Blankfein said he hoped the paper could see he was “just a banker, doing God’s work”.

It was intended as a throwaway remark, in jest. Instead, Blankfein appeared everywhere, not only in The Sunday Times, proclaiming that “bankers do God’s work”.

Next year’s Blackstone offering is awaited with interest. What’s the betting they do something similar? After all, the 2023 edition was a triumph. Seriously.

Global state-owned investor ranking by size

1.	United States
2.	China
3.	UAE
4.	Japan
5	Norway
6.	Canada
7.	Singapore
8.	Australia
9.	Saudi Arabia
10.	South Korea

Key findings of Jenkins report

Founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna, "accepted the political utility of violence"
Views of key Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, Sayyid Qutb, have “consistently been understood” as permitting “the use of extreme violence in the pursuit of the perfect Islamic society” and “never been institutionally disowned” by the movement.
Muslim Brotherhood at all levels has repeatedly defended Hamas attacks against Israel, including the use of suicide bombers and the killing of civilians.
Laying out the report in the House of Commons, David Cameron told MPs: "The main findings of the review support the conclusion that membership of, association with, or influence by the Muslim Brotherhood should be considered as a possible indicator of extremism."

MATCH INFO

Champions League quarter-final, first leg

Ajax v Juventus, Wednesday, 11pm (UAE)

Match on BeIN Sports

UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets

heading

Iran has sent five planeloads of food to Qatar, which is suffering shortages amid a regional blockade.

A number of nations, including Iran's major rival Saudi Arabia, last week cut ties with Qatar, accusing it of funding terrorism, charges it denies.

The land border with Saudi Arabia, through which 40% of Qatar's food comes, has been closed.

Meanwhile, mediators Kuwait said that Qatar was ready to listen to the "qualms" of its neighbours.

Key facilities

Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
Premier League-standard football pitch
400m Olympic running track
NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
600-seat auditorium
Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
Specialist robotics and science laboratories
AR and VR-enabled learning centres
Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills

Conflict, drought, famine

Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.

Band Aid

Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.

The burning issue

The internal combustion engine is facing a watershed moment – major manufacturer Volvo is to stop producing petroleum-powered vehicles by 2021 and countries in Europe, including the UK, have vowed to ban their sale before 2040. The National takes a look at the story of one of the most successful technologies of the last 100 years and how it has impacted life in the UAE.

Part three: an affection for classic cars lives on

Read part two: how climate change drove the race for an alternative

Read part one: how cars came to the UAE

While you're here

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Specs

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Torque: 1075Nm
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The Indoor Cricket World Cup

When: September 16-23

Where: Insportz, Dubai

Indoor cricket World Cup:
Insportz, Dubai, September 16-23

UAE fixtures:
Men
Saturday, September 16 – 1.45pm, v New Zealand
Sunday, September 17 – 10.30am, v Australia; 3.45pm, v South Africa
Monday, September 18 – 2pm, v England; 7.15pm, v India
Tuesday, September 19 – 12.15pm, v Singapore; 5.30pm, v Sri Lanka
Thursday, September 21 – 2pm v Malaysia
Friday, September 22 – 3.30pm, semi-final
Saturday, September 23 – 3pm, grand final

Women
Saturday, September 16 – 5.15pm, v Australia
Sunday, September 17 – 2pm, v South Africa; 7.15pm, v New Zealand
Monday, September 18 – 5.30pm, v England
Tuesday, September 19 – 10.30am, v New Zealand; 3.45pm, v South Africa
Thursday, September 21 – 12.15pm, v Australia
Friday, September 22 – 1.30pm, semi-final
Saturday, September 23 – 1pm, grand final