Catenaa, Thursday, July 02, 2026– Blackstone’s private equity fund for wealthy individuals delivered its strongest performance in May, propelled by its investment in Anthropic.
Class I shares in the fund, Blackstone Private Equity Strategies, delivered net returns of 4.3% in May, bringing year-to-date gains to 11.4%, the firm said in an investor letter seen by Bloomberg.
The fund, known as BXPE, deployed more than $2.5 billion in the second quarter, including an additional investment in Anthropic as well as a bet on payment processor Stripe.
While private equity has been under pressure in recent years, BXPE suggested in the letter that a yearslong rut for buyouts and initial public offerings is starting to ease.
“We are seeing a more constructive exit environment, with increased IPO activity,” including SpaceX’s public offering, “which we anticipate will support realizations across BXPE’s portfolio,” the firm said in the letter.
Private wealth has become a sought-after source of capital for alternative asset managers, and Blackstone is one of the biggest players with more than $310 billion of such assets across various funds. Individual investors can be flightier and more risk-averse than institutional backers:
This year, Blackstone’s retail credit fund was one of many that received a spike in redemption requests amid fears of exposure to software firms vulnerable to AI disruption.
Blackstone President Jon Gray said at a financial conference last month that the “noise” on private credit had been loud, and that “there’s an underestimation of the power of this wealth franchise we’re building.”
The firm’s private equity fund for the wealthy has the flexibility to deploy about 30% of its net asset value to independent deals that may not fit its institutional funds. That flexibility has allowed it to make bets on AI as well as on assets the firm would like to hold for longer in perpetual funds.
Its big AI bet, Anthropic, was valued at $965 billion in May, while Stripe reached a $159 billion valuation in an employee tender offer earlier this year. BXPE also backed Anthropic competitor OpenAI and AI infrastructure firm CoreWeave, and it took a stake in Elon Musk’s SpaceX ahead of its massive IPO.
