Jon Gray

Gray is a Chicago native. His father worked in the family business, a small auto parts manufacturer on Chicago’s West Side that struggled in the 1970s and was eventually sold to a competitor; the factory was called Blackstone Manufacturing, and according to acquaintances, the fact that the firm he later worked for has the same name is sheer coincidence.⁠[1][2][2][2]

At the University of Pennsylvania, Gray earned both a BS in Economics from the Wharton School and a BA in English from the College of Arts and Sciences, graduating magna cum laude in 1992, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He had once considered becoming a journalist. In a Romantic poetry class, he met his classmate and future wife, Mindy.⁠[3][4][5][2][2]

In 1992, straight out of college, Gray joined Blackstone as an analyst, spending his first 18 months in mergers and acquisitions and also working in private equity. Blackstone’s founders were then considering setting up a real estate fund and asked John Schreiber, a fellow Chicagoan and former JMB Realty executive, to lead it; on the advice of senior leaders, Gray moved to the newly formed real estate group, becoming its first and, for a time, only junior-level employee.⁠[6][1][2][6][2][2]

In 1994, Blackstone launched its first real estate fund, raising $335 million. For almost a decade afterward, the group focused mainly on smaller deals.⁠[2][2]

After almost a decade of smaller deals, while bidding for a small hotel chain, Gray and his colleagues realized that as long as a target company’s core assets were real estate, they could finance the acquisition of an entire public company with commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS), obtaining far more financing than a typical leveraged buyout. The first such major deal was the $3.4 billion acquisition in 2004 of Extended Stay, with 685 properties; that same year, Blackstone also acquired Prime Hospitality, the five Boca Resorts in Florida, and 31,000 apartments in Germany.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

In January 2005, Gray became a senior managing director and, with Chad Pike, co-head of Blackstone’s real estate business. The two shifted the focus from buying individual buildings to acquiring entire companies, which gave them greater flexibility with assets and led them to make bigger bets.⁠[4][1][1]

In November 2006, Blackstone announced its bid for Equity Office Properties Trust, the largest owner of office buildings in the United States, controlled by Sam Zell. On January 18, 2007, Vornado Realty and two partners launched a competing bid at $52 a share, above Blackstone’s $48.50; after three weeks of research, negotiations, and repeated counteroffers, Gray prevailed with an all-cash offer of $55.50 a share, which was 50 cents lower than Vornado’s but preferred by the Equity Office board. The deal was completed in February 2007 at $39 billion, surpassing KKR’s $25 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1989 to become the largest leveraged buyout in history at the time; Gray was 37 years old.⁠[2][1][2][2][2][2][2]

To pay down the acquisition debt, Blackstone needed to sell at least half of Equity Office’s properties: on the day the deal was signed, it sold eight Manhattan office towers to Harry Macklowe for $7 billion, and between February and April 2007 it sold more than $28 billion of Equity Office assets.⁠[2][2][2]

On July 3, 2007, Hilton Hotels Corporation announced a merger agreement with Blackstone’s real estate and private equity funds under which it would be acquired for $47.50 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $26 billion, a 40% premium over the previous day’s closing price. Gray, then a senior managing director, said it was hard to imagine a better strategic fit than Hilton. From that year, he served as chairman of Hilton and handpicked Christopher Nassetta as chief executive officer.⁠[7][7][7][3][2]

After the global financial crisis and the U.S. recession, by 2018 the investment had generated about $14 billion in profit (partly realized), a record in private equity. After Hilton, Gray did not make another deal until mid-2009.⁠[1][2]

In early 2008, as the credit markets began to freeze, Blackstone launched a $1 billion mezzanine lending fund, and the following year its main fund began a buying spree: it bought 560 U.S. shopping centers owned by the Australian operator Centro for $9.4 billion, took a stake in the bankrupt General Growth Properties, and in October 2010 bought back the bankrupt Extended Stay hotel chain for $3.9 billion, a company it had sold in 2007 for $8 billion. By 2011, the real estate business held roughly a fifth of Blackstone’s $159 billion in assets under management but accounted for nearly half of the firm’s earnings.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

In January 2012, Gray became Blackstone’s global head of real estate, and in February of that year he joined Blackstone’s board of directors; he also served on its Management Committee. By 2013, the real estate platform managed more than $50 billion in investor capital, with major holdings including Hilton, Equity Office, Brixmor shopping centers, and London’s Broadgate office complex.⁠[4][3][8][8][8]

On May 8, 2012, the University of Pennsylvania announced that alumni Mindy and Jon Gray had given $25 million to establish the Basser Research Center, focused on the prevention and treatment of breast and ovarian cancers associated with BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations. The center is named for Mindy Gray’s late sister, Faith Basser, and is located within Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center at the Perelman School of Medicine.⁠[9][9][9]

In November 2016, the Grays’ Gray Foundation and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the launch of NYC Kids RISE, a child college savings account initiative to help families of New York public school students save for college over the long term; as of 2026, the program provides college savings for every New York City public school kindergartner.⁠[10][10][3]

On February 13, 2018, Blackstone announced that Gray, 48, would succeed Tony James as president and chief operating officer, taking over day-to-day management of the firm and reporting to co-founder, chairman, and CEO Stephen Schwarzman; James became executive vice chairman. Ken Caplan and Kathleen McCarthy succeeded Gray as global co-heads of real estate. When Gray stepped down as head of real estate, the business had become the world’s largest, with more than $115 billion in investor capital, and had accounted for half of the firm’s earnings in recent years.⁠[6][1][6][6][6][6]

Schwarzman praised Gray’s judgment and energy and said the appointment laid the foundation for the next generation of senior management. Gray said it was “a story of continuity” with no need for sharp turns, and that he saw “big white spaces” in areas such as insurance, infrastructure, retail clients, and the use of data. The appointment led to his being seen as the designated heir to Schwarzman and James.⁠[6][6][1][1][1]

In 2019, the Grays donated $10 million to the University of Pennsylvania to provide financial aid to first-generation, low-income students from New York City; that same year, the Gray Foundation gave $3 million to a project at Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center studying the effects of breast cancer on the immune system.⁠[5][5]

On September 15, 2022, the University of Pennsylvania announced a further $55 million gift from the Grays to establish the Cancer Interception Institute through the Basser Center, to research intercepting cancer cells as soon as they appear or preventing BRCA-related cancers at the source. This brought the couple’s total commitment to Penn and the Basser Center to more than $125 million.⁠[5][5][5]

On December 1, 2022, BREIT, Blackstone’s $69 billion non-traded real estate investment trust for wealthy individual investors, announced that it would limit redemptions because requests had exceeded its limits of 2% of net asset value per month and 5% per quarter; the news sent Blackstone’s stock down as much as 10%. Gray had put an additional $100 million of his own money into BREIT since July of that year.⁠[11][11][11][11]

Gray then defended the limits on CNBC, saying the product had been set up with limitations on liquidity from the start and was described as “semi-liquid” because they knew there would at some point be a period of volatility and did not want to sell assets at the wrong time under pressure.⁠[12][12][12]

During a 2025 business trip to Sydney, Gray filmed a 25-second running video of himself on his phone in front of the Sydney Opera House and posted it to LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry; over the following year or so, he posted nearly 50 similar videos, talking along the way about long-term investing, market volatility, and the rise of artificial intelligence, and they became popular on LinkedIn. In January 2026, a 42-second video of him running through Central Park in heavy snow in New York received 2.7 million views. He called himself “the accidental influencer” and said that in the “trust business” of managing capital for others, communicating directly with clients and shareholders is very helpful.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13][13][13][13][13][13][13]

On May 7, 2025, Tel Aviv University announced that it had received a $125 million gift from the Grays’ Gray Foundation, the largest in the university’s history; its Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences was renamed the Gray Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, having previously been named after the Sackler family. The gift will be used to increase the medical school’s annual intake from 300 to 400 students, build a 600-bed student dormitory with preference given to disadvantaged students, renovate existing facilities, build new research laboratories, and support BRCA research. The Grays said they had been searching for a way to make a meaningful impact in Israel since “the tragic events of October 7th.”⁠[14][15][15][14][14][15][15][15][15]

Blackstone’s fiscal 2025 annual report shows Gray as president, chief operating officer, and director, sitting on the Management Committee and nearly all of its investment committees; under the company’s governance arrangements, when Schwarzman ceases to be the founding member of the Series II Preferred Stockholder (which elects the board of directors), Gray will succeed him in that role. As of 2026, Blackstone had about $1.3 trillion in assets under management. As of April 2026, he had not yet become chief executive officer.⁠[3][3][3][3][16][13]

As of 2026, Gray was chairman of Hilton Worldwide and a director of XRG and Harlem Village Academies, and had previously served as a director of Corebridge Financial, Nevada Property 1 (the owner of The Cosmopolitan of Las VegasThe Cosmopolitan of Las VegasThe Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas is a luxury casino resort hotel on the Las Vegas Strip in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States, located between Bellagio and CityCenter; it opened on December 15, 2010. During construction, after the original developer defaulted on its loan, the project was taken over through foreclosure by a Deutsche Bank subsidiary; it was sold to a Blackstone fund in 2014 and has been operated by MGM Resorts International since 2022.Open the full entry), Invitation Homes, Brixmor Property Group, and La Quinta Holdings.⁠[4][4][4]

Gray and his wife, Mindy, founded the Gray Foundation, which focuses on two areas: families affected by BRCA mutations and low-income youth in New York City. As of October 2026, the foundation had given about $600 million since its first grant in 2015, including more than $235 million for BRCA initiatives and more than $175 million for New York youth initiatives. The couple have been named to The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of the largest donors in the United States.⁠[17][18][18][3]

Blackstone: Official website: https://www.blackstone.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

Gray Foundation: Official website: https://www.grayfoundation.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[17]

LinkedIn: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-d-gray (opens in a new window)⁠[16][19]