DrChaos, you managed to miss my point entirely. I brought up Berkshire Hathaway merely to point out that the fact Blackstone’s holdings would be mostly private should not be a big issue in its IPO because many other public companies – like Berkshire Hathaway – also held mostly private companies.
I agree that in just about every OTHER way Berkshire is entirely different from Blackstone. Actually I’d probably say “very” different as opposed to “entirely” different, but that’s a matter of semantics.
How you managed to read my post and get the idea that I was making a blanket comparison between Berkshire Hathaway and Blackstone – outside of the issue of the fact that they both invest in private companies – is a mystery to me.