I haven’t read the Blackstone S-1 filing, but it seems to me that when a company that makes money by taking corporations private wants to take *itself* public, instead of floating their private subsidiaries, watch out!! Clearly someone is headed for the exits here.
How are you supposed to value Blackstone’s internal holdings when they are a hodgepodge of “privatized” companies, hedge funds, debt obligations and more.
Does BX have revenue per se? Profits? Dividends? Does it extract the profit of all the subsidiaries that it owns, partially or fully? Will it report them in detail?
It’s almost like creating a mutual fund of itself, minus the transparency of having a market-determined value of what the fund owns. Seems fishy. Especially given that insiders are cashing out some nontrivial holdings directly in the IPO.
