Blackstone Group CEO and co-founder Stephen Schwarzman got paid more than $786 million for 2017. It may not be a record payout for the head of a publicly traded company—Och-Ziff Capital Management’s Daniel Och took home $1.19 billion in 2008 and $918.9 million the year before—but it’s a whopping package by any measure.
What’s it based on, though? It certainly wasn’t Schwarzman’s salary.
As detailed in the private equity firm’s annual report, filed Thursday, Schwarzman only got a $350,000 base salary for 2017—the same that went to Blackstone’s executive vice chairman, vice chairman, chief financial officer, and multi-asset investment chief.
It wasn’t down to bonuses, either. All of the above executives got a cash bonus for the year, except for Schwarzman.
Blackstone’s CEO did get $125.5 million in executive compensation, including carried interest and incentive fees related to performance. (It’s worth recalling here that Schwarzman raised a lot of eyebrows back in 2010 when he compared the Obama administration’s plans to raise the carried interest tax rate to Hitler’s invasion of Poland—he later apologized.)
But the bulk of Schwarzman’s payout—$661 million—came in the form of dividends from his stake in the company, of which he owns around 19%.
Blackstone manages $434 billion, making it by far the largest private equity firm in the U.S. It made a record $3.9 billion in profits during 2017.
John Gray, its new president and chief operating officer (previously its global head of real estate) took home $274 million for 2017.
This article was updated to remove a statistic about average CEO pay in 2017 that in fact referred to the previous year.