Stephen Schwarzman

Steve Schwarzman is chairman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone, one of the world’s leading investment firms with over $500 billion in assets under management today. Steve is an active philanthropist, supporting causes across higher education, culture, and the arts. In 2018 Steve made a foundational gift to establish the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to advance the study of computing and artificial intelligence. Schwarzman College will include significant efforts to convene and educate thought leaders on related ethical, policy and workforce considerations. More recently, Steve partnered with the University of Oxford to create the Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, including an Institute for Ethics in AI. Some of Steve’s other philanthropic initiatives include: building a first-of-its-kind student and performing arts center at Yale; renovating and expanding the historic New York Public Library; and, founding an international fellowship program, Schwarzman Scholars, at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China’s major research scientific university and top-ranked university in Asia. Steve is a longtime member of the International Advisory Board of Tsinghua’s School of Economics and Management and is involved in preliminary discussions with the university on its initial plans regarding AI ethics. Steve was a member of the first White House Industries of the Future Group in 2018, a business and academic roundtable focused on increasing America’s competitiveness in industries of the future. He is also member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Business Roundtable, and International Business Council of the World Economic Forum. In 2018, Steve was ranked in the top 50 on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s most powerful people. Steve holds a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.