Cartoonish plutocrat Stephen Schwarzman would rather not be known as a cartoonish plutocrat! You may recall how the multibillionaire CEO of Blackstone Group threw himself a $3 million star-studded birthday party (with Rod Stewart!) last year and thereby became the living symbol of the wretched excesses of Wall Street money-jugglers in this modern boom era. Well now that everybody is broke he regrets doing that stuff, okay:
"Obviously, I wouldn't have wanted to do that and become, you know, some kind of symbol of sorts of that period of time," Schwarzman lamented yesterday at a conference in New York. "Who would ever wish that on themselves? No one."
I think that sort of thing means a lot to, you know, not only the poor, but also the people who bought into Blackstone's IPO last year when the stock was at 35. Who are also now the poor. [Pic via NYO]