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Private Equity Firm Plays Into Rural Identity [1]
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Date: 2025-01-22
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the mailing list for more rural news, thoughts, and analysis in your inbox each week.
In a moment in which every American must choose each day between hopelessness and distraction, the billion-dollar private equity firm Blackstone has somehow given us both, and managed to display a fascination with, and repulsion of, rural life while at it.
Blackstone, the world’s largest “alternative investment management” firm, released its annual end-of-year review video on YouTube last December. Contrary to what you might expect, the video is less an internal round-up and more a goofy advertisement for the firm. The comments section for the video has been disabled.
The plot of the video is convoluted, especially for those of us who don’t keep tabs on the Blackstone social media output through the years, so here is a summary:
Blackstone’s 2023 year-end video was a spoof of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, with Blackstone executives dressed in glittering costumes prancing around a stage. (To what end, you ask? I do not know.)
The 2024 year-end video begins with the firm’s real-life executives play-acting shock at the poor reception of the previous year’s video. They brainstorm ways to improve it with different reality TV alternatives, spoofing Real Housewives, the Bachelor, and more (to hilarious effect!) before landing on the perfect follow-up to last year’s failure: an original country music song.
“The alternatives era has just begun, so it’s time to invest in our funds,” the song, titled “Build With Me,” begins, with Blackstone execs lip-syncing along in cowboy hats and western shirts.
“Oh, come on, build with me / Got a private market opportunity.” Blackstone staff participate in what can only barely be described as a hoedown in the lobby of their Park Avenue offices. They lead a pony in a cowboy hat down a hall of conference rooms, to the tune of “Building business, building wealth / Blackstone does it like nobody else.”
Please watch the video yourself. Before any judgment on the firm or its assumptions of country life, you will be struck by its value-neutral oddness. It is the baffling result of poor and mystifying taste, the kind of thing that emerges from a meeting in which everyone was waiting on someone to veto the idea.
Aside from the obvious poor taste, the video does betray some of the national obsession with, and repulsion of, country living. First of all, if life on the range is about property ownership and acquisition, Blackstone is one of the biggest cowboys there is. The firm’s recent foray into the real estate market makes it one of the largest property owners in the country, and it hit a record $1.1 trillion in assets under management in the third quarter of 2024. Not bad for some country bumpkins.
“Come on, build with me!,” these executives lip-sync at us, and we acknowledge the similarities in entrepreneurial ethic that they are trying to highlight. Isn’t the private equity firm just the realization of a distinctly American urge that began on the range? It’s the urge to find something new, lay claim to it, develop it, and make a good living by it. But, as critic George Scialabba notes, there is an important distinction. “Industrial capitalism,” and the agriculture industry that underpins it, “made money by making things; financial capitalism makes money by fiddling with figures.”
The industrial history of the nation, begun in small towns and on farms, had many terrible results, from pollution to worker exploitation, but it is redeemed by the things it produced. Blackstone has none of that to offer.
Undeniably, though, there is something alluring about the cowboy mentality. We see it in the resurgence of country music in the charts and popular TV shows “Yellowstone” and “Landman,” following plucky individuals looking to make it big on the frontier.
In a world ravaged by climate change destruction, growing income inequality, and a new administration that boasts about benefits for the few; amidst a social fabric ripped nearly to shreds by mutual fear, a national psyche poisoned by the atomization of the Covid-19 pandemic, and precious few places of solidarity and mutual care, maybe the only coherent worldview that can get us through the day is “you get yours.”
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