Blackstone Group LP’s Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire Republican, said he hasn’t decided which presidential nominee he’ll vote for in November.
“I’m an undecided right now,” Schwarzman said Thursday in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Betty Liu. “I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do yet.”
The private equity pioneer, who financially backed Republican Mitt Romney in 2012 and historically supported Republican nominees for president, said he’s closely watching the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This election has been a “mystery” to him, Schwarzman said Tuesday at the CNBC Institutional Investor Delivering Alpha Conference in New York, adding that the nominees’ trading barbs reminds him of a food fight and lacks substantive policy proposals.
Schwarzman, 69, said he expects the battle for the presidency to become clearer before election day on Nov. 8.
“I have a sixth sense that things are going to clarify,” he said in the Bloomberg TV interview.
Schwarzman, who grew up in Philadelphia as the son of a dry-goods store owner, has a net worth of $10 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He started New York-based Blackstone in 1985 with Peter G. Peterson and has expanded the asset manager to oversee $356 billion in private equity holdings, real estate, credit assets and hedge funds.
Tony James, Blackstone’s billionaire president, is supporting Clinton and last week held a fundraiser for the Democratic nominee at his New York apartment.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
