By Miriam Gottfried
Call it the battle of the buyout firms, the private-markets melee, the holiday hostilities. Blackstone and Apollo Global Management have released their annual holiday videos.
This year marked Blackstone's seventh year of releasing a highly produced holiday-themed video, which it sends to clients and shares on social media. Apollo got in on the action a few years ago, and now the dueling videos are becoming as competitive as the firms themselves.
Blackstone spent the week promoting its 2024 version ahead of its scheduled release on Thursday. That gave Apollo the chance to frontrun its bigger rival by releasing its video on Wednesday.
The move may have gotten under Blackstone's skin. The firm's social-media team was telling people internally that its video's view count topped Apollo's within 15 minutes, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Apollo's video focuses on the challenge of coming up with a theme for a holiday video. It includes a smattering of inside jokes about key businesses (i.e. "fixed-income replacement" and "hybrid value") and references to the frozen yogurt machine that CEO Marc Rowan has touted as a way to reward staff for big wins. Apollo-sponsored PGA Tour golfer Patrick Cantlay makes an appearance from the putting green.
If Apollo's joke is about being out of ideas, Blackstone could be accused of having too many of them. Its video starts by recapping its "Alternatives Era Tour," a Taylor Swift-themed parody from last year that was widely labeled "cringey." It then veers into a mashup of spoofs of various reality TV shows, including "Real Housewives," "The Bachelor" and "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" before concluding with an original country song featuring line dancing and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman riding horseback.
Scattered throughout are references to its deals and cameos from Real Housewife and fashion designer Jenna Lyons and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
"Can you believe people confuse us with them?" Fink says.
"Ritual humiliation cosplay. Not selling my BX yet though," said one user on the social-media platform X referring to Blackstone's stock ticker.
Write to Miriam Gottfried at Miriam.Gottfried@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 19, 2024 15:11 ET (20:11 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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