Blackstone CEO admits his first big investment loss nearly brought him to tears—but the lesson put him on a path to now being worth $47 billion

No matter how high someone climbs the corporate ladder or how many millions they earn, every business leader is still human. They’re bound to stumble and make mistakes—even when steering some of the world’s largest companies. Blackstone cofounder and CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, for instance, once admitted he was nearly brought to tears after flubbing a major deal with Edgcomb Steel in the mid-1980s. “It was the third investment in the firm’s history…I had never made investments. And I didn’t even know there were things like investment committees,” Schwarzman recalled in Blackstone’s Life Lessons series last year. “I made a mistake, and we basically lost our original investment value.” In the aftermath of the expensive blunder, Schwarzman was quickly pulled aside by an investor. It was a meeting that stuck with him for five decades. “I sat down, and he started screaming at me…I was shocked,” Schwarzman continued. “But then I said, ‘That’s completely fair.’ It was his money that was lost, and I was responsible. His teeing off on me was horrible, and I almost cried at the meeting. But I sucked it up, and I said, ‘I’ve just got to take these beatings.’” Blackstone had lost all of its equity in Edgcomb shortly after the incident. It was a career-altering moment—clients “expect good things to happen” when working with the $148 billion business, Schwarzman said, but he had missed the mark. And the cofounder took it personally; Blackstone was his brainchild, scaled up with a $400,000 investment after Schwarzman walked away from a high-powered job at Lehman Brothers. But instead of wallowing in the hurt from the “miserable, grisly experience,” the businessman repositioned himself for success. He took a walk outside, watching fall leaves trickle down and sun bounce off the water, and talked himself through the mess up. In the years since, Schwarzman has become a self-made billionaire, amassing a $47.4 billion fortune in leading the global asset manageme