What exactly is Blackstone’s crime? “She made $9,000 a minute,” wrote one Twitter user of Wesley LePatner, chief executive officer of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, who was killed in the Midtown Manhattan office shooting on Monday. “For most a lump sum of 9k would be life changing and she made it per minute. She was chief executive of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust and her sole job was making sure housing is expensive and that we all rent for the rest of our lives. Rest in piss.”
LePatner leaves behind young children and a husband, and has posthumously been mighty venerated by colleagues and friends. So it’s no shock that someone so high-performing, who worked for Blackstone, is the most threatening type of person to leftists on Twitter, mocked even after death.
https://t.co/kWckl6kUel pic.twitter.com/LJ8wEkDEl8
— Gwen ????️⚧️ ????️ (@CastleCrumblng) July 30, 2025
The basic facts of the leftist critique are comically wrong: A 40-hour workweek (which no Blackstone executive works) contains 2,400 minutes. If she’s compensated at $9,000 a minute, and she works for an entire year, she makes $1,123,200,000 annually. This would be more than Blackstone’s CEO makes, as well as other top executives, so it is implausible. But, perhaps more to the point, her “sole job” was not “making sure housing is expensive” and that people “rent for the rest of [their] lives.” The far left loves a one-dimensional villain, but I’m not sure they love the world that would come after all their favorite villains are vanquished and industries like real estate, healthcare, and investment banking cease to exist.
They seem to want a regression to the Dark Ages: an unsophisticated economy with no landlords, no insurers, no complex markets. They see complexity in the economy, the reason for which is beyond their comprehension, as parasitic.
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Online leftists misunderstand the root of our housing woes, believing that Blackstone is a major reason why their rent prices are high. Is it “big homebuilders withhold[ing] housing supply” (as antitrust guy Matt Stoller claims)? Is it both “big homebuilders and private equity [who] made American cities unaffordable” (as antitruster Basel Musharbash claims)? Is it Blackstone’s Real Estate Income Trust that gave “individual investors a chance to own a piece of apartment buildings, warehouses, data centers and other types of commercial real estate,” per The Wall Street Journal—”one of Blackstone’s most successful products ever…boast[ing] over $70 billion in net asset value”?
“I tracked down a complete listing of the country’s 50 largest homebuilding markets, from #1 Dallas to #50 Cincinnati,” writes Derek Thompson on his Substack, tearing apart Musharbash’s claim that big homebuilders function as oligopolies in American cities, withholding housing supply and conspiring to make things more expensive. “How many meet Quintero’s first oligopoly threshold (two companies = 90 percent of the market)? Zero out of 50. And how many meet his second threshold (six companies = 90 percent of the market)? One.” It’s a fundamentally silly and untrue claim with no evidence to bolster it.
As for the question of whether all the rental real estate has been gobbled up by Blackstone and its competitors operating similar businesses, you have a bit of trickery when it comes to defining what exactly counts as an “institutional buyer.” The National Association of Realtors defines them as “companies, corporations, or limited liability companies (LLCs)” that own property—the only issue is, lots of small-time landlords form LLCs, so that’s not exactly a good way to measure it. Are iBuyers that make cash offers on homes considered institutional buyers? And what exactly is the level of concentrated ownership that becomes a problem for leftists? “The Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust currently has an ownership interest in at least 274,859 rental housing units,” per CNBC. That’s a little less than 1 percent of the country’s 46 million housing units. But more fundamentally: Doesn’t it make sense for landlords to own multiple properties—if it is, y’know, their business? Do we support specialization or not? And should institutional investors be allowed to invest in real estate at all? What exactly happens when a bunch of capital exits the real estate market? Yelling about Blackstone online doesn’t do much to solve housing supply issues, which are primarily related to city-level zoning laws and all the little regulations piled atop that drive the cost of building up—and old conventions that were outlawed.
There’s also what we could term the “rest in piss” problem: Far-left political discourse seems to revel in killing. They celebrate when someone who works in a disfavored industry gets murdered in cold blood.
“This sweet angel was the CEO of the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT), responsible for taking over $48 billion dollars of residential housing off the market and renting, specifically targeting areas with high immigration rates so they have Section 8 to rent,” wrote another user, sarcastically. Top reply: “Crazy how the people doing bad stuff all have addresses.” This is the specialty of the e-leftist: insinuate you’re going to engage in political violence, but maintain a veneer of plausible deniability.
We’re living in the Luigi era: Killers are celebrated as folk heroes by far-leftists who don’t have any idea how the market actually works, who hide behind the safety of their keyboards.
Scenes from New York: It’s fine to increase bus and subway fares, but I have an incredible idea for how to up the revenue: We could punish the millions of fare-evaders who routinely hop the turnstile.
QUICK HITS
- Kamala Harris has made possibly the first good decision of her life and chosen not to run for governor of California.
- “I will shove my Glock up your ass!” is one way to handle a police encounter. The full story is actually fairly sad.
Last year an armed and drunken Baltimore County councilmember holed up at his office at the mall; when the cops arrived, he told one “I will shove my Glock up your ass!” The incident got hushed up, but now @rkobell and @cadoyle_18 have the scoop. https://t.co/Z2jGK1i9Um
— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) July 31, 2025
- The Trump administration has authorized the burning of birth control vs. distributing it as foreign aid, as previously intended.
- The world according to The New York Times:
Some recent efforts from the New York Times pic.twitter.com/TyeQeamdAI
— Oliver Traldi (@olivertraldi) July 28, 2025
