Titans of Private Equity: Blackstone's Stephe Schwarzman, Jonathan Gray and KKR's Henry Kravis.Private markets are booming thanks to the popularity of alternatives among wealthy retail investors and ‘higher-for-longer’ interest rates. Once feared, buyout firms like KKR, Apollo and Blackstone have gone mainstream, as they climb higher on the Global 2000.hese are boom times for the world’s largest buyout firms and asset managers.
Several of the biggest alternative investment managers including Apollo, KKR and Blackstone saw large gains in the ranking since 2023 and in total over a dozen firms made this year’s Forbes Global 2000, which ranks the 2,000 largest public companies in the world. A decade ago there were only two such firms on Forbes Global 2000, which uses a composite score that takes into account revenue, profit, assets and market value.
A close second was global investment firm KKR, which jumped nearly 700 spots to No. 175 this year. With the third highest market value of this group at $92.8 billion, KKR posted $22.7 billion in revenue and nearly $4.1 billion in profits over the last twelve months. Wall Street analysts are overwhelmingly positive on shares of KKR, which have been on a tear in the last year, soaring 99% and far outpacing those of its peers.