The World's Largest Investment Firms 2024: Gains for Apollo, KKR, Ares, and Blackstone

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.

- SERGEI KLEBNIKOV

These are boom times for the world’s largest buyout firms and asset managers. With the Federal Reserve now signaling that it could take longer to cut rates than previously forecast, investors have continued to pour into private market investments, trading liquidity for potentially higher returns. The traditional private equity business remains strong— but it has evolved far beyond the original leveraged buyout model of the 80s and 90s. The game today is dubbed alternatives, with firms buying and building up target companies in areas like logistics, infrastructure and healthcare. Retail-friendly funds often with open-ended maturities have made alternative investments more accessible to a wider market and the global opportunity is massive.

In addition to private equity, real estate is also a huge business for many of these firms. Blackstone’s $337 billion portfolio of commercial real estate is unrivaled, comprising 12,000 properties covering 1.1 billion square feet globally. Private credit has also become a booming business for these giant investment firms, including specialist Ares Management, thanks largely to higher interest rates.

According to Morningstar senior stock analyst Greggory Warren, private capital fundraising is on track to surpass last year and alternative asset managers are still sitting on significant amounts of dry powder. “Investors at times [ignore] the historical outperformance of alternative-asset funds relative to traditional mutual funds and ETFs,” he says.

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.