“If you ever do that to me again, I'm going to kill you.” The late Pete Peterson uttered those somewhat tongue-in-cheek words to Stephen Schwarzman in 1985, not long after they'd founded The Blackstone Group together. They had just exited yet another failed investor pitch for their then-boutique investment bank, and Peterson was frustrated.
Specifically, they'd just met with Delta Airlines. They'd flown to hot and humid Atlanta for the meeting, the walk from where a cab had dropped them to the Delta building had soaked them in sweat, only for their visit to pile insult onto injury. “Delta doesn't invest in first-time funds” was what they were told.
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