Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman took home more than $1bn in 2024 as the private equity titan saw his income rise due to a rebound in investment activity at the world’s largest alternative investment group, according to the company’s annual report released late Friday.

Schwarzman’s income marked a 9 per cent increase from the prior year, fuelled entirely by rising dividend payments from his enormous Blackstone shareholding. The Blackstone co-founder owns 19 per cent of the New York-based investment group and has for years received hundreds of millions of dollars annually in dividends paid out from its profits.

Blackstone increased its dividend payouts to shareholders by about 18 per cent in 2024 as its so-called distributable earnings, a metric analysts favour as a proxy for cash flows, increased by a similar measure. Blackstone historically pays out at least 85 per cent of such profits to all of its shareholders, which include Schwarzman and many other top executives, such as president Jonathan Gray.