“Don’t confuse us with BlackRock,” sing the staffers from venture capital firm Blackstone, a major life sciences funding business. It may well be that BlackRock, known for its own controversies, may not want to be associated with Blackstone.
Why? Well, Blackstone executives have decided to quite literally sing the praises (and prospectus) of the business in an excruciatingly long 5-minute corporate video that looks as if it was made by teenage amateurs on a budget.
Staffers, with corny background and getups harking back to the 1970s, tell the audience about the company in song. A focus of the video is “the alternatives era,” where “we buy assets and make ‘em better," the staffers sing.
Blackstone has said on X, formerly Twitter, that the video was in fact “inspired by the [Taylor Swift] Eras Tour.”
The idea is of an “emergency tour” for the VC to help raise funds and is all done rather tongue-in-cheek with more than a wink to the audience.
Blackstone invests in numerous fields but has a big business in life sciences, as it mentions in the song in the video, having funding deals with the likes of Sanofi and Alnylam.
These types of videos are typically slick, short, and usually full of people in either business suits or very white lab coats. Not for Blackstone, which as Christmas approaches (and they do a holiday video each year) has appeared to go for a deliberately wacky approach that for some viewers on social media has passed from kooky to cringey.
Some, jokingly on X have commented that they “would pull all the money from them” or simply mock the level of corporate cringe, but others have seen it as giving the VC “a human touch” and that the song was “pretty catchy.”