2026 MIC – Jon Gray on Bridging Public and Private Markets for Every Investor

Few conversations at the 2026 Morningstar Investment Conference drew as much anticipation as the one between Blackstone President and Chief Operating Officer Jon Gray and Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor. Gray joined Blackstone in 1992, built its real estate business into the largest commercial real estate platform in the world, and was appointed President and COO in 2018. Since then, the firm has grown to $1.3 trillion in assets under management. Speaking to a room of advisors and allocators, Gray made a methodical argument for giving private markets a permanent place in individual investor portfolios, and outlined where he sees risk and opportunity in the economy today.

Start with Asset Allocation, Not Products

Gray opened with a premise that shaped the entire conversation. Advisors approaching private markets for the first time, he argued, should resist treating individual private products as short-term trades. The right framework is institutional.

The largest pension funds and endowments allocate a third or more to private assets. Individual investors, Gray pointed out, have a comparable investment horizon: they are saving for retirement, managing wealth over decades, and their duration is not fundamentally different from a pension fund’s. The benefits he described fall into three categories. First is access: assets like SpaceX, Anthropic, most U.S. real estate, and the bulk of infrastructure simply cannot be reached through public markets. Second is diversification. The S&P 500 is a strong benchmark, but today it carries heavy concentration among a small number of stocks; private assets offer different return patterns and lower correlations. Third is return. Trading away some liquidity for higher long-term returns is precisely why Blackstone’s business has scaled to $1.3 trillion across asset classes.