The simple version

When a firm says how much money it looks after, it is describing everything it has been handed. Not all of that money is billable, and the firm reports the billable part separately.

The two figures sit one above the other in the same table, and the lower one is always smaller. The upper figure tells you how big the firm is. The lower one is the figure its revenue is built on.

The useful habit is to read the second line before reacting to the first. A firm can grow the headline and barely move the part that pays it.

The numbers

• Total Assets Under Management: $1,368,346,601 thousand, or about $1,368.3 billion, against $1,241,731,296 thousand a year earlier. The filing prints the change as 10 percent.
• Fee-Earning Assets Under Management: $989,664,711 thousand, or about $989.7 billion, against $906,221,028 thousand a year earlier. The filing prints the change as 9 percent.
• The difference between the two lines: about $378.7 billion this quarter, against about $335.5 billion a year earlier.
• Invested Performance Eligible AUM: $662.8 billion at quarter end, which the filing defines as the fair value of invested assets that are eligible to earn performance revenues. This is a separate measure and not the difference between the two lines above.
• The same filing reports Fee Related Earnings of $1.6 billion, or $1.26 per share, and Distributable Earnings of $1.7 billion, or $1.32 per share.
• Base Management Fees for the quarter: $1,992,046 thousand. Total Management and Advisory Fees Net: $2,159,457 thousand.
• Figures are Blackstone's, from the exhibit filed with its Form 8-K on October 22, 2026. All asset figures are as of September 30, 2026.

Why the lower line is the one attached to revenue

The label on the lower line does the explaining. It is the portion the firm describes as fee-earning, and the rest of the pile is not counted in that line.

This exhibit prints both figures and their growth rates, and it does not set out why the two differ. That is worth saying plainly rather than filling in. What the document does define is its recurring-profit measure, and that measure is built from charges collected, not from the size of the pile.

So the chain runs one way only. The lower figure feeds the charges, the charges feed the recurring-profit measure, and the upper figure sits outside that chain as a measure of scale.

The actual math on a five-quarter gap

The same filing prints both lines for five quarters in a row, which lets you watch the space between them instead of guessing at it. In billions, the upper line runs 1,241.7, then 1,274.9, 1,304.0, 1,346.3 and 1,368.3. The lower line runs 906.2, then 921.7, 937.6, 961.6 and 989.7.

Take one away from the other and the space between them runs 335.5, 353.3, 366.4, 384.7 and 378.7 billion dollars. It grew for four quarters and then closed a little in the most recent one. Across the full year it is about 43 billion dollars bigger.

Those five gaps are ours, worked out from the firm's printed figures rather than stated in the filing. The point is the direction: both lines rose, and the part sitting outside the fee-earning line rose faster.

What this means

If you ever compare two firms that look after money, the headline figure is the wrong place to stop. One firm can be larger on the upper line and smaller on the line that generates its income.

It also explains a thing that reads as contradictory in coverage. A firm can announce a record on the big figure in the same release where the charges it collects barely moved, and both statements can be accurate.

For anyone who holds a fund, the transferable habit is smaller than it sounds. When a document gives you two numbers for what looks like the same thing, find out which one the money is calculated from.

What this is NOT

This is not a view on Blackstone as an investment, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or avoid any security or fund. We do not give personalized advice.

It is not a claim that the part outside that line is idle, hidden, or improper, and not a claim that it earns nothing. The filing reports a third measure, $662.8 billion of invested assets it describes as eligible to earn performance revenues, and we have not worked out how that set overlaps the other two. It discloses all of this itself, which is the opposite of concealment.

And it is not an explanation of why the two lines differ. This exhibit defines Perpetual Capital, Fee Related Earnings and Invested Performance Eligible AUM, but it never defines the fee-earning line, so we do not either. Any reason you read elsewhere is somebody's inference unless it is sourced to a document that states it.

Sources

• Blackstone Inc., Exhibit 99.1 to Form 8-K filed October 22, 2026, accession 0001193125-26-428297. Total and Fee-Earning Assets Under Management, five-quarter series, and the segment revenue table.
• Same exhibit, Definitions section, for the Fee Related Earnings measure.