The Leftists Who Celebrate Murder
What exactly is Blackstone’s crime? “She made $9,000 a minute,” wrote one Twitter user of Wesley LePatner, chief executive officer of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, who was killed in the Midtown Manhattan office shooting on Monday. “For most a lump sum of 9k would be life changing and she made it per minute. She was chief executive of Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust and her sole job was making sure housing is expensive and that we all rent for the rest of our lives. Rest in piss.”
LePatner leaves behind young children and a husband, and has posthumously been mighty venerated by colleagues and friends. So it’s no shock that someone so high-performing, who worked for Blackstone, is the most threatening type of person to leftists on Twitter, mocked even after death.
https://t.co/kWckl6kUel pic.twitter.com/LJ8wEkDEl8
— Gwen ???? ???? (@CastleCrumblng) July 30, 2025
The basic facts of the leftist critique are comically wrong: A 40-hour workweek (which no Blackstone executive works) contains 2,400 minutes. If she’s compensated at $9,000 a minute, and she works for an entire year, she makes $1,123,200,000 annually. This would be more than Blackstone’s CEO makes, as well as other top executives, so it is implausible. But, perhaps more to the point, her “sole job” was not “making sure housing is expensive” and that people “rent for the rest of [their] lives.” The far left loves a one-dimensional villain, but I’m not sure they love the world that would come after all their favorite villains are vanquished and industries like real estate, healthcare, and investment banking cease to exist.
They seem to want a regression to the Dark Ages: an unsophisticated economy with no landlords, no insurers, no complex markets. They see complexity in the economy, the reason for which is beyond their comprehension, as parasitic.
Online leftists misunderstand the root of our housing woes, believing that Blackstone is a major reason why their rent prices are high. Is it “big homebuilders withhold[ing] housing supply” (as antitrust guy Matt Stoller claims)? Is it both “big homebuilders and private equity [who] made American cities unaffordable” (as antitruster Basel Musharbash claims)? Is it Blackstone’s Real Estate Income Trust that gave “individual investors a chance to own a piece of apartment buildings, warehouses, data centers and other types of commercial real estate,” per The Wall Street Journal—”one of Blackstone’s most successful products ever…boast[ing] over $70 billion in net asset value”?
“I tracked down a complet
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