![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/GettyImages-1174952938-e1761575905132.jpg?w=2048\")
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\u201cIt was the third investment in the firm\u2019s history\u2026I had never made investments. And I didn\u2019t even know there were things like investment committees,\u201d Schwarzman recalled in Blackstone\u2019s Life Lessons<\/em> series last year. \u201cI made a mistake, and we basically lost our original investment value.\u201d<\/p>\n In the aftermath of the expensive blunder, Schwarzman was quickly pulled aside by an investor. It was a meeting that stuck with him for five decades.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI sat down, and he started screaming at me\u2026I was shocked,\u201d Schwarzman continued. \u201cBut then I said, \u2018That\u2019s completely fair.\u2019 It was his money that was lost, and I was responsible. His teeing off on me was horrible, and I almost cried at the meeting. But I sucked it up, and I said, \u2018I\u2019ve just got to take these beatings.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Blackstone had lost all of its equity in Edgcomb shortly after the incident. It was a career-altering moment\u2014clients \u201cexpect good things to happen\u201d when working with the $148 billion business, Schwarzman said, but he had missed the mark. And the cofounder took it personally; Blackstone was his brainchild, scaled up with a $400,000 investment after Schwarzman walked away from a high-powered job at Lehman Brothers. But instead of wallowing in the hurt from the \u201cmiserable, grisly experience,\u201d the businessman repositioned himself for success. He took a walk outside, watching fall leaves trickle down and sun bounce off the water, and talked himself through the mess up. In the years since, Schwarzman has become a self-made billionaire, amassing a $47.4 billion fortune in leading the global asset management titan.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI said, \u2018This can never happen again,\u2019\u201d Schwarzman said, adding that Blackstone has since changed all of its processes, and vigorously debates all complex deals. \u201cSetbacks are terrible, but they also are great teachers.\u201d<\/p>\n Making a mistake worth millions of dollars\u2014or even billions\u2014is a rite of passage for every entrepreneur striving to make waves.<\/p>\n Even the biggest business leaders openly fess up to their faults; over a decade ago, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said it was still \u201creally early\u201d for the $4.3 trillion tech giant to release a phone, as it tried to improve upon its first fledgling mobile rollout. It was a misstep that seemed to stick, as to this day Amazon still hasn\u2019t broken into the smartphone market. Other Amazon offerings have fallen flat over the years, including an auction site that failed through multiple iterations.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com,\u201d Bezos said in 2014 at the Business Insider Ignition conference. \u201cLiterally billions\u2026Companies that don\u2019t embrace failure and continue to experiment eventually get in the desperate position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence.\u201c<\/p>\n Even today\u2019s tech pioneers aren\u2019t doing everything perfectly. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is known for helming one of the 21st century\u2019s biggest tech products: ChatGPT. The AI chatbot surpassed 900 million weekly active users worldwide this February; and riding the high of its GPT-4 success, the company decided to up the ante with a new-and-improved model, GPT-5. But the rollout was anything but an innovative whirlwind. The launch was so bad that OpenAI was forced to restore access to GPT-4 while the problems got smoothed out.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI think we totally screwed up some things on the rollout,\u201d Altman admitted in 2025, according to The Verge<\/em>. \u201cWe\u2019ve learned a lesson about what it means to upgrade a product for hundreds of millions of people in one day.\u201d<\/p>\n Some mistakes come with a hefty price. The former CEO of $108.5 billion fintech company Intuit, Brad Smith, once made a $40 million error because he was \u201cconvinced [he] had a winner.\u201d He went all-in on a new e-commerce business model, convincing Intuit\u2019s board to make two investments of $20 million to get his vision off the ground. But the eye-watering stake only led to 18 sales, averaging out at $1,500 each, surmounting to only $27,000. Smith was sure he was going to get sacked, but wound up learning a bit of wisdom he carried with him leading the business for a decade.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy only thought was \u2018I am going to be fired,\u2019\u201d Smith wrote for <\/em>Fortune <\/em>in 2015. \u201cI decided to own my mistake\u2026As you might imagine, it was not a fun meeting. However, one director pulled me aside following the meeting and shared a piece of advice that has stayed with me ever since\u2026He looked me in the eye and said that he \u2018preferred the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on October 27, 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Blackstone #CEO #admits #big #investment #loss #brought #tears<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cIt was the third investment in the firm\u2019s history\u2026I had never made investments. And I didn\u2019t even know there were things like investment committees,\u201d Schwarzman recalled in Blackstone\u2019s Life Lessons… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2453,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[2589,119,310,237,512,2732,4326,4327,3884,283,426,369,1908,3716,1285,4328,2377,2378,427,800,2379,4329,1763,22,4330,92,4331,430,4332,4333,1825,4334,4335,735,748,3298,4336],"class_list":["post-2452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-admits","tag-advice","tag-amazon","tag-big","tag-billionaires","tag-blackstone","tag-bosses","tag-brad-smith","tag-brought","tag-business","tag-careers","tag-ceo","tag-chatbots","tag-chatgpt","tag-chief-executive-officer-ceo","tag-emotions","tag-entrepreneurs","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-evergreen-refresh","tag-executives","tag-founders","tag-intuit","tag-investing-strategy","tag-investment","tag-investment-advice","tag-investors","tag-jeff-bezos","tag-jobs","tag-leadership-advice","tag-lehman-brothers","tag-loss","tag-millionaires","tag-mistakes","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman","tag-smartphones-and-mobile-devices","tag-tears"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2452\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Jeff Bezos to Sam Altman: owning mistakes and getting on track<\/h2>\n