Blue Owl Capital Inc.

What is Blue Owl Capital?

Blue Owl Capital Inc. is a publicly traded alternative asset manager formed in 2021 by merging Owl Rock Capital and Dyal Capital Partners. It manages 307.4 billion dollars across Credit, Real Assets, and GP Strategic Capital platforms.

Is Blue Owl publicly traded?

Yes. Blue Owl trades on the NYSE under ticker OWL. It listed in 2021 through a SPAC combination.

What is Blue Owl's AUM?

307.4 billion dollars as of December 31, 2025, up 22% year over year, with 187.7 billion dollars of fee-paying AUM and 222.8 billion dollars of permanent capital.

Who founded Blue Owl?

Doug Ostrover and Craig Packer built the predecessor Owl Rock after leaving Blackstone's GSO; Marc Lipschultz built Dyal Capital Partners. Ostrover and Lipschultz serve as co-CEOs.

What does Blue Owl do?

It is one of the largest private credit managers in the world, running direct lending funds, permanent capital vehicles including listed BDCs, real asset strategies, and a business that takes minority stakes in other asset managers.

What is OBDC?

Blue Owl Capital Corporation, ticker OBDC, is the firm's largest publicly traded business development company, a permanent capital vehicle that lends to middle-market companies. The parent Blue Owl Capital trades separately under OWL.

How many employees does Blue Owl have?

Approximately 1,365 people globally as of the end of 2025.

Blue Owl formed in May 2021 through a three-way combination: Owl Rock Capital, the direct lending firm Doug Ostrover and Craig Packer built after leaving Blackstone's GSO; Dyal Capital Partners, the GP stakes business Marc Lipschultz ran; and Altimar Acquisition, a SPAC that took the combined firm public on the NYSE.

Owl Rock's founding DNA matters. Ostrover and Packer were among the executives who built GSO Capital, Blackstone's credit arm, before departing in 2015 to start Owl Rock in 2016. The firm grew fast on the direct lending boom, and by the 2021 combination it managed tens of billions. Dyal, founded in 2011 inside Neuberger Berman, pioneered buying minority stakes in alternative managers' management companies, a business that became Blue Owl's GP Strategic Capital platform.

Post-listing growth ran on two tracks: organic fundraising in private wealth and institutional channels, and acquisitions that added Real Assets capability, including the Oak Street net lease business in 2021 and later IPI Partners' digital infrastructure platform. New capital commitments reached 56 billion dollars in 2025 alone, pushing AUM past the 300 billion dollar mark in the fourth quarter.

The firm's trajectory placed it among the fastest-growing alternative managers ever. From zero in 2016 to over 300 billion dollars in AUM in under a decade, built largely on the private credit expansion that followed the regional banking stress of 2023 and banks' continued retreat from corporate lending.

Blue Owl publishes an annual sustainability report covering ESG integration in underwriting and its operational footprint, and applies responsible investment frameworks across its platforms. It does not hold blanket external sustainability certifications.

The firm's ethics exposure is the standard private credit debate: questions about lending standards, opaque portfolio marks, and whether private credit's growth has outrun its risk infrastructure. Blue Owl addresses these in public filings and investor materials without a record of regulatory findings.

Private credit scrutiny: Blue Owl sits at the center of the ongoing debate about private credit risk: questions about how portfolio companies are valued, covenant quality in direct lending, and whether the asset class's rapid growth has outrun underwriting discipline. No enforcement action is on record, but the scrutiny is structural and sector-wide.

BDC fee structures: Its permanent BDC vehicles, like all externally managed BDCs, face periodic criticism over management fee levels relative to retail investor returns, a debate common to the listed BDC industry rather than a finding specific to Blue Owl.

Market repricing: Alternative asset manager stocks fell sharply in 2025 and 2026 amid private credit concerns, hitting Blue Owl harder than diversified peers given its credit concentration. This is a market judgment, not a legal or regulatory matter.