Earnings call transcript: Blue Owl Capital Q3 2025 revenue beats forecast

Blue Owl Capital Inc. (OWL) reported its third-quarter earnings for 2025, meeting expectations on earnings per share (EPS) and surpassing revenue forecasts. The company posted an EPS of $0.22, aligning with analyst expectations, and reported revenue of $727.99 million, exceeding the forecast of $680.97 million by 6.9%. Despite the positive revenue surprise, the stock experienced a decline, trading down 4.56% to $16 in pre-market activity.

Key Takeaways

• Blue Owl Capital’s revenue exceeded expectations by 6.9%.
• The company maintained its EPS forecast of $0.22, matching analysts’ predictions.
• Management fees saw a significant increase of 29% over the past year.
• The stock fell by 4.56% in pre-market trading despite strong revenue performance.
• Blue Owl raised over $14 billion in new capital commitments.

Company Performance

Blue Owl Capital demonstrated robust performance in the third quarter, bolstered by substantial increases in management fees and new capital commitments. The company raised over $14 billion, contributing to a record 12-month capital raise of $57 billion, representing 24% of its previous assets under management (AUM). This growth underscores Blue Owl’s strength in capital acquisition and its strategic investments in digital infrastructure and alternative credit markets.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $727.99 million, up from the forecast of $680.97 million.
• Earnings per share: $0.22, matching the forecast.
• Fee-related earnings increased by 19%.
• Distributable earnings rose by 15%.
• Management fees surged by 29% over the past year.

Earnings vs. Forecast

Blue Owl Capital’s EPS of $0.22 met the consensus forecast, while revenue was a standout, surpassing expectations by $47.02 million, or 6.9%. This revenue beat marks a positive deviation from previous quarters, where revenue surprises were less pronounced.

Market Reaction

Despite the positive earnings report, Blue Owl’s stock declined by 4.56% in pre-market trading, falling to $16. This movement contrasts with the company’s 52-week range, where the stock had previously reached a high of $26.73. The market reaction may reflect investor concerns over broader market conditions or sector-specific challenges.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, Blue Owl Capital targets $5 billion in revenue and $3 billion in fee-related earnings. The company anticipates continued growth in management fees, particularly in real assets, and plans to expand its digital infrastructure and alternative credit product offerings. Future revenue forecasts indicate continued growth, with expectations of reaching $3.22 billion by 2026.

Executive Commentary

Marc Lipschultz, Co-CEO, emphasized the company’s strategic positioning, stating, "We’ve skated to where the puck is going and our investors are benefiting from that." Alan Kirshenbaum, CFO, highlighted the opportunity landscape, describing it as "a generational opportunity that we’re experiencing."

Risks and Challenges

• Potential volatility in credit markets could impact Blue Owl’s lending operations.
• Increasing competition in digital infrastructure may pressure margins.
• Macroeconomic uncertainties could affect capital raising and deployment.
• Regulatory changes in financial sectors may pose operational challenges.
• Dependence on successful capital deployment to generate management fees.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about Blue Owl’s strategies to navigate credit market volatility and its flexible fundraising approaches. Executives reassured stakeholders of the company’s strong credit quality and unique positioning in digital infrastructure financing.

Full transcript - Blue Owl Capital Inc (OWL) Q3 2025:

Operator: Good morning and welcome to Blue Owl Capital’s third quarter 2025 earnings call. During the presentation, your lines will remain on listen only. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I’d like to advise all parties that this conference call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Ann Dai, Head of Investor Relations for Blue Owl Capital.

Ann Dai, Head of Investor Relations, Blue Owl Capital: Thanks, operator, and good morning to everyone. Joining me today are Marc Lipschultz, our Co-Chief Executive Officer, and Alan Kirshenbaum, our Chief Financial Officer. I’d like to remind our listeners that remarks made during the call may contain forward-looking statements, which are not a guarantee of future performance or results and involve a number of risks and uncertainties that are outside the Company’s control. Actual results may differ materially from those forward-looking statements as a result of a number of factors, including those described from time to time in Blue Owl Capital’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. We’d also like to remind everyone that we’ll refer to non-GAAP measures on the call, which are reconciled to GAAP figures in our earnings presentation available on the shareholders section of our website at blueowl.com.

Please note that nothing on this call constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any Blue Owl fund. This morning we issued our financial results for the third quarter of 2025, reporting fee-related earnings, or FRE, of $0.24 per share and distributable earnings, or DE, of $0.22 per share. We declared a dividend of $0.225 per share for the third quarter, payable on November 24 to holders of record as of November 10. During the call today, we’ll be referring to the earnings presentation, which we posted to our website this morning, so please have that on hand to follow along with that. I’d like to turn the call over to Marc.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Great. Thank you so much Ann. The results we reported for the third quarter of 2025 reflect strong growth and business performance across an increasingly diversified set of investment platforms. Not only are we beginning to see the benefits of the ongoing investments being made across our institutional and private wealth distribution channels, we have also had early successes in new product expansion. We continue to see a comprehensive shift in how assets are being financed globally. Financing offered by the private markets is more and more so being recognized by borrowers as a compelling solution that offers the ability to execute with certainty and at scale and with terms tailored to the specific counterparty.

This is a structural evolution for which Blue Owl Capital is particularly well positioned given our leading franchises and one that we are increasingly able to meet in a cross asset class fashion as a result of our acquisitions. Concurrently, investor focus has continued to shift toward credit and digital infrastructure, which are taking greater market share away from legacy categories. We’re seeing this play out broadly across institutional, insurance and private wealth channels and have already strategically positioned Blue Owl Capital to be a beneficiary of these trends. We’ve skated to where the puck is going and our investors are benefiting from that. Of course, in any period of meaningful structural change within markets, there’s always a concern that some participants may act irresponsibly, resulting in negative outcomes.

There have been some headlines over the past month detailing idiosyncratic credit issues which have led to broader questions about the health of the corporate and asset-backed credit markets. Let me start by saying that Blue Owl Capital has no exposure to Tricolor or First Brands, and broadly speaking, we do not view the events that have unfolded for those companies as canaries in the coal mine. The health of the private credit markets, however, we do believe that these two situations are reminders that vigilance is required in credit investing. As we have highlighted in previous earnings calls and continue to call out, the health of our credit portfolios remains excellent with an average annual realized loss of just 13 basis points and no signs of meaningful stress in direct lending.

The modest level of non-accruals we have seen are not thematic in nature and there has not been an uptick in our watch list levels. Similarly, in alternative credit, we’re not seeing anything that would indicate weakness in consumer credit. In fact, you’ve heard numerous banks highlight the resilience of their consumer portfolios during recent earnings calls. Despite some of the financial press headlines, the reaction that we have seen in public equity markets has not been consistent with the strong fundamental performance we see in our portfolios, and our software loans have remained the best sector performer with our direct lending portfolio. We are very pleased with the credit quality and ongoing health of the underlying borrowers there.

Moving on to business performance, during the quarter we saw over $14 billion of new capital commitments, bringing us to another record last 12 month capital raise of $57 billion, the equivalent of 24% of our assets under management a year ago. This capital raising does not yet reflect any contributions from our acquisitions from which we are anticipating significant growth over the next couple of years. Notably, we have a growing base of AUM not yet paying fees, $28 billion as of the third quarter, which we expect to largely deploy over the next couple of years and drive over $360 million of management fees upon deployment. In direct lending, we’re seeing an uptick in the pipeline for deployment and continue to find high quality investment opportunities, generally underwriting to a high single digit unlevered return despite tighter spread dynamics industry wide.

With the risk free rate expected to end the year below 4% and with leverage loan and high yield currently offering 6% to 7%, we believe our direct lending strategy continues to offer meaningful spread premium and an attractive risk return versus other asset classes. Gross origination in the third quarter was roughly $11 billion, and net deployment increased to $3 billion, bringing last 12 month gross and net originations to $47 billion and $12 billion, respectively. In alternative credit, we continue to demonstrate scale benefits, deploying approximately $5 billion over the last 12 months, primarily focused on small business equipment leasing, aviation, and consumer transactions. This is consistent with our broader asset backed strategy of financing the Main Street economy.

The team continues to make meaningful progress, capitalizing on longstanding relationships to deliver for our insurance clients, for whom we have originated several billion dollars this year with a robust forward pipeline. We continue to see the power of the integrated platform more broadly as the alternative credit team works closely with direct lending, real assets, and insurance to build focused efforts in areas such as equipment leasing. During the quarter, we announced a forward flow agreement with PayPal, their first partnership of this sort in the U.S. We thought it’d be worth spending a moment on how we structure forward flow agreements to create downside protection for our investors and why they’re so compelling.

One of the most important elements is the dynamic nature of these agreements, meaning we monitor performance of the portfolio on a daily basis, and we can turn off the flow if the assets are not performing as expected. In addition, our team is focused on partnering with best-in-class originators.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: We have a high degree of alignment.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: In other words, the originators are at a minimum owning risk side by side with us through their balance sheets and are often the first loss risk. Finally, these assets are typically shorter-lived, self-amortizing assets with a duration of two years or less. This means that if there is weakness by vintage or originator, it runs off relatively quickly compared to other forms of credit we underwrite to severely challenge economic conditions, and when we buy or lend, our starting point is to assume that the credit will get worse. To reiterate my earlier comments, we see no weakness of note in real assets.

We have continued to execute across a record pipeline of capital demand in the data center space, specifically with over $50 billion of investment announced over the past two months across two transactions, including $30 billion of capital investment with Meta in Louisiana and over $20 billion of capital investment with Oracle in New Mexico. This is in addition to the previously announced development with Oracle in Abilene, Texas, where Blue Owl has anchored the financing of approximately $15 billion of project value through phase two. We are fortunate to be in the position to offer the scale of capital and deep sector expertise that together make Blue Owl the preferred partner for the hyperscalers representing the forefront of cloud and AI innovation, as highlighted by our leadership role in all three of the largest financings in the space.

Across our Diversified Net Lease and digital infrastructure strategies, we have raised more than $15 billion in aggregate capital over the past two years, reflecting strong interest for investors in what we are offering, and this only includes $1 billion of the $7 billion Digital Infrastructure Fund we just finished raising in Diversified Net Lease alone. The $14 billion we have raised over that period compares to $26 billion of total AUM for that strategy two years ago. This includes the largest real estate fund raised in 2024, the top real estate product in private wealth on a net capital raised basis, and over $4 billion raised toward our next vintage and associated co-invest.

To add to that, during the third quarter we announced a substantial strategic partnership with Qatar Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, with a shared goal of further scaling and expanding Blue Owl’s digital infrastructure business, extending our progress on this front. Subsequent to quarter end, we launched our Digital Infrastructure Fund semi-liquid product ahead of schedule and anticipate a first close in December. With significant investor interest already observed, we have built what we think is an outstanding business in private wealth where we have raised over $16 billion over the last 12 months, more than doubling our fundraising pace from two years ago. I believe the strength of our results is indicative of the durable partnerships we’ve built over time and a long track record of bringing innovative solutions to market.

Today, we have an installed base of over 160,000 individual investors in Blue Owl Capital products and are adding highly complementary new products in digital infrastructure and alternative credit to the lineup. We’re very excited about the runway for these new initiatives and look forward to providing more detail in the coming quarters. In GP stakes, we closed on two investments during the third quarter, bringing us over 35% invested on our target size for our latest flagship vintage. We also completed our largest strip sale to date, selling about 18% of the assets in Fund 4 for proceeds of over $2.5 billion, delivering a 3.2x gross return on the assets sold across two transactions. As you’ve seen over the past year, we have been successful in delivering liquidity to the investors in these funds while introducing innovative paths for new investors to participate in the strategy.

In total, our GP stakes flagship funds have distributed more than $5.5 billion over the last 18 months in a market increasingly focused on DPI, or distributions to paid-in. In situating our funds squarely within the top quartile on this important metric, in considering the strong results we reported for the third quarter and the ongoing momentum across Blue Owl Capital, we continue to center around a few guiding principles that anchor our accomplishments to date and inform our path forward. First, performance remains key. If we do right by our investors, growth will follow, and our focus is always first and foremost on delivering exceptional return per unit of risk and protecting the downside.

Second, duration of capital is highly important to achieve positive investment outcomes over time, and we have an embedded base of permanent capital that not only supports the investors in our funds but also creates meaningful visibility in earnings for the investors in our stock. Finally, we are hyper vigilant to the notion of complacency. We always look to be skating to where the puck is going, not where it has been. This focus on innovation and being ahead of the curve has brought us to our current position at the intersection of many of the largest secular trends happening across alternatives, and we believe it will continue to serve our investors well going forward. With that, let me turn it to Alan to discuss our financial results.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Thank you, Marc, and good morning, everyone. We are very pleased with the results we reported this quarter, marking our 18th consecutive quarter of management fee and FRE growth. Over the last 12 months, management fees increased by 29%, and 86% was from permanent capital vehicles. FRE was up 19%, and DE was up 15%. We had another very strong quarter of fundraising, taking in over $11 billion of equity in the third quarter and nearly $40 billion over the last 12 months, an increase of over 60% from the prior year and another record for Blue Owl Capital. Of that $40 billion, $23 billion, or roughly 60%, came from institutional clients, reflecting an increase of over 100% versus the prior year period.

In private wealth, we have gotten off to a great start with two new wealth-focused vehicles with significant interest in our Alternative Credit Interval Fund and our new Digital Infrastructure Fund, and we continue to see a growing breadth of interest in our existing product lineup. We highlight the massive secular trends in play for these strategies on Slide 5 of our earnings presentation. To break down the third quarter fundraising numbers across our strategies and products, in credit, we raised $5.6 billion, a near record quarter for our credit platform. $3 billion was raised in direct lending, of which $2.4 billion came from our non-traded BDCs, OCIC and OTIC. The remainder was primarily raised across our newly launched Integral Fund and other alternative credit funds, various diversified lending funds, SMAs, and investment-grade credit. In real assets, we raised $3 billion.

$1 billion was raised from O rent, with another $1 billion raised for the seventh vintage of our flagship Net Lease strategy. The remainder was primarily raised in insurance-focused products and co-invest dollars. In GP strategic capital, we raised $2.7 billion, with most of this due to the strip sales that Marc referenced earlier. The latest vintage of our large cap GP stake strategy is now up to $8 billion raised towards our $13 billion goal. From a forward-looking fundraise perspective here, as we commented on last quarter’s call, we expect the fourth quarter fundraise to come in at similar levels to the second and third quarters. Turning to our platforms in credit, our direct lending strategy gross returns were approximately 3% in the third quarter and 13% over the last 12 months.

Weighted average LTVs remain in the high 30s across direct lending and in the low 30s specifically in our software lending portfolios. On average, underlying revenue and EBITDA growth across our portfolios was in the high single digits and as Marc mentioned earlier, credit quality remains very strong. In light of the most recent 25 basis point rate cut, we wanted to refresh the framework of how rate cuts impact Blue Owl Capital and underscore the resiliency of our Part 1 fees. For every 100 basis points of rate cuts, the impact the Part 1 fees see is approximately $60 million or a modest 2% of our third quarter revenues annualized. With that refresher, first let’s look backward and then we’re going to look forward.

Over the last 12 months we have grown total direct lending management fees by 18% and Part 1 fees by 12% during a period that included 100 basis points of rate cuts. Relatively modest sponsor M&A activity reflecting the advantages of incumbency and scale in this business. Sitting here today, looking at the forward SOFR curve which shows approximately 100 basis points of average rate decline in 2026 over 2025 and incorporating our current expectations around fundraising and deployment in direct lending, we anticipate continued growth in Part 1 fees in 2026. Turning to alternative credit now, our strategy gross returns were approximately 4% in the third quarter and 16% over the last 12 months. The vast majority of portfolio returns in this strategy have historically been generated by contractual yield and principal recapture with relatively short duration compared to corporate credit.

Over the past two quarters we held one of the largest first closes for an interval fund at $850 million and have subsequently raised an additional $150 million to date, bringing us to over $1 billion raised for this new product, an incredibly strong start. We are now onboarding at a number of the major custodians, enabling a broader swath of platforms to distribute the product on a continuously offered basis and we continue to add large distribution platforms to the pipeline for onboarding. We have deployed the majority of this initial fundraise already by upsizing existing partnerships and transactions as we had more demand for capital than we were able to fill previously in real assets. You heard about the strength of our data center pipeline from Marc just now.

Combining the demand for capital in this area with robust opportunities we see in logistics and manufacturing onshoring, we continue to expect that Net Lease Fund 6 will have committed nearly all of its available capital for investment by year end. Through September 30, we have deployed roughly 50% of this fund, with much of the remainder slated for deployment over the next 12 to 18 months as various build-to-suit projects reach completion. Our Net Lease pipeline continues to grow with over $50 billion of transaction volume under letter of intent for a contract to close. With regards to performance, gross returns in Net Lease were approximately 4% for the third quarter and 10% over the last 12 months. In GP Strategic Capital, we have now closed on four investments to date in the latest vintage of our GP stakes strategy.

Year to date, we have deployed more than $5 billion of equity in our large cap strategy, slightly above the average annual deployment over the past few years. Performance in these funds remains strong with a net IRR of 22% for Fund 3, 34% for Fund 4, and 13% for Fund V. A few items remaining here that I wanted to cover with everyone. First, during the quarter we saw a fee step down on a portion of the AUM in Net Lease Fund 6 that paid fees on committed capital. This resulted in very modest management fee growth in our Real Assets platform for the third quarter.

As we look ahead, we anticipate a meaningful acceleration in management fee growth for real assets given our robust fundraising momentum and the strong pipeline we just discussed, with the anticipated mid single digits growth for the fourth quarter quarter over quarter, which annualizes to about 20% growth and further acceleration expected into 2026. As a reminder, we’ve committed 90% of Fund VI to be invested, but have only deployed roughly 50% of capital out of that fund, providing visibility into management fee growth as those projects reach completion. Second, in GP stakes, there’s a fee step down for Fund 2 that is occurring at the end of October and will result in an annual management fee impact of about $22 million.

Finally, when we look at our most important key metrics like FRE growth and FRE per share growth or DE growth and DE per share growth, due to the timing of when shares are issued for each of our acquisitions—shares are issued at close—there can be a natural, very short-term divergence between something like FRE growth and FRE per share growth. To see the best indicator of our current EPS growth rates, we can look at our quarter-over-quarter growth for, say, Q1 to Q2 2025 or Q2 to Q3 2025, since we closed our last acquisition at the beginning of January. These are clean quarters, meaning each quarter has full share count and full P&L from all acquisitions.

What you see in quarter-over-quarter growth for these recent quarters is a meaningful closing of the gap between FRE and FRE per share, as well as an acceleration in FRE per share growth. To wrap up, I think you’ve seen from our business performance that nothing has changed fundamentally across Blue Owl Capital, despite the acute reaction we’ve seen in all stocks over the past month or so. One of the benefits of our model is that we have very high visibility into future earnings. Given the recurring nature of our revenues, reflecting our very durable business model, portfolio quality has remained very strong across the board, fundraising has been very robust, and we continue to lean into our incumbency and scale to drive positive outcomes for our shareholders and investors. Thank you very much for joining us this morning. Operator, can we please open the line for questions?

Operator: Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press Star one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press Star one again. Please ensure your phone is not on mute when called upon. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and please rejoin the queue if needed. Thank you. Your first question comes from Glenn Schorr of Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Various Analysts, Questioners, Various Financial Institutions: Hi, thanks very much. Maybe I’ll try to just get a summary with your last commentary on the acceleration. I am okay with some dilution that gets Blue Owl into these key growth markets and maybe it offsets any pressures from any lower rates and maturation of any of your legacy businesses. The question I have is we’re trying to solve, I think we’re all trying to solve for the magnitude and the timing of the growth investments when they stop having any dilution and improve the FRE growth, FRE per share growth and the margin. Maybe just big picture 2026 and 2027, are we back on track? Do you see 20+% FRE growth, FRE per share matching that? Do we see margin stabilization and improvement from here? Just trying to get to the summary of it all because I think that’s where you’re getting at.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Yeah, thanks Glenn.

I appreciate the question. The answer is yes across the board. We expect over time to continue to have margin expansion from where we are today. As we get into 2026, 2027 and certainly our 2029 goals, we will expect to see meaningful accretion, meaningful acceleration, excuse me, of metrics like FRE per share, DE per share as we look 2025 to 2026 and again as we look 2026 to 2027. Each of those years builds on each other. We are, from everything we see sitting here, right on track with what we call our North Star, our Investor Day goals of 20+% growth for management fees, for revenues, for 20% growth on metrics like FRE per share.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: You know what, I’ll just add, taking the numbers that Alan Kirshenbaum just said, let’s take a step back for a moment. To be clear, we understand why people ask questions about acquisitions because this is an industry that hasn’t always done them well. I say this all due humility. We’ve done them phenomenally well. I mean, think about where we are and how we positioned for where the real opportunities going forward are both for our investors in our funds and for our shareholders. Our position in digital infrastructure is, you know, is veritably monumental. We have this incredibly successful intravan already in asset backed and asset fact is growing. These are capabilities that are fully integrated. In fact, you’re already seeing, if you look at the Meta transaction, we had about 100 people working across the firm on that.

That never could have been done absent the capabilities that we have both built organically and added. This sort of recurring, not your mathematical question, because I absolutely understand there’s the mathematical reality that if you issue shares and have less than a year of earnings, then obviously the per share effect won’t show up until you get a year out. If you look at our annualized numbers, look quarter over quarter and annualize them, you can already see what we’re talking about. This isn’t a, you know, we can see it on the come, just look at the quarter on quarter numbers, annualize them. You can see that the acceleration coming back to the levels that we’re all anticipating. From where we sit today, just so everyone knows it, those acquisitions are done, dusted and thriving. We view that as having been no small part of our success.

Look at, let’s look at, you know, rent or rent today is by far the leader in that fundraising. Net flows in real estate continuously offered are our fund, our real estate traditional flagship fund. As you know, we’ve already raised nearly half of our target fund size just out of the blocks we’ve already committed. I think we’re now 90% committed in Fund 6. I mean, we are, we’re really thriving not just in our core businesses that we already had like direct lending, but these additions. Absolutely, we need to deliver it through to the numbers. That’s just math. Thankfully, it’s not operational, it’s not execution, it’s not strategic, but that math will show through.

Maybe one other thing to add, when folks are looking for early measures of success, it takes years to ramp products, ramp strategies to get a good level of AUM that we’re working off of. When you think of early measures of success, it could take nine to 12 months to roll out an organic brand new product, a brand new strategy within your business. Think about what we’ve done with our acquisitions. The Alternative Credit Interval Fund was out in market.

In less than 12 months.

ODIPS, which is our digital infrastructure wealth dedicated product we’ve talked a lot about here, we’re going to have our first close in less than 12 months from when we close the acquisition. When folks are looking for, you know, how much are we going to raise, what’s going to happen over time? It takes time. When you look for those early measures of success, are they on the right track? I couldn’t agree more with Marc. Wow, we’re hitting on all cylinders and things are pointing up into the right for us with all of these acquisitions.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Appreciate that perspective. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Patrick Davitt with Autonomous Research. Your line is open.

Hey, good morning everyone. I have a question on retail flows. I guess through the lens of the volatility in August, it looks like October 1 subscriptions were still quite strong. Do you have any early view on how the credit volatility we’ve seen, the news flow, has or has not impacted the numbers we’re going to see for November 1? Thank you.

Thanks, Patrick. Appreciate the question. We’re coming off, just for credit, just focusing on what we’re doing there. I’m going to pull the lens back a little. Very strong flows. We’re coming off of a record quarter in our wealth dedicated products for 3Q. We have continued momentum this month. We should build on what we did last month for products like OCIC. We had a record month with O rent. We broke over $300 million. We are well on our way to one of our goals, one of our many goals that we’re on track with, of hitting a $1 billion a quarter run rate for O rent by the end of this year. We’re very encouraged by what we see, and we see a lot of resiliency in the channel for what we’ve.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Been doing O Rent and OCIC, just very particularly the way you phrased it, to be clear, they’re accelerating this month, accelerating. I have to add it to the list of imaginary problems that people are concerned about, and maybe it speaks to this point. Sometimes we get this issue of, oh gosh, individual investors, are they more volatile? They’re going to be fickle. Actually, the evidence to us is there’s certainly no evidence that it might be to the contrary, that institutions actually can sometimes be much more herd-like and can hit odd rigid barriers, or someone on their board calls and says, gosh, I read an article, I don’t really know. Actually, the evidence we have doesn’t suggest that individuals, in fact, seems like they’re grasping the reality that these strategies are working really, really well, perhaps better than the media and maybe some institutions.

Although we’re doing quite well with institutions now as well. So helpful.

Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Brian J. Mckenna with Citizens JMP Securities LLC. Your line is open.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Thanks.

Good morning, everyone. If I look at all of your public companies, that includes OWL, OBDC, OTF, all three continue to deliver pretty strong results across the board. You look at the underlying fundamentals, they remain some of the best in the industry. Even for your public BDCs, they are really the best in the industry. You look at direct lending, gross returns that you reported today, it should be another strong quarter for your BDC. The fundamentals remain really strong, but you look at all the stocks and they’re trading at pretty meaningful discount to peer. What do you think is still misunderstood about your businesses within the market today? What are you doing as a management team to change these perceptions and ultimately get these stock prices higher? Does there come a point when insiders start to step in and they ultimately start buying some of these stocks?

As to what investors don’t understand, it’s probably hard for us to give you a comprehensive answer. You obviously talk to a lot of investors. We can offer some theories. I can certainly tell you what we’re doing. We’re doing two things that I think at the end of the day will solve this problem. One, we are executing, executing, executing. Business is good. Business is continuing to be good, and we’re focused on continuing to deliver. We haven’t seen an opportunity as good for investors and by extension for Blue Owl Capital as the digital infrastructure investment cycle that we’re in. We’re just going to continue to deliver results for investors and continue to deliver. Frankly, we’re short capital in an arena like that. I think that execution is the name of the game. Internal, for us and then communication.

We are out on the road talking to shareholders all the time. Everyone in the senior team here is, by the way, happy to do it. We like spending time with shareholders and we’re out on the road and we’ll answer any question anybody has. I think we can communicate. We’re trying to spend time answering questions as best we can in the media as well. We’re going to communicate and execute. To what you just said, look, to our way of thinking, it couldn’t be better said. The reality is we and every one of these vehicles, they’re an incredible value. Rather than complain about it, which I know is a natural tendency we could have, that seems kind of pointless. Rather, we’re just going to continue to deliver spectacular results. Look at where we are compared to where we were when we set up our investor day.

We’re tracking right along. Look at like RD this year versus what people thought a year ago and compare that to what the revisions happened with our peers. We’re in a different category, as we should be because we have a highly predictable fee stream. I don’t know I will take advice from anyone on how better to do either of those things or crack the code to. If history is a guide, those who join us now I think are going to be the beneficiaries of the upside from here, which we think of as substantial. Thanks so much.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Thanks, Brian.

Operator: The next question comes from Craig Siegenthaler with BofA Securities. Your line is open.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Hey, good morning, Marc. Alan. Hope everyone’s doing well. My question is on the digital infra business. We’ve seen these large deals recently like the $27 billion deal with Meta to develop the Hyperion data center. I’m sorry, I’m losing my voice a little bit here, but I believe the underlying leases have maturities of about.

15 to 20 years.

My question is under what scenarios can Meta terminate or walk away from the lease earlier than 15 years, and if they do that, what compensation would they owe Blue Owl’s funds, and how would that impact the IR for Blue Owl’s LPs on that investment? Thank you. Yes. The leases, first of all, let’s step back. The leases are designed to function for 20 plus years. Just to start to level set to your point, there is a—this is part of the skill and art that both Meta and I think we brought to it. They’re designed in a very bespoke way to create elements of flexibility for Meta. Of course, as you know, actually just yesterday we were talking about how they’re rapidly accelerating their spend.

I think this is more about having a flexibility, which I give them full credit for, than having anything that’s likely to be used. Just to cut through it all, if there were an early termination, there is a perfectly mathematical make-whole where we make the debt, makes all its money. We make a spectacular equity return under every circumstance. We expect it’ll end up being a 20 plus year undertaking, but it actually does not matter if it terminated anywhere along where they have the options to do it. There is a value guarantee on the assets, so we make a great return under any one of those conditions. We’re happy any which way.

Thank you.

Thanks, Greg.

Operator: The next question comes from William Raymond Katz with TD Cowen. Your line is open.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Okay, thank you.

I wish there was a day we could ask more than one. Maybe sticking with the digital story, I was wondering if you could help us understand how quickly you might be able to absorb the most recent flagship fundraising given the size of the pipeline, and then secondarily, despite the strong macro dynamics, the fund performance has been pretty weak two quarters in a row. I was wondering if you could help us unpack why that’s the case and would that be a hindrance to drive growth from here?

Thank you.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Yeah, let’s first just clear up the accounting, therefore, kind of misunderstanding—not your misunderstanding, but understandable misunderstanding—of the return point. Alan, why don’t you cover that first, and then I’ll talk about the front. Sure.

Thanks, Bill. This quarter, we saw some mark to market on swaps that we have around debt that’s in place. When we look at this, we see these are very long-term projects. When you look at the underlying performance of the data centers, they are very strong. I’ll tell you, on average across our digital infrastructure funds, Fund 1, 2, and 3, we have IRRs in the high teens. We’re experiencing great, great, great IRRs for our investors. This is short-term noise.

Yeah.

Just to frame that in a way that will be apparent to everyone, I’m sure is already apparent to you. These are very long-dated leases with red escalators. Not to be lost, by the way, that escalators are very powerful over time. To match, we will, you know, we swap debt in many cases against them. We’ve locked in our returns and our returns are outstanding. As an accounting matter, the swap itself gets marked for accounting purposes unrelated to the fact that really it’s just serving to create this fixed income stream, so that it’s just an accounting quirk in terms of the absorption of the fund. Yeah, listen, we are heavily committed already through Fund 3 and we will be back with Fund 4 in 2026.

At this point, as I said, the demand for capital given the partnerships we have and the capabilities we have vastly exceeds our current capital on hand. That’s a great opportunity for our LPs or frankly others that may join us in other strategic roles. Take like QIA who joined us as a strategic partner in our continuously offered product, $1 billion commitment to help anchor that product, and we’re going to continue to grow that partnership. They’ve been a fantastic strategic partner and they picked this platform because they see the scale and quality of the opportunity. We’re going to continue to develop these both strategic partnerships and we’re already seeing really great fund flows and uptake rate speeds of adoption we’ve not seen before in the continuously offered world. We’re trying to gather the capital, but it’s still very imbalanced.

We need much more than we have to capture what we may think are once in a generation opportunities.

When you think of the momentum we have here, Bill, think about Fund 3 close at the end of April and within 12 or 18 months we should be out. We expect we will be out with our first close, not just marketing, but our first close for Fund 4 and the Digital Infrastructure Fund wealth product. I mentioned a few minutes ago, our plans were to launch that in early 2026. We’re ahead of that plan. We have so much momentum. We have two of our biggest distribution partners live in the system. We expect our first close to be December 1. We are really encouraged by the early signs we’re seeing in the channels there.

Thanks for the good update.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Benjamin Elliot Budish with Barclays Bank PLC. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning and thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask about operating leverage in the business. You indicated, I think earlier in the Q&A that you do expect FRE acceleration in the next few years.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Curious.

If I just look at this quarter, you did have a big step up in credit management fees, I think driven by the listing of OTF. Margins are still sort of that low 57% range. I guess that was presumably embedded into your prior full year guidance. Can you just remind us why wasn’t there more in the quarter as we think about the next several years? Obviously a lot going on in the top line and from a fundraising perspective, how else are you thinking about expanding FRE margins and what that may look like?

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Thank you.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: There’s a reason that we grow faster and more predictably than anyone in our industry. There’s a reason that we get to strategic places like digital infrastructure and alternative credit. We’re saying that other people are doing a phenomenal job. They are. There’s a reason, when you just step back and put the numbers on a piece of paper, we are kind of in a category of our own. It’s because we invest in continuing that track forward. We will continue, of course, to be a highly profitable business. You continue to see our margin this quarter at 57% plus. Sure, there’s some operating leverage in the business over the medium term, but just from our point of view, that is not where you make money in our business.

If we had 30 more basis points of margin and gave up investing in the thing that’s going to be the continuation of this accelerated growth two years from now, it’d be a really terrible trade. We don’t find the idea of trying to squeeze a penny out of our margin versus invested in the future a worthwhile trade. Yeah, there’s operating leverage, but you should expect.

You should.

I mean, I don’t want to tell you what you should want us to do. That’s obviously your call. I would proffer you should want us to continue to invest in this dramatic outperformance over the long term versus try to optimize the last dollar of margin today. That’s where we are. We will continue to make growth investments. I’d rather have you think about us as growing for a very, very long time at a very high margin with the highest fee rate, by the way, which we do have in the industry. Whether we take the last 50 basis points of margin to the bottom line or put it into the business, pun intended, on the margin, you should expect we want to put that in the business. We continue to outperform so dramatically. North Star, $5 billion of revenue, $3 billion of FRE. That’s where we’re going.

All right, fair enough.

Thank you, Marc.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Thanks, Ben.

Operator: The next question comes from Crispin Elliot Love with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I want to go back to digital infrastructure. Definitely had some meaningful announcements recently, the Qatar Investment Authority partnership, the Meta joint venture. When you think of upcoming data center opportunities, what type of pipeline are you looking at? Are you able to put a dollar value on that, as well as just expected structures for these types of investments? Could structures evolve? Just on the Meta joint venture.

Why do you think the JV structure?

Made the most sense for that one? Yeah, it’s a wonderful question about the structures because if you look at the three largest data center complexes, financings done, which no surprise I’ll note, all three are ours, each one is a different structure. I think this is really an important point to understand in the hundreds and hundreds of billions and to quantify. I don’t even quite know how to quantify the pipeline because it’s so vast in terms of the number of projects that we’ve already signed or that we’re advanced on or that we’re talking about. Remember, the size of each one is just so. It’s just so massive. You know, in excess of $100 billion for sure, in terms of the way we would look at our pipeline, so let’s call the pipeline or adjustable market for practical purposes kind of infinite. It doesn’t really matter.

That’s not the constraint. By the way, I’m sure we all did look at the numbers from yesterday from all the big hyper, three of the big hyperscalers and the articles in the Journal. As far as reading the Journal, three articles in a row all talk about one very core theme from Google, from Meta, from Microsoft, dramatic acceleration in capital spending beyond what the big numbers are people already thought and had. You know, if you actually, I think, talk to a lot of folks, they’d say we’re underspending the opportunity, not over. I don’t want to be in the position and we’re not in the position to take that risk. We do things under long-dated contracts with exceptionally high-quality companies where we earn these really, really strong and growing yields. That’s our part, where the picks and shovels, where the infrastructure of that part.

With that said, there are multiple structures and this is part of the strength we can deliver at Blue Owl Capital. I think the reason that we are prevailing in this market is because we can serve as that one-stop shop depending on what kind of solution you want. I’m going to just quickly take you through this. If you look at the Abilene, Texas or Stargate project, as sometimes referred to. That project we’re developing in partnership with a fantastic company, Crusoe, who recently just announced their own actual financing which we’re a part of. That really reflects the strategic partnership we have with Crusoe. They’re outstanding in what they do. They’ve been a pioneer in this business. They have big projects they’re working on and we’re working together on how we look there in the development business and we’re in the, you know, own the capital business.

It’s a wonderful complement. In that case they’re the developer and we’re the owner and Oracle is the tenant. That’s one structure. In the case of the Borderplex project, which is now that one by the way, phase one and two, that was a $15 billion project in Borderplex. That’s a $22 billion project in Borderplex. We’re the developer. We remember we have a business called Stack. Stack has about a thousand people in it. This is another one of the may or may not be fully understood but the gigantic barriers to entry here is everyone’s happy to own a data center. We just took one of our data centers we had created organically and, you know, say we’re creating our data centers, the 7, 8 cap rates. We just agreed to sell one at a 5.25% cap rate. Everyone likes to own them.

The question is, how do you get to own them at 7 and 8 cap rates? You have to have the partnerships and be able to either with a Crusoe or on your own. In the case of this, on our own develop. Stack, we have a thousand people that do design, build, operate and it’s not about what you did today, it’s about what you did two years ago to position yourself with the right land, the right power and the right understanding of the regulatory frameworks and how to actually get this done. Getting it to done matters as much as the capital and we do both. The third iteration is Meta. Meta develops and is very good at developing their own data centers. They say, okay, I don’t need the development.

What I need is someone that can deliver $27 billion of capital, that understands my business and understands all the nuances that are going to go into developing this project. Our expertise isn’t like we need to build it away for them, but rather expertise allows us to structure in partnership with Meta in a way that meets their needs. They say, oh yeah, it’s great we get to work with someone that understands what we’re doing. Meta is building that project. What I like about that just so happens that all three, you see three different, all good flavors depending on what the user, the data center wants. We’re positioned to do all three and we’re happy to do all three. Great, thank you Marc.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Appreciate the detailed answer.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Of course, thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Brennan Hawken with BMO. Your line is open.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask a clarifying question and then one a little bit more forward looking. I think, Alan, in your prepared remarks you were talking about the GP stakes business and then you went into fundraising expectations. I was a little unsure about whether or not I thought those fundraising expectations were firm wide and not narrowly.

To the GP stakes business, where you.

Expect 4Q to be equal to 2Q and 3Q levels, just want to confirm that. You also highlighted expectation for management fee acceleration in the real asset business.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Does that mean that the fee rate?

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Step down that we saw this quarter should recover, or are you going to be seeing strong revenue growth despite the lower fee rate?

Thanks, Brandon. Good questions. I appreciate you asking them. I have an opportunity to clarify on the first question. 4Q is similar to 3Q and 2Q.

That was a comment out of this.

Prepared remarks, same comment as last quarter, strictly related to sixth vintage of GP6. That’s what I was focused on in that comment narrowly, not broadly for Blue Owl Capital. On the real asset side, yes, the answer is yes. The fee rate looks lower this quarter.

It’s a little bit of a mix shift. It’s a little bit of a Fund.

Fee step down, but the fees for Fund 7 haven’t really fully kicked in. We’ve caught a little bit of capital, but not that much, and that’s the dynamic you’re seeing. We’ve raised money for, or and fees are coming down a little here because of the Fund 6 step down. It’s very, very modest growth there. You’re going to see an acceleration of growth and continued fee expansion for real assets.

Great. Thank you for the clarifications.

Thank you, Brennan.

Operator: The next question comes from Steven Joseph Chubak with Wolfe Research LLC. Your line is open.

Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my questions.

Morning, Steven.

Hope you’re both doing well. Marc, you provide some really helpful detail on the forward flow agreements and your approach to underwriting and structuring these deals. Certainly a growing area of focus among investors and I was hoping to delve a little bit deeper. There are four subcomponents I was hoping to unpack. First, if you could talk about the quality of the underlying credits. Second, the amount of subordination you build into these structures. Third is the volume it’s expected to produce in a typical quarter, and then the appetite to afford similar agreements. I know that was quite a bit, but credit quality, subordination, volume, and appetite for more partnerships.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Sure. Let us tackle all. They’re all good, they’re all good questions and they’re all highly salient. These flow partnerships are something we very much like because what we’re doing, again it’s kind of a theme, no surprise in the Blue Owl system, which is we like to find the people that are best at what they do, work with them in the case of, say, a Meta, work with them in the case of, say, a PayPal, buy them when it’s something that is an internal asset management capability that we need to, should have, like IP or outlay. I think the theme you’re going to always see is we’re looking for best of breed and we are very keenly aware of what we are great at and not great at. Or put another way, when you focus, you tend to be really great at things.

There’s a reason that we are outperforming for our LPs in almost everything we do, it’s because we focus. We don’t have that many strategies. There’s a reason we win partnerships that I think many would love to have because we’re more focused in a few core areas that really work. The flow partnerships are part of that. Let’s start with quality. Quality, what you see is we’re looking, and this is quite important too, even with all the noise in the market, we work with prime. We’re not in the subprime business. We’re talking about prime credit quality. That is why you’ll see partnerships with people like PayPal or SoFi who have strong prime flows in what they take in. That’s a logical starting point. Quality is very high. We don’t play in the edges. We don’t do anything meaningful in subprime. We do prime.

A lot of it’s just business finance, business lease finance and otherwise. High credit quality by individual credit. Obviously, of course, it gets down to the packaging, the diligence. To your second point, subordination. In everything we do in these partnerships, either the person we’re partnered with is owning part of the same risk we are owning on their balance sheet, or in most cases, subordinating. The amount of subordination, I can’t really give you a numeric answer because that depends on the exact credit quality, how much, what controls there are and what can go into the box. Important to understand, we’re not buying a package of things and saying, good luck with that. They’re keeping a parallel piece or usually a subordinated piece. The flow agreements, we can shut them off. You know, we’re doing daily feeds. This is a very data intensive business. We’re doing daily feeds.

Between them and us, we see everything that’s processing. These flow agreements can be shut off if there’s deterioration around parameters, in which case they actually run off quite rapidly. One of the beauties of alternative credit and flow arrangements is the duration per package per month is very fast. In a world of liquidity, if people want liquidity or strategy where you can get to liquidity as an answer to a change in the world or a change in preference, this is the best match, which is why we put the interval fund structure here. You know, you got to match structure to strategy if you really want to deliver for investors. That’s on subordination. There is most often subordination. There’s always at least parallel ownership and there’s tremendous day-to-day controls through data and tech integration with these big platforms. Volume. You’ve seen some of the announcements we have.

Now remember, it’s important when we talk about $7 billion, for example, it’s not that we put out $7 billion, right. That is going to be deployed over a couple of year period in this sort of running cycle of take receivables and then they get quickly paid down and then you add more receivables. We can take you through and we can certainly try to make sure people understand going forward a bit of what’s the deployment, peak deployment, or deployment pace. It really gives us what is a lot of visibility and optionality, maybe for lack of a better term. It’s not like we put $7 billion to work in any given moment. Divide that over a couple of years effectively. On doing similar partnerships, absolutely.

What we want are the best originators in the world and leverage their capabilities and will be the best capital partner they can have. Partner of choice. That marries with a lot of what we do. Same thing we do in the world of direct lending. We’re not in the private equity business. We don’t compete with our borrowers. They’re in the business, they’re great at it. They originate, if you will, and then we support their purchases. Yes, we’ll absolutely continue to see similar partnerships formed.

That’s great, Marc, thanks for the comprehensive response, really appreciate it.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Thanks, David.

Operator: The next question comes from Alexander Blostein with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Hey everybody, good morning.

Thanks.

Another one for you guys related to credit. While the three instances that occurred a few weeks ago all seem to be related to fraud, it sounds like there’s another one this morning with HBS and those headlines coming out in the last hour or so here.

As you look at.

The credit exposures broadly across your platform and acknowledging that those four are not really related to you guys and sounds like it was all related to fraud, how are you addressing potential fraud risks across the platform? Is there anything differently that you’re starting to look at? Is there extra diligence you’re starting to look at throughout the portfolios, and ultimately will that require any incremental spend if these instances start to kind of percolate throughout the industry?

Yeah, thanks. I think maybe what I’m going to do is take a slight step back and just try to comprehensively address the overall credit theme question, and well phrased. I think it’s actually important to level set at one place to begin with, which is credit quality. Here, our peers and at the banks for that matter, despite some tempests in teapots, is very strong, very strong. I’m going to come back to us, but let’s just start with the ecosystem in total. It’s very healthy. The ecosystem, the credit ecosystem, is extremely well capitalized. It’s trillions and trillions of dollars.

Then you have a problem, and in this case, as you point out, a handful of problems that appear to be rooted in fraud, which is kind of the least relevant indicative issue when it comes to credit quality or systemic problems and yet has garnered extraordinary amounts of attention. Banks do a very good job. I don’t want this to be misunderstood. We’re all part of a common ecosystem. We have a different approach, but take banks like Wells Fargo, they do a phenomenal job. J.P. Morgan, phenomenal job. These are great institutions and we work with them all the time. I think we should start with, there’s almost like, I don’t know if you’re all familiar with the Mandela effect. This is like the Mandela effect of finance, which is this just common population collective misimpression of what’s going on.

For those who don’t know, the Mandela effect is where there’s these, like, people imagine that the Monopoly guy had a monocle—he didn’t. Or that Pikachu’s tail has a black tip—it doesn’t. There’s just these common misunderstandings and misimaginations, and I can do a list so everyone has one. Fruit of the Loom doesn’t have a cornucopia. In any case, the point being, somehow by just talking about this, enough people have worked themselves into this imaginary world where there’s some big or potential credit problem. From where we sit now, I’m going to be a little more parochial. There’s definitely not. When I now look at our book, performance remains extremely strong. We’ve originated over $150 billion in credit over the last decade and we’re still running at 13 basis point loss rates, and it’ll be higher than that over time. That’s too low.

I mean, that’s not the right rate. We don’t suggest it is or should be. In any given quarter, we have a company that has its challenges. We have had every. We will have it every quarter. We will have some company that has a challenge. We have 400 of them. The key is to have very few. When you have them, get a good recovery. All of that is working. We are not seeing anything in our portfolio that is thematically problematic. We are not seeing anything that suggests a shift in overall credit quality or yellow lights or anything like it. We are still seeing growth. I am not trying to be a Pollyanna.

Like I said, of course there are going to be companies that get in trouble. We have had them and we will have them and so will our peers and so will the banks. That is the nature of being a lender. The key is, is it thematic? Does it suggest anything greater or does it even really matter much to the net result when you talk about such small numbers of defaults with any reasoned recovery? The answer is it does not. I am not by any measure trying to be dismissive, but I do think like a little bit of a step back because now it is like this daily rhythm of everyone saying, what about this thing? What about that thing? As for the items you mentioned, let me just tie it back again. I will just be parochial again rather than try to speak so broadly.

Actually, the strength of what we do in asset backed is exactly what you described. The thoroughness with which we tie in with the originators, the quality of the originators, just like we do in sponsor finance. We care who the partner is, we care who that originator is. I have to tell you that there is a lot of reasons to think that SoFi and PayPal are really well run companies that are not, you know, I hope, God willing, you know, companies like that are not any part of the problems that we are talking about. That is part of selection. Then there is how you do it. There are tools that can be deployed and we deploy in this business. You do use third party servicers. That is a way to have someone else looking. You do field checks.

By the way, if you do field checks in some of these circumstances, you see red flags. If you look at platforms, you see red flags. It is very, a lot of work can be done even to confront fraud and prevent it, or at least prevent it from getting into your portfolio. Once you are in any credit, whether, let us forget fraud, let us just talk about deteriorating performance. Daily data ties. We have a whole data science team here. You know, that’s why I get asset backed. Ought to be done by professionals and asset backed, part of why we acquired one of the best in the business. Because this is a very different business from what many people in credit do. It does have many, many more line items and flows. Do we do anything new?

Listen, anytime there’s a problem anywhere in the financial markets, of course our job is to instantly go back and look and say, does this suggest there’s anything else we should have been doing or could be doing? The comforting answer for you will be, we went back, we looked and no, there’s nothing that we missed. There’s nothing we would change. We think we have fantastic controls. That doesn’t mean no one could ever defraud us. Anybody could be defrauded. I would tell you that no, we actually looked and when we study what did happen and study how we approach it and frankly, what we even knew about maybe were, having looked at some of these companies over time, nothing, we feel great about how our process works, but we will always be vigilant about it. I think everyone is, maybe not everyone.

I think we’re a little careful of just kind of this churning and churning and churning. I think the credit system, banks and private lenders think we’re in a really, really healthy place. Last thing I’ll say, if you really, if someone’s looking around for, oh, you know what, there’s really some problem in the world of credit, then I would tell you that people should take the flight to quality and get into our BDCs and get into our real estate products, all of which are designed to be defensive and take credit. It’s the senior part of the equity capital stacks. The last point I’ll make, and I don’t mean to drone on about this, but I know it’s a really important topic to the market right now.

I understand that if you’re actually concerned about the broad credit industry, banks, private lenders included, I mean, people need to take a pause and think about what that means for their equity books. We are the senior parts of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies and by the way, many favorably selected by sector, by sponsor, by capital structure. If you really are watching this problem, we ought to all collectively turn our attention to, in that case, wildly overvalued equity markets. We ought to have people moving into credit, not out of credit. That is not my opinion that we have wildly overvalued. I think we actually have a really healthy economy and a really healthy ecosystem. I see it with our portfolio, we continue to see great strength.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Great.

Thanks for all the background there, Marc.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Of course.

Thank you, Alex.

Operator: The next question comes from Christoph M. Kotowski with Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. Your line is open.

Yeah, good morning and thank you. I’m trying to think about going back to the data center financing space and trying to think about how, when we see these press reports about financings, how to translate it into what it means for your AUM and fee paying AUM, you know, when, where and how much. Thinking about Hyperion, for example, the reports I saw were that you put in about $2.5 billion of equity, there was $27 billion of debt, and that the lease terms go to 2049. Three part question then. One, I assume what’s AUM for you is the $2.5 billion, not the $27 billion.

Two, I assume that that $2.5 billion is primarily spoken by Net Lease 6, by Net Lease 6 and Infra 3, and as such it would already be in the fee paying AUM, but it would explain why you’re coming back to market so soon. Thirdly, does this stay fee paying AUM for you until 2049 or are there step downs before then?

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Yeah, so a few things. Al and I will cover both parts of this. Our investment in Meta equity is roughly $3 billion, just to use the right number between us, that is deployed by us over time into, and therefore to, I think the point you raised, its commitments today, that fund over time. It is therefore a use of capital. We have several strategies, and one of the hallmarks of Blue Owl Capital has been this drive to make sure that individual investors and institutions get treated as true peers. You know, we have multiple vehicles, depending how you choose to participate, that have a strategy that will participate in this product. While $3 billion is a gigantic number, remember we have multiple strategies that participate in that. You named two of them very much correctly. Our net lease product for sure is a relevant piece.

Our digital infrastructure is the lead horse, if you will. This is an example of a digital infrastructure originated product, which, by the way, wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have IPI, which therefore benefits the Net Lease fund. Back to our point, remember Net Lease is participating. Oh, by the way, Net Lease is where we originated Oracle, so that can be a benefit for digital infrastructure. These aren’t coincidental combinations. Very importantly, we have our own rent triple Net Lease product and now the Digital Infrastructure Trust, and those are the wealth access channels, those participate. It isn’t a matter of I wonder if I picked the right fund. It’s really did I pick the right firm, and investors picked the right firm. We have homes for that equity, and it’s great, it’s great equity. That’s really how we approach it.

Just to close out your point, yes, there will be gaps between the time we commit and the time we deploy. That does in part explain if people are trying to reconcile drawdown to when we’ll be back in market. Obviously, once we commit to Meta, whether we funded it today or two years from now, you have to have that money on hand. As for assets under management, of course it depends on the vehicle, but it is the case that within a perpetual product, you talk about, we’re talking about long periods of time, we want 20 something years. Yeah, that asset could just stay there, could stay there forever, I mean in that sense of the word, 20+ years. We would get, you know, paid continuity. That again is the beauty of matching capital structure to asset, not our funds. It won’t stay forever, right?

In our funds, like our real estate funds, we will often buy and then we’ll sell at nice premiums, you know, the results. In fact, that’s just kind of a thing we were talking about just the other day actually, like our real estate product. You want to invest in real estate and you want to make, you know, well, risk-managed returns. You know, you look at our, we’ve now fully invested and exited our first three real estate funds and as the 24% net IRR doing business with IG companies. That has to do with the difference between the running, you know, kind of double-digit hold-forever kinds of returns to, you know, if you create things at 7% and 8% and if you want to sell some of them at 5.5% to 6%, you generate very high IRR.

The beauty is we have the ability to do all of the above and whoever joins us, they can pick their entry path and participate in this digital transformation.

Okay, thank you. That’s it for me.

Thanks, Chris.

Operator: The next question comes from Brian Bertram Bedell with Deutsche Bank AG. Your line is open.

Great, thanks.

Thanks.

Good morning. Thanks for taking my question, maybe just continuing on that line of that question, just extending that to maybe tying it back to some comments you made earlier in the call, Marc, about the supply of capital for digital infrastructure versus the deployment opportunities being very vast over a long period of time. How do you think about sort of the strategy of fundraising to try to match that deployment in the future? I know we have of course IPI 4 coming up and the real estate 7 still in the market. As you think about that timeline over the next one to two and even three years in terms of trying to match that demand, if you think that’s still going to be there, what are the strategies to either launch new funds or use the retail markets maybe as a more major fundraiser for those projects.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Yeah, so look, I think what I had mentioned and I appreciate the question, we have great homes for a lot of capital by the way. We’re all in very creative approaches also on top of what I’m going to describe. We have four entry points that allow you to participate in this digital transformation depending on exactly what assets you want and what type of structure you want. That’s like again, this is very driven around meeting our investors where they live. I’m not going to repeat it all, but we have our real estate product, as you said, Real Estate 7 in the market. Real Estate 7 is a diversified triple net lease product that owns a variety of different kinds of real estate projects with really strong tenants and 15, 20 year leases.

I think we’re running in our product right now close to an 8% average cap in those real estate products. We have a long history of stability and great results and that’s a great institutional entry into real estate. In fact, if you’re doing real estate, it’s a little hard for us to see why that wouldn’t be the way you’d want to do real estate, period with that word stopping there. If you want a vertical exposure into the data centers, which is this moment in time generational and we think opportunity. I think by the way, as years to run again, just go read the headlines. Everyone keeps announcing bigger numbers, not smaller numbers and they’re mind bending numbers. We have our digital infrastructure business where once again we have an unparalleled history. We’ve done over 100 different data centers.

I think today we have already have or are building 10 gigawatts. I know that’s not like an intuitive term, but if you think about a gigawatt is the amount of power that a typical sizable city in America consumes. When you think about it, we’re talking about like right now we have built or are building 10 cities worth of data center capability. Of course that’s a fraction of the market. You can participate in and those are both drawdown funds. If you are comfortable and like that structure, you’ll be in a drawdown fund. It obviously therefore means it’s more about money going in and ultimately cycling back out. It’s drawdown and it has all the positive and negative attributes of that structure.

The exact parallel to that is you can participate in O Rent, which is obviously our continuously offered version that allows you to participate in triple net leased assets. Each one has a slight nuance in the kinds of projects. One is built more for hold and collecting yields, one is built more for sort of that drawdown and ultimate exit. They’re participating in the same origination and engine. You can participate there and then on the digital infrastructure side as an individual, if you prefer to have the semi-liquid option where you can get your yields and then come and redeem the capital, seek redemption on a quarterly basis, you come into ODIT. If I put those four together, we have the horizontal real estate solution and the vertical data center solution. We have the drawdown entry point and the continuously offered semi-liquid entry point.

I think we have everything you need and we welcome anybody anywhere. Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) is anchoring and coming into the continuously offered product. I even think this idea that people like institutional product, we’ve never ascribed that, but now more than ever, that isn’t the right way to think about it. It’s about creating structures and matching them to people’s preferences about the kinds of assets and access to capital and holds and the like that they have in mind. QIA is in ODIT. That’s really how we’ve laid out our system. We don’t have as many products as most people. We won’t have as many products as most people. We are open to, of course, doing SMAs and customized solutions, but we’re really trying to make sure we have the right entry points and that they’re all scale.

Do you think the fundraising for those products can accelerate, given the deployment opportunities? I guess that’s towards the sort of the punchline of the overall question.

Oh yes, yes, I think we’ll see. We’ll continue to, you know, our target for real estate, seven, remember at $7.5 billion, that’s triple what it was two funds ago. Right. They are scaling and scaling to frankly an ever better market for us to deploy. Digital infra already was a gigantic step up, Fund 3 from Fund 2. We haven’t set a target obviously for Fund 4 yet. Those will scale. The continuously offered, of course, are the ones that people can really, you know, they can participate tomorrow in these assets. That therefore is a highly flexible way to introduce capital into this accelerating demand.

I would only add to.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: It’s not just the supply.

That’s driving the demand. It’s the amazing risk-adjusted returns that we’re seeing when we make these.

Investments that are driving the investors.

This is a generational opportunity that we’re experiencing.

Seeing, and I think that’s a big.

Part of what’s driving the demand on the investor side.

That’s all great color. Thank you so much, guys.

Thanks, Brian.

Operator: The next question comes from Wilma Burtis with Raymond James. Your line is open.

Alan Kirshenbaum, Chief Financial Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Good morning, Wilma.

We can’t hear you.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Put Wilma back in the queue and just go to.

Operator: This will conclude the Q&A session. I’ll turn the call to Marc Lipschultz for closing remarks.

Marc Lipschultz, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Blue Owl Capital: Great, thank you very much. I think we covered a lot of ground and we are trying to figure out the right way to balance the sort of bigger picture with the results. I’ll tell you that it was a great quarter we’re really happy with. Most importantly, the performance of the products in turn leads to importantly great performance at the Blue Owl Capital level. Bang on track, with durability and predictability. We’re feeling very good that we skated to where the puck has gone and we’ll continue to do that. We’ll always be vigilant. Don’t take anything away from the fact that we understand people and we do too. We always are on the lookout. Sitting here today, we love the position and we’re quite positive about the future for both Blue Owl Capital and our Blue Owl products.

We appreciate your time and we will keep executing and we’ll keep communicating.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.

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