Meet Blackstone’s ‘accidental influencer’ who made LinkedIn jogs Wall Street’s must‑watch content

It is nine degrees on a Sunday in January, and while most New Yorkers are hunkered down during New York City’s largest snowfall in years, Blackstone’s president and chief operating officer is jogging through several inches of fresh snow in Central Park.

Jonathan Gray sounds a little out of breath as the snow falls around him. “This is a tough environment,” he says in the 42-second video, looking directly into the camera phone carried by a friend trudging alongside him. “It reminds me of the motto: Stay calm, stay positive, never give up. It also reminds me of investing. Conditions are not always perfect. There’s noise, but you stay the course—you don’t lose sight of what’s important.”

The clip will rack up 2.7 million views for Gray, the 56-year-old heir apparent to the top job at the world’s largest alternative asset manager, which oversees about $1 trillion and ranks No. 321 on the Fortune 500.

Gray is not yet a CEO. But he is already doing a version of the job in social media feeds, and offering a preview of what the modern corner office now demands: a chief executive who doubles as a creator‑in‑chief.

The accidental influencer

Across the Fortune 500, the C-suite now comes with an unwritten rule: Show up on social media, or at the very least, on LinkedIn. In 2025, over two-thirds of Fortune 100 CEOs had at least one social media account, and of those, 71% posted at least once per month, a 37% increase in activity from the year prior, according to a report from communications advisory firm H/Advisors Abernathy.

Few executives embody this “always‑on” expectation as naturally as Gray. His jogging dispatches, including nearly 50 videos filmed in the past year, have become a fixture on LinkedIn. Gray’s LinkedIn posts regularly generate nearly 440,000 impressions and average more than 100,000 views per video. One travel montage spanning several European cities drew 5.9 million views alone, according to Blackstone. Between flights and investor meetings, the executive carves out time to explain economic swings, market volatility, and tech trends, all while touting Blackstone’s global reach.

Since his appointment to COO in 2018, the firm’s assets under management have roughly doubled, while its client base has expanded across new geographies. Gray, who joined the firm fresh out of college in 1992, insists his jogging videos are not part of any master plan. “I’m the accidental influencer here,” he tells Fortune. Indeed, he says, when Christine Anderson, Blackstone’s global head of corporate affairs, first suggested he start posting videos, Gray says he was “resistant for an extended period of time.”

When he finally gave in, Gray started by following the formula many executives rely on: what he now describes as dull, “corporatist posts”—formal updates tied to speeches and events, which were met with muted engagement. But then, while on a 2025 business trip to Sydney, Australia, Gray experimented with a........

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