Blackstone, Ancestry.com, and Consolidation of Genetic Data

The Biowarfare Chronicles, Part 5

Check here for more on the Biowarfare Chronicles.

These men are laughing because so many people give them credit for being the good guys because they practice Effective Altruism and participate in mindfulness meditation at Burning Man in between orgies.

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Beneath the Smokescreen of the Pandemic

RTE readers may want to revisit the highly reasonable speculation that sharks are after the mass of genetic data at this moment when human population is expected to be approximately at its peak.

You're probably familiar with Ancestry.com by now. They're the multibillion dollar company that pats you on the back for giving up access to your genetic information in order to best understand your family tree.

Do it because you're sophisticated.

Do it because it enriches history.

Do it because you need something to talk about at a cocktail conversation when somebody else already monopolized the latest issue of The Atlantic. The whole issue.

Do it to prove you're not racist, and care about resolving the social injustice of people who died already.

Heck, do it because it creates an enormous and at present undervalued central repository of genetic data that could be used to control global populations in the era of sophisticated and invisible bioweapons that may already be able to target specific genetic pools.

On August 5, 2020, during the turmoil that was…2020…Blackstone Inc. purchased a majority stake in Ancestry.com for the likely cheap price of $4.7 billion.

(Reuters) - Blackstone Group Inc BX.N said on Wednesday it agreed to acquire genealogy provider Ancestry.com Inc from private equity rivals for $4.7 billion, including debt, placing a big bet on family-tree chasing as well as personalized medicine.

Ancestry.com is the world’s largest provider of DNA services, allowing customers to trace their genealogy and identify genetic health risks with tests sent to their home.

Blackstone is hoping that more consumers staying at home amid the COVID-19 pandemic will turn to Ancestry.com for its services.

“We believe Ancestry has significant runway for further growth as people of all ages and backgrounds become increasingly interested in learning more about their family histories and themselves,” David Kestnbaum, a Blackstone senior managing director, said in a statement.

If you thought Ancestry.com might be safe because Mormons in Utah wouldn't screw you over (most of them probably wouldn't, willingly), you may want to understand just who Ancestry's corporate masters are, and what they can do with your data.

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What is Blackstone Inc.?

Blackstone Inc., not to be confused with the even more behemoth Blackrock Capital. We might describe Blackrock and Blackstone as Fat Man and Little Boy.

On the surface, Blackstone is the world's largest "alternative investment" firm. This means that in addition to buying large companies (which is mostly what they do), they can invest in carbon credits, art, forestry, and non-fungible tokens. Blackstone currently owns a trillion dollars worth of the world's most powerful stuff. And they want for you to know they're going to do a good job for all us humans.

So, they smoke weed instead of snorting coke?

That's what they say during appearances on Sesame Street, but don't believe everything you see on TV.

The founders of Blackstone are Peter G. Peterson and Stephen A. Schwarzman, whom you know must be important because they use their middle names. And they are.

Peter G. Peterson is a billionaire businessman who was an investment banker and CEO of Lehman Brothers. He followed David Rockefeller as the Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations—a position that he held for 22 years, which is reputedly long enough to sacrifice a whole lot of babies to Moloch, if you are so inclined. He has served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and has been involved with various Rockefeller philanthropic activities. One of his several wives was the co-creator of…Sesame Street. I think he also played Mike's and Nancy's dad in Stranger Things.

Stephen A. Schwarzman is one of America's richest men, reportedly worth $32billion in 2022, and made a list of the eleven most powerful members of the Skull and Bones fraternity in history. Schwarzman was also a CEO at Lehman Brothers. He served the Trump administration as Chairman of the Strategic and Policy Forum while organizing such influential men as JP Morgan Chief Jamie Dimon and Disney boss Bob Iger. We still don't know what it means that he has been photographed with Ghislaine Maxwell because courts decided that you can't handle the truth. Some people seem to feel that Schwarzman and Blackstone made a lot of their money by helping to destroy the American Dream:

It ought to matter to Yale that the man for whom it’s renaming the Commons invests heavily in schemes that have hoodwinked millions of hard-pressed homeowners into becoming temporary tenants in homes they once thought they owned. Schwarzman’s Blackstone and its subsidiaries swept up legions of such properties at foreclosure, thereby transferring billions of dollars of residents’ equity to Blackstone, as the journalist Aaron Glantz demonstrates with macroeconomic rigor and novelistic intimacy in Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Crooked Banks, and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream.

It ought to matter to Harvard, MIT, and other institutions of higher learning that they have accepted millions of dollars from the late Jeffrey Epstein, even as he systematically raped young women, with the active connivance (and at times the outright collaboration) of other powerful men. It ought to matter that Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School, Brown University, and the University of Michigan accepted millions of dollars from the late A. Alfred Taubman, a prominent New York shopping-mall developer and former principal owner of the elite Sotheby’s Auction House. Taubman was imprisoned in 2002 for running a price-fixing scheme with Sotheby’s competitor, Christie’s, that cheated buyers and sellers out of some $100 million. At least Taubman cheated people who could afford it; Schwarzman, by contrast, has profited from the dispossession of thousands of people who can’t afford to be cheated. (The same is true, it bears reminding, of Mnuchin, who also made millions as a foreclosure vulture in the wake of the 2008 mortgage meltdown.)

Schwarzman has come a long way.

And if you've given Ancestry.com consent to sell your genetic data to third parties, for whatever purposes it might be used for, these are the men who now run those data auctions.

May the odds be ever in your favor.