From Owl Rock to $307 Billion: A Timeline of How Blue Owl Capital Was Built
September 2009 is when the oldest piece of what is now Blue Owl Capital first took shape. Marc Zahr and his team founded Oak Street Real Estate Capital in Chicago, launching a net lease investment business focused on sale-leaseback transactions with investment-grade tenants. No one involved was thinking about data centers or GP stakes at the time.
Six years later, in 2010, Dyal Capital launched inside Neuberger Berman with a different premise: buy minority equity stakes in private fund managers. Meanwhile, in 2016, Owl Rock Capital Partners was founded in New York as a direct lending firm targeting the upper end of the private credit market. Three separate businesses, three separate histories, serving three separate investor bases. More information about leadership and company structure can be found at the company’s LinkedIn profile.
2016–2021: The Owl Rock and Dyal years
Owl Rock grew quickly in private credit, becoming one of the larger non-bank direct lenders in the U.S. Dyal built out the GP stakes category, eventually handling the majority of large-ticket GP minority equity transactions across the industry. Oak Street, operating independently in Chicago, expanded its net lease portfolio across hundreds of properties.
The convergence happened in May 2021. Owl Rock and Dyal combined in a business combination that created Blue Owl Capital and took the firm public on the NYSE under the ticker OWL. Later that year, in October 2021, Blue Owl acquired Oak Street Real Estate Capital, adding the net lease platform and completing the three-platform structure — Credit, Real Assets, and GP Strategic Capital — that defines the firm today.
2021–2025: Public listing, acquisitions, and platform expansion
From there, growth accelerated through a combination of organic fundraising and acquisitions. Blue Owl expanded its Credit platform into alternative credit, investment-grade private credit, and liquid credit/CLOs. Real Assets added real estate credit capabilities and, most significantly, digital infrastructure. Historical financial details and corporate filings are available at www.annualreports.com/Company/blue-owl-capital-inc.
AUM moved from $235 billion at the end of Q3 2024 to over $307 billion at the end of 2025. The firm now employs more than 1,365 people across over 20 offices and carries a BBB+ credit rating from Fitch. The firm’s $3 billion secondaries strategy announcement underscores the breadth of capital raising activity.
The 2025 milestones that drew the most attention — the $27 billion Hyperion joint venture with Meta, the Gigabit Fiber investment, and the seven PERE and Infrastructure Investor awards — all came from the Real Assets platform, the newest leg of Blue Owl Capital’s three-part business. What started in 2009 with Oak Street buying single-tenant buildings in the Midwest had, by the end of 2025, become a $80.6 billion operation. Detailed information on fourth quarter results is accessible via finance.yahoo.com/quote/OWL/. The firm was recognized as the top real assets manager by two of the private markets industry’s most visible award programs.
