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.

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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 new format, one he had used on his family’s group chat. To stay connected with his wife and four daughters, Gray often records quick travel videos of famous landmarks “so they’d remember I exist,” as he later joked in an interview with fitness influencer Kate Mackz.

This time, standing in front of the Sydney Opera House in running gear and AirPods, he pointed the camera at himself for 25 seconds. “I try to go for a jog to clear my head and pump myself up for the day when traveling internationally,” Gray wrote in the post. The reaction was immediate. Users flooded the comments with their own Sydney recommendations and running tips, and praised Gray for “keeping it real.”

“I was like, oh wow, that worked,” he says. “I go to Japan, I go to Paris, I go to Bentonville, Arkansas. I can keep doing this.”

Communicating Blackstone’s reach

The format stuck: Gray’s relentless travel schedule has effectively become a content engine for Blackstone. Now, between meetings, he pulls out his phone to talk about long‑term investing in Amsterdam, the rise of AI in Paris, and  the importance of “Gross Domestic Happiness” in Bhutan.

The videos are a conversation-starter in meetings, and they have even earned Gray a nickname—the Forrest Gump of LinkedIn. When he travels for conferences or business trips, he says, “most of the time, the first thing people bring up to me” are the jogging clips, not the deals. “I was just meeting with some clients from Canada, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, will you run when you come?’” Like other social media influencers, he has done collaborations, including one with Lazard CEO Peter Orszag during a trip to South Florida.

Gray’s posts are usually unpolished, slightly breathless—he is running, after all—and highly effective. His Blackstone team tells Fortune the operation is relatively low-lift: no coaching, no prep calls, no talking points laid out before he hits record. “It’s really just all him,” Blackstone’s Anderson tells Fortune.

Gray usually films in selfie mode, hold