SOTS 2nd Hour: Blackstone COO, Ares CEO, & Morgan Stanley's Simkowitz 5/4/26

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Carl Quintanilla (0:58)

Good Monday morning. Welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla, live at the New York Stock Exchange alongside Sara Eisen and David Faber. Today live at Milken in Beverly Hills, California. A great lineup of guests this hour from Milken, including Blackstone president Jon Gray, ARI CEO Michael Arougheti, Morgan Stanley, Co-president Dan Simkowitz. We'll get to the action in oil and equities this morning, as the president outlines a plan, at least, to help free some stranded cargo ships in the Middle East.

To start us off though, Sara and David, give us some of the vibes out of Milken this morning.

Sara Eisen (1:30)

Good morning, Carl. It's good to see you and David, we're here at an interesting time given there's a war going on, and I think geopolitical risks, energy shock. It does remain front and center because the folks that are moving money, whether they're private equity, whether they're the banks, of course, some of the private firms, the public firms, and I think the question is both short and long term, how investors are processing all of this.

But beyond the geopolitics, other big topics, the public versus private debate, what's going on with private equity, what's happening with the private credit, I think that's going to be a key one. I know I'm moderating a few panels on this, on that topic, and so are you. And then, I'm kicking it off in the 11 a.m. hour with the commissioner of the CFTC who is here, who is interesting because that's a five person commission. He's the only one there as the chair. They have a lot of vacancies, but they're doing a lot. They just brought their first insider trading case on predictions markets. They're sort of fighting all the states when it comes to regulation of predictions markets. So those are all hot topics as well. And the fact that they have made it into sort of front main stage at the Milken Conference, I think shows you how big the predictions markets are getting and how intertwined it's getting with traditional finance.

David Faber (2:52)

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, we've talked about it a good amount, and we will continue to because to your point, I mean, you hear to the extent that that market becomes even more liquid.

Will it be an opportunity for institutions even to use to hedge positions in some way, something you hear about at the same time of the two big ones? One of them is very much devoted, or at least to sports, that being Kalyshe, right? I think it's still 80 percent something along those lines of value.

Sara Eisen (3:17)

And it's like, how do you regulate? Some of them are offshore, right? Like Polymarket, and does the CFTC have the resources and the guidelines, I think, is the question.

David Faber (3:26)

They are fascinating private companies as well. Polymarket just beginning its monetization journey, so to speak, I believe, as well. The values that they have both been accorded are enormous.

Don't compare to the likes of an Anthropic or an OpenAI, but nonetheless also get to another point that we're going to be discussing. I'll be talking with Jon Gray about as well, IPOs, as we await, not just the biggest of the big being SpaceX, but many of the others that private equity companies are sitting on that hope to see some exits, for example.

Sara Eisen (3:53)

Well, speaking of IPOs, we've got Bill Ackman next hour. Of course, we spoke to him on IPO Day, but we're going to zoom out today and talk, first of all, about the performance on the first day, and then just what he's looking at and investing in, right? For retail investors to get into his closed-end fund, he's had a few big positions and is fashioning himself in the likes of Berkshire Hathaway, which is interesting coming off of the meeting this weekend. So I'm excited to talk to him about the overall environment and what he's interested in, and then AI front and center.