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 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, 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 recalls. “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, holding his phone at arm’s length. Occasionally, his wife, friends, or colleagues lend a hand. “People really like the authenticity of it and the fact that they know it’s really coming from Jon,” Anderson adds, at Blackstone’s Manhattan office. “That was a little bit of the unlock in the beginning, too,” she observes, turning to Gray, “because you look like you’d be coming off a long flight. You’re a little disheveled, you’re sweating. It was just so real.”

It’s an effective communications strategy for Blackstone—and for Gray’s own profile as an executive—that also happens to be very cheap. “Obviously, the cost is not very high to go like this,” Gray says, holding up his phone. “And it works.”

While compliance rules for the financial firm’s external communications still apply, the legal inspection and green-lighting process generally takes just a few hours. Besides, “most of the time, I’d be jogging anyway,” Gray says. “It’s probably motivated me a little more, honestly.”

Gray’s ‘dorky dad’ social media style

Part of Gray’s appeal is that he leans into his quirks. “There is a little bit of what I describe as my dorky dad vibes,” he says. “That’s maybe the way my girls would say it. But that’s sort of who I am, a little bit overly optimistic.”

His daughters are also some of his toughest critics. Gray often sends draft videos to both his family’s and Blackstone team’s group chats for review. “They have insights,” Gray says of his children. “They’ll say to me, ‘Hey, the background wasn’t so good,’ or ‘The lighting wasn’t so good,’ or ‘You should hold the camera better. You’re holding it down, you’re getting too much extra chin there.’ They’re much better at this stuff.”

Sometimes, his success has surprised his daughters. “When I told my girls that Kate Mackz had asked me to run, they’re like, ‘Why would she want to run with you?’” he says. “Meanwhile, if you go on Instagram, it has like two and a half million views.”

Anderson says the magic lies in Gray’s willingness to poke fun at himself. “He’s uniquely good at this,” she says. “If you have a CEO who this doesn’t come naturally to, it’s very hard.” Gray’s lack of self-consciousness is an asset, he says: “If I stumble on some words, if I’m out jogging, sweating—the more authentic, the better.”

For executives hoping to copy Gray’s success, he offers a simple formula: “Good background, a bit of humor, self-deprecation is very good. And then if you can have a nugget of information, advice, or insights, and you wrap that together and try to keep it to 90 seconds or less, that’s what you’re trying to do, but it does have to be authentic.”

Gray has become the go-to for video, often serving as an on-camera host for more polished explainers of Blackstone’s quarterly earnings. “He’ll do a maximum of three takes, and usually, he gets it in the first take,” Anderson says. “It’s pretty quick, the whole filming takes us about seven to 10 minutes.” He also helps to produce the firm’s elaborate holiday video, now an annual viral tradition.

But he and Anderson have found that heavily produced studio content routinely underperforms in comparison to the spontaneous running clips. “If we do something highly produced, and we spend a lot of time in the studio, we reach fewer people,” Gray says. “Some of these [running videos] may reach more people than when we go on TV.”

Gray is not the only Blackstone executive tapped to star on social media. His boss, 79-year-old billionaire, Blackstone cofounder, and CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, also creates social-first videos with his team, offering leadership and business advice for nearly six years on LinkedIn to his more than 400,000 followers. The chief executive even recently collaborated with TikToker Max Klymenko, the creator behind the viral Career Ladder series, for a video now topping 4 million views.

Jon Gray’s LinkedIn playbook

While most of Gray’s videos appear to be spontaneous, there’s a genuine business strategy behind them, and it’s a playbook more Fortune 500 executives are scrambling to replicate.

“At the end of the day, in our business, when you’re investing capital on behalf of others, you’re a steward of capital, you’re really in the trust business,” Gray says. “Being able to communicate with your clients directly, your shareholders, and show them who you are and what matters to you in a direct way, that’s very helpful, and that’s what this has become.”

LinkedIn editor-in-chief Daniel Roth says Gray’s approach has become a model for other leaders. “There is a ton of demand for these executive voices because they’re authentic,” he says. “Executives trying to figure out how to be heard, in a very noisy market, see that other executives are having success doing it, and so they start doing it themselves.”

Timothy Pollock, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, isn’t surprised that Gray’s videos draw such massive audiences. He argues that executives are now effectively celebrities, like movie stars and athletes.

“Why does what time they wake up or when they do their workout matter to them doing their job?” he asks. “But that’s what people love, because we live vicariously through our heroes. Business executives increasingly, for better or worse, play that role in society.”

Blackstone’s social media model

Given the positive reception on LinkedIn, it’s no surprise that other executives—and their communications teams—have taken notice, reaching out to Anderson, Gray says: “A lot of other firms [ask], ‘How did you get Jon to do this?’”

Ted Merz, a former journalist and now the founder of digital-first storytelling firm Principals Media, specializes in ghostwriting services for CEOs and executives, and says Gray has become a “very important figure” in the executive communications world. “He’s now super-famous among corporates for what he does with the running videos,” Merz tells Fortune. The videos, Merz says, have also raised the bar for other executives. “If Jon Gray can do it, and he’s pretty busy, what is your excuse?”

Gray says he has no plans to slow down anytime soon: “At some point, when I’ve jogged in enough places and people are like, ‘Enough already,’ we’ll find something else to do.”