Are family offices considered private equity?

Hi Guys,

So I've been doing a bit of reading into family offices recently and have seen various people working at large shops (AUM $3bn+, which is large for an FO) and describing them as private equity. Is this the case?

My perception was that for a business to be considered private equity it required outside investment. Would be good to hear the thoughts of this from those on the PE forum.

Thanks all!

4 Comments
 

Family offices run a lot of different strategies (basically whatever the family wants). Some of those strategies are essentially the same as their non-FO PE firm counterparts, but some are not. For example, Pritzker Group is basically a PE firm with a much longer term time horizon since they don't have to return capital. There will also be plenty of other FO's that don't touch PE at all (at least not directly) - they just allocate to various funds and then monitor how those funds do.

 

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