Blackstone’s Wesley LePatner did it ‘all at once.’ The foundation made in her honor wants 1,000 leaders to master work, civic life, and philanthropy

In July 2025, Wesley LePatner kept bringing up the same worry with her husband.

She was already stretched thin by many measures.

She ran a Blackstone real estate fund, chaired the firm’s Women’s Initiative, served on boards from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to UJA-Federation of New York, and was raising two children.

Still, she kept telling Evan LePatner it wasn’t enough.

“We kept having this conversation over and over again.

And she said, ‘I’m not doing enough.

I need to do more,’” Evan LePatner told Ellie Austin, editorial director of Most Powerful Women, onstage at Fortune ’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Tuesday.

Later that month, on July 28, a gunman opened fire inside the Midtown Manhattan office building where Wesley worked.

She was 43 and one of four people killed.

“And it hit me like a freight train after she died that I couldn’t let this flame, this fire of a person, just fall to the ground,” Evan said.

On the first anniversary of her death, he launched the Wesley Mittman LePatner Foundation .

Its goal is to develop 1,000 leaders who will put their private-sector skills to work for nonprofits and civic institutions.

Wesley spent more than a decade at Goldman Sachs before joining Blackstone in 2014.

There she rose to global head of Core+ real estate and CEO of the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust (BREIT).