Billionaire BlackRock CEO Larry Fink runs the world's largest asset manager. Here's how he became one of the most powerful people in finance. (2024)

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Laurence Douglas Fink was born November 2, 1952. He grew up in Van Nuys, California, located in the San Fernando Valley region of Los Angeles.

Fink's father owned a shoe store, and his mother was a professor at California State University at Northridge.

He earned his bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California at Los Angeles, graduating in 1974.

He also got his MBA with a concentration in real estate from UCLA in 1976.

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After graduating, Fink worked at First Boston, the investment bank later bought by Credit Suisse.

He rose to become First Boston's youngest managing director at 28 years old and a member of its management committee at 31.

Vanity Fair reported in 2010 that Fink "added, by some estimates, about $1 billion to First Boston's bottom line."

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In 1986, he took a hit when his department lost roughly $100 million from incorrectly predicting interest rates would rise when they in fact fell.

Years later, in his 2016 commencement address to graduates of UCLA, Fink reflected on the loss.

"We lost the company a lot of money. And all of a sudden, we went from 'partners' to outcasts," he said. "I was upset with how we were sidelined. But I was even more upset with myself, because I had become complacent…too sure of what I thought I knew. I believed I had figured out the market, but I was wrong — because while I wasn't watching, the world had changed."

He talked more about risk management and that time in his career in an interview with Crain's.

"We probably should have been fired for the amount of risk we were taking during those times," he once told Crain's. "They should have been raising questions: 'How are you making so much money? Are you taking too much risk?' And they didn't ask. They asked it when you had the losses."

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Fink later left First Boston for Blackstone Financial Management.

The similarity of Blackstone and BlackRock's names was intentional, despite outside advice to distinguish them to avoid confusion, Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman told CNBC in 2017.

"Larry and I were sitting down and he said, 'What do you think sort of about having a family name with "black" in it?'"

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It was under Blackstone's umbrella that BlackRock later got its start. Fink started BlackRock with seven partners in 1988.

His big loss at First Boston inspired a subsequent focus on risk management at BlackRock.

"The greatest lesson for me was: know your risk," he told Crain's of his First Boston loss. "That was a major genesis for the formation of BlackRock. When we started the firm, we focused on risk management."

BlackRock went public in 1999, with shares priced at $14 in its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. The company also began selling its proprietary investment management system, Aladdin, that year.

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The firm has made several big acquisitions under Fink's leadership.

Among them are BlackRock's acquisitions of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers in 2006 and Barclays Global Investors, with its iShares exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, in 2009. BlackRock today is the world's largest ETF issuer.

More recently, BlackRock announced plans this year to acquire private equity firm and infrastructure investor Global Infrastructure Partners for roughly $12.5 billion in cash and stock in its biggest deal since 2009.

The deal will create the second-biggest global infrastructure manager with more than $150 billion in assets, according to an internal memo Fink and BlackRock president Robert Kapito sent to employees that was seen by Business Insider.

"We believe this will be one of the fastest growing areas of our industry over the next 10 years," the memo read.

The Fed has enlisted BlackRock's help in key crises.

These include the 2008 financial crisis and the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

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Throughout his career, Fink has been a proponent of environmental, social, and corporate governance principles in business.

He has been vocal about the climate crisis, for example, writing in 2020 that "climate risk is investment risk," adding that "every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change."

Fink, however, no longer uses the term "ESG," saying it's become "weaponized" in politics and "misused by the far left and the far right."

Fink has been hit with criticism from both sides of the political spectrum in recent years.

Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called Fink "king of the woke industrial complex, the ESG movement, the CEO of BlackRock, the most powerful company in the world," at the fourth Republican presidential debate in December.

In a response on LinkedIn, Fink noted BlackRock was accused of "pursuing an ideological agenda."

"The only agenda we have is delivering for our clients," he said. "Now I know why they call this the political silly season."

Fink also has critics on the political left. Climate activists, for example, have protested outside Fink's home and BlackRock's New York headquarters in recent years, calling for a divestment from fossil fuels.

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Fink's annual letters have helped build his and BlackRock's influence and signal where he's focusing efforts.

In addition to his annual letter to investors, he also wrote an annual letter to CEOs for several years but has since stopped publishing the latter. Key figures in business and politics closely follow his yearly remarks.

Fink focused on retirement in his most recent letter to investors.

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Today, BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager.

BlackRock's assets under management hit a record $10.5 trillion in the first quarter of this year.

Fink's success at BlackRock has made him a billionaire.

Today, his net worth is estimated at $1.2 billion, according to Forbes.

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Looking ahead, Fink said in 2023 that he wasn't planning to depart BlackRock "anytime soon."

Though he hasn't shared further specifics on when he aims to retire, he told The Wall Street Journal in May 2023 that he "would prefer to not be at BlackRock in his late 70s."

He added that he and Kapito have been training five possible contenders to succeed him as BlackRock's CEO. One of the five possible candidates, Salim Ramji, has since left the firm to become CEO of Vanguard.