BlackRock, Inc.

Larry Fink co-founded BlackRock in 1988 in a single room at Blackstone Group, with eight partners and a focus on fixed income risk management. Fink had previously been one of the most successful mortgage bond traders at First Boston — until a single bad trade lost the firm $100 million, ending his career there. The humiliation of that loss shaped BlackRock's entire philosophy: obsessive risk management through technology and data rather than gut instinct.

BlackRock developed a proprietary risk management platform called Aladdin — Asset, Liability, Debt, and Derivative Investment Network — that could model the risk of complex financial portfolios with unprecedented sophistication. Aladdin became so powerful that BlackRock began licensing it to other financial institutions. Today, Aladdin monitors approximately $21 trillion in assets for clients including pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and central banks — meaning BlackRock's technology watches over a significant fraction of global financial assets.

When the 2008 financial crisis erupted, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury Department needed a firm that could value the toxic mortgage assets sitting on bank balance sheets — assets so complex that most institutions could not price them accurately. They called BlackRock. The firm was hired to manage the assets of Bear Stearns, AIG, and Fannie Mae during the crisis. The engagement gave BlackRock unparalleled insight into the financial system and cemented its reputation as the most sophisticated risk manager on earth.

BlackRock acquired Barclays Global Investors in 2009 for $13.5 billion, instantly becoming the world's largest asset manager with over $3 trillion under management. BGI brought the iShares ETF business — the world's largest exchange-traded fund platform. The acquisition transformed BlackRock from a large fixed income manager into the dominant force in global asset management. Assets under management subsequently grew to over $10 trillion.

When COVID-19 triggered market panic in March 2020, the Federal Reserve again turned to BlackRock to manage its corporate bond purchasing programme — effectively giving a private company significant influence over the Fed's market interventions. Simultaneously, Larry Fink's annual letters to CEOs — in which he outlined BlackRock's expectations on climate change, diversity, and corporate governance — attracted criticism from both left (for not being forceful enough) and right (for imposing a political agenda). BlackRock had become too large to be politically neutral.