Larry Fink co-founded BlackRock in 1988. It is now the largest asset manager on earth, holding trillions of dollars for pension funds, governments and ordinary savers who have mostly never heard of it.
Two things built that. Low-cost index investing, sold through iShares exchange-traded funds, which changed how the world buys stocks. And Aladdin, the risk-management platform that much of the financial industry — including BlackRock's competitors — now runs on.
When the largest shareholder in thousands of companies speaks, boards everywhere are forced to listen.
Scale of that kind is political whether or not anyone intends it to be. BlackRock is a major shareholder in thousands of public companies, so what it says about governance and strategy lands with force in boardrooms, and has made Fink a target for people who resent that.
His annual letters used to be about long-term value and stakeholder capitalism. They became battlegrounds in a wider argument about what finance is for. Whichever way that argument settles, his firm sits at the centre of how the modern world invests.