Larry Fink: The King of Wall Street and His $10 Trillion Empire

On a gray October morning in 1999, Larry Fink sat in his New York office staring at numbers that refused to cooperate. This was supposed to be a coronation. After more than a decade of building BlackRock from a scrappy fixed-income boutique into a rising star, the company had gone public. The problem was Wall Street didn’t seem impressed. The stock debuted at a valuation of just under $900 million, far below expectations.

Fink, a man known for both his stubborn confidence and volcanic temper, considered scrapping the entire deal. His phone rang. On the other end was Merrill Lynch’s CEO, David Komansky, who had no patience for second thoughts.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Komansky barked. “Just do the IPO. If you do your job well over the next four to five years, it will be a distant memory. Don’t be a fucking asshole.”

It was a brutal pep talk, but it worked. Fink pressed on. Two decades later, that “distant memory” had faded into insignificance. BlackRock wasn’t worth $900 million anymore. It was managing more than $10 trillion in assets, larger than the GDP of every country on earth except the United States and China.

Larry Fink had become the undisputed king of Wall Street.

Laurence Douglas Fink was born on November 2, 1952, in Van Nuys, California, a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley. His mother, Lila, was an English professor. His father, Frederick, ran a shoe store. Larry didn’t shine academically like his older brother, which meant he had to spend afternoons helping in the shop, a chore his more gifted sibling was excused from. The lesson that taught him was that success had to be earned, not handed down.

At UCLA, he studied political science before pivoting to an MBA in real estate at Anderson. Like many bright young men of the 1970s, he was drawn to Wall Street’s promise of money and excitement.

Fink had multiple offers from top investment banks, but his ambition nearly unraveled when he bungled a final interview with Goldman Sachs. “I was devastated,” he later admitted, “but it ended up being the blessing of blessings.” Instead, he joined First Boston, one of the pedigreed investment banks of the era.

For a young man eager to prove himself, First Boston was the right place. Known for its aggressive trading culture, it attracted hungry outsiders willing to take risks and innovate.

Fink started in the bond department. For the uninitiated, a bond trader buys and sells debt — government bonds, corporate bonds, mortgage bonds — looking to profit from changes in interest rates and credit conditions. Bonds may sound dull compared to stocks, but they are the plumbing of global finance, shaping everything from mortgages to national budgets.

Fink quickly gravitated toward a new product called mortgage-backed securities. These were bundles of home loans packaged together and sold as tradable assets. Investors liked them because they paid steady interest. Banks liked them because they freed up capital to issue more loans. In the 1980s, they were hailed as an innovation that that made home ownership possible for millions.

Fink was brilliant at trading them. By 1978, he was running the bond department. He became the youngest managing director in First Boston’s history, and at 31, he was appointed the youngest member of its management committee. The sky seemed the limit.

Then came 1986. Interest rates fell in ways he hadn’t anticipated. His desk’s hedges failed. First Boston lost $100 million, and his reputation collapsed.

“I screwed up. And it was bad,” he later said.

That humiliation would fuel the rest of his career. He became obsessed with risk — not avoiding it, but measuring it, modeling it, never again being blindsided.

In 1988, Fink and seven colleagues, including Barbara Novick and Ralph Schlosstein, struck out on their own with $5 million in seed money from Blackstone. They called their new venture Blackstone Financial Management before renaming it BlackRock.

Their pitch was a simple one of a firm that combined investment management with rigorous risk analytics. Out of this vision came Aladdin — the Asset, Liability, Debt and Derivative Investment Network.

Aladdin began humbly, coded on a $20,000 Sun workstation crammed between a fridge and a coffee machine. But its mission was audacious in that it promised to create a real-time system that could model financial portfolios and prevent the kind of blindside that had ruined Fink at First Boston.

Clients loved it. Pension funds, including the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), trusted BlackRock to protect their billions. Governments saw a firm that could safeguard reserves. Corporations saw a partner that spoke the language of risk. By the mid-1990s, BlackRock had become a magnet for capital.

As Robin Wigglesworth later chronicled in Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever, this mix of technology and pragmatism was what set BlackRock apart.

Growth accelerated through deals. The biggest breakthrough came in 2009 when BlackRock acquired Barclays Global Investors for $13.5 billion. Included in that purchase was iShares, a line of exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

For everyday investors, ETFs are like baskets of stocks or bonds that can be bought and sold like single shares. iShares allowed ordinary savers to access entire markets for low fees, from the S&P 500 to emerging economies.

The effect was revolutionary. Millions of small investors joined the game, while institutions adopted ETFs for efficiency. iShares grew into a juggernaut, with trillions in assets, cementing BlackRock as the biggest money manager in history.

By the 2010s, BlackRock was a financial colossus. Its Aladdin platform quietly powered much of the global market. Its ETFs dominated retirement portfolios. Its advisory arm helped governments in crisis, from the U.S. Treasury during 2008 to the Federal Reserve during the pandemic of 2020.

Larry Fink, once the failed bond trader, now had presidents and central bankers on speed dial.

But his power also drew scrutiny. Critics warned that BlackRock was too close to Washington, especially to leaders of the Democratic party. Environmentalists accused it of hypocrisy over fossil fuels. Billionaire Sam Zell once threw a jab at his arrogance, “I didn’t know Larry Fink had been made God.”

Fink brushed it off. He had been burned before. He knew how to outlast critics.

At 71, he remains vigorous, but the question looms: who succeeds him? Rob Kapito, his longtime lieutenant, is nearing retirement age himself. Other contenders, like Rob Goldstein, Mark Wiedman, Rachel Lord, and Martin Small, jockey for position.

“BlackRock is a one-man show,” one activist investor observed. A former colleague put it differently: “When he leaves, it will be like when Alex Ferguson left Manchester United.”

It is tempting to see inevitability in his rise. But nothing about Larry Fink’s story was preordained. He was the less gifted sibling, the boy sent to stack shoes in his father’s store. He was the young banker humiliated by a $100 million mistake. He was the man rejected by Goldman Sachs.

Yet from those stumbles he built an empire. BlackRock’s $10 trillion makes it bigger than any other money manager in history. Its reach extends into pensions, sovereign wealth funds, corporations, and the portfolios of millions of ordinary savers.

Larry Fink is not God. But anyone who knows anything about global finance would tell you that his shadow is everywhere.