Larry Fink was born in Los Angeles in 1952, trained at UCLA and began his career in mortgage trading at First Boston, where an early-1980s desk loss became, in his telling, the formative experience that produced the institution he later built. He co-founded BlackRock in 1988 with a small team and grew it into the largest asset manager in the world, with assets under management now measured in the trillions of dollars.
BlackRock's reach extends well beyond traditional active and passive investing into the Aladdin risk-management platform that is now used by many of the world's largest financial institutions, into private markets through major acquisitions in infrastructure and private credit, and into the policy debate on climate transition through Fink's annual letters to chief executives.
He has navigated, with varying degrees of public combativeness, the political backlash to ESG investing in parts of the United States while continuing to argue that energy transition is an investable category measured on multi-decade horizons.