Around his 71st birthday, Larry Fink began to blue-sky about the future.
What would it take, the billionaire mused with associates, to really grow the firm, to double the stock price of BlackRock, the giant asset manager he has run for nearly 40 years?
Inside BlackRock, steward now of $11.6 trillion of investor money, two other questions hung in the air: How long Fink would reign at the company, and who could succeed him.
These days, those questions all point to the same answer: Larry Fink isn’t done with BlackRock yet.
Just the opposite. At 72, Fink, BlackRock's chair, CEO and co-founder, is in the middle of his next big act at the company he built into the world’s largest asset manager. Through almost $30 billion in acquisitions, he aims to reshape BlackRock into a dominant force in the private markets, as well as the public ones. People close to the company have privately suggested that the day when Fink steps back — a topic of speculation going back at least a decade — is now years into the future.
The past week has only underscored those thoughts. Fink acted as dealmaker-in-chief in the whirlwind negotiations that clinched BlackRock’s offer to buy more than 40 ports in 23 countries and, most importantly, those at either end of the Panama Canal. He personally talked with President Donald Trump, who wants the U.S. to control the canal, to get it done. Trump praised the company’s deal in a prime time address to the nation.
Far from handing off, Fink is relishing his role atop BlackRock, people close to him say. He’s moving to quiet down years of criticism that the firm pushed “woke capitalism,” and he remains the most powerful elder statesman in the investment industry. He’s intent on seeing BlackRock’s recent deals through, in hopes of ensuring that the firm’s new direction is firmly on course and that his wager to reinvent BlackRock will succeed, according to people familiar with his thinking.
He’s been on a travel blitz over the past few months, visiting Prime Minister Keir Starmer in London; meeting with the ruling emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Mishaal Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah; and traveling to Australia, where he has praised the country’s superannuation fund system. On March 10, he was in Houston for an energy conference, and on March 12 he’s scheduled to be at a conference BlackRock is holding in Washington on retirement.
“Larry is working as hard as he ever has, and he will sprint to the finish line — whenever that is,” said Ralph Schlosstein, a BlackRock co-founder and chairman emeritus of Evercore.
Hours after the deal was announced, Fink himself said: “I probably have more energy today than I did when I was 32.”
If Fink isn’t ready to go, potential successors face a choice. Two have already hit the exits: Salim Ramji now runs rival Vanguard Group, and Mark Wiedman will leave soon. Two other BlackRock veterans, Chief Financial Officer Martin Small, 49, and Chief Operating Officer Rob Goldstein, 51, remain firmly in the picture, according to people familiar with the matter.
They face a changing landscape, as the recent deals both make the firm more complex and bring new faces into the ranks of CEO hopefuls, including Global Infrastructure Partners President Raj Rao, 53, the people say. Rao, alongside GIP Deputy Chair Michael McGhee, played a leading role in clinching the $19 billion ports deal.
Adding to the changes atop BlackRock, the most prominent non-Fink voice on the board — and therefore on succession — is about to change. Murry Gerber, the lead independent director for the past eight years, plans to step down in the next few months, and his replacement hasn’t been announced.
A spokesperson for BlackRock declined to comment. The company said last year that it has succession plans in place for senior management and has identified internal executives for many senior roles.
“One of the challenges that a lot of these founders face is that they’re all brilliant in their own regard, but finding that next generation of leadership is always a challenge,” said Bill Katz, an analyst at Cowen who has followed BlackRock for decades and was around when the company went public in 1999. “For him to leave now, I don’t think is logical,” Katz said, but “they would do themselves some good service by getting the market more familiarized with the next generation.”
Fink is talking about staying on as chairman when the time comes for him to step aside as CEO. That means he could have a major say at BlackRock for years yet. No longer is he saying – as he did when he was 64 — that being chairman would be a “disaster” or “unfair” to the next CEO
“When I do believe the next generation is ready, I’m out,” Fink said in July. “I may be out as a CEO, I may stay as a chairman, but I’m not going to be a blocker.”
Fink has just kicked off BlackRock’s next chapter: one focused on growth in private markets. The three acquisitions — $12.5 billion for Global Infrastructure Partners, £2.55 billion ($3.2 billion) for Preqin and $12 billion for HPS Investment Partners — have either closed or are in the process of closing over the first half of this year. They will leave the firm with $600 billion in alternative assets, roughly double what the firm managed at the end of 2023. Alternatives and technology revenue will account for about one-fifth of the firm’s total.
Fink sees the deals as vital to his company’s future. At the center of the logic behind them is Fink’s answer to how to grow the firm beyond its dominance of stocks and bonds, ETFs and index funds. The leading firms in private markets were getting higher market capitalizations: Blackstone Inc. was worth more with about 1/9th of the assets. Clients from insurers to pensions to family offices and potentially millions of wealthy individuals, too, were shifting to private assets, especially infrastructure and private credit. BlackRock, which spun out of Blackstone in the mid-1990s, had to make a play.
