About Larry Fink
Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, has made a series of public appearances over the past year to discuss energy policy, infrastructure investment, capital markets, and workforce development. At the 2021 MIT GCFP conference, Fink stated that environmental policies were contributing to inflation and rising energy costs by changing supply without changing demand. He also said the world needed to focus on creating a just transition and new technologies to bring down the cost of green energy, and argued that divestiture from fossil fuels was a form of greenwashing. Fink also said that if the United States is serious about climate change, it would need to reimagine the IMF and World Bank.
In 2026 appearances, Fink discussed the demand for artificial intelligence and data center infrastructure, stating that there is not an AI bubble but rather significant supply shortages where demand is growing faster than anticipated. He described a potential new asset class involving futures on computing power. Alongside Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Fink announced a $30 million investment as part of BlackRock's "Future Builders" initiative to train electricians and skilled tradespeople in Texas, in response to what he called a massive demand for workers. During BlackRock's Q1 2026 earnings call, Fink noted the firm had raised $744 billion in net inflows over the past 12 months and saw assets surpass $11 trillion, citing growth in private markets and wealth management. He described the United States as a "juggernaut" in capital markets and called for expanding access to private assets to help more people grow their retirement savings.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Larry Fink's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Becky Quick0:00
We've kind of gotten used to BlackRock beating the numbers, beating expectations. That's certainly the case this time around. Also, your assets under management up by a pretty significant amount too. We're talking about almost another $100 billion in assets under management up. So where does that put you all right now? Are you closing in on $10 trillion?
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Larry Fink0:19
No, Becky. I mean, obviously we had declines in the equity markets, and we also had a rising dollar, so our assets were basically flatish for the quarter. You know, we're approximately about nine and a half trillion. We did see $98 billion of net inflows in long-term assets from our clients, which is pretty significant. And over the last rolling 12 months, we saw $450 billion in net flows. In addition to the quarter we've just had, continuous quarter increases of above 5% organic growth. And coming in in our third quarter, we had a 9% organic base fee growth, so way beyond what we committed to the street. And then we also had a 16% increase in revenues, and that's despite in the third quarter where we had fee wave concessions of $130 million in our money market business. And so, you know, this is a third consecutive month this year where we have had over $100 million type of fee concessions. And so even with that, we had a 16% revenue increase in our platform. And probably the most important thing to say, it was broad-based. Broad-based in ETFs, we actually had $45 billion in active flows. Flows internationally, flows domestically, in almost every asset category. So a pretty outstanding quarter, and almost every one of our businesses showed that resiliency.
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Becky Quick1:57
Part of that revenue growth came from the 13% growth you saw in tech services revenue. What's happening?
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Larry Fink2:04
Yes. Well, I think the Aladdin system is becoming a platform for more and more of the asset managers, insurance companies, endowments and foundations, and pension funds are using as a platform to manage their entire portfolio, to process their trades, to be working with their custodial banks. We've actually added quite new parts of the business to Aladdin, working with financial advisors in Aladdin Wealth, helping them understand the associated risks across all their clients' portfolios. And we hope to be rolling out in the coming quarter Aladdin Climate, where we're going to have analytics to help people understand and judge and measure a portfolio. Right now, it's pretty easy to overlay a model related to climate risk and see what that will do related to physical impact. What's going to be more difficult and is going to take time is making sure that we have the analytics specifically for every company. And that's going to be a function of the company's reporting more and for companies to be more transparent, and then we can see and judge how companies are performing towards that long-term objective of a net zero world.
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Becky Quick3:18
Hey Larry, your results show that people are definitely investing more. There's interest in that. If you look at JPMorgan and Bank of America, they have talked about how card spending is up really significantly too. You kind of put those pictures together and that gives you a picture of a very strong consumer and a strong economy right now. But you do have some concerns about what you see that are significantly more concerning than the views we've gotten from either Jamie Dimon or from Brian Moynihan recently. What is it that you see that concerns you?
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Larry Fink3:52
Well, I think we're in a long transition, the transition out from COVID. And during the period of COVID, we've seen, as you said, great successes in some components of the economy, and then we see other components of society being left behind. We are seeing a much more fragmented, divergent world in terms of the developing world growing much faster than the developing world. And so we are also in this transition. I mean, part of the irony today, we have more job openings than ever before, and we have, it is estimated, another eight million people who were in the workforce not in the workforce. And so there's this huge divergence between the people who are out of work or looking for a job and those companies who are looking for help. I believe those who are looking for help is much more overwhelming. But I think what is transforming our world, and this is that transition that I'm talking about, I think we underestimate the power of the gig economy. I think we underestimate what COVID has done to so many people throughout the world in terms of trying to navigate the work-family balance, and the gig economy in many cases a lot more accommodative. I also believe so many companies who are dependent on part-time workers not paying them a health care benefit or retirement benefits, there are alternatives to those jobs now.
