Larry Fink

Chairman and CEO

Laurence Douglas Fink was born in California in 1952, graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles and took an MBA there in 1976. He worked at First Boston, where he was among the pioneers of the mortgage-backed securities market and rose to the bank's management committee, leaving after a large trading loss in 1986. In 1988 he founded BlackRock with seven partners under the umbrella of the Blackstone Group; it became independent in 1994. The firm grew through the acquisition of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers in 2006 and of Barclays Global Investors with its iShares platform in 2009, becoming the largest asset manager in the world with more than ten trillion dollars under management. His annual letter to chief executives is among the most debated documents in institutional investment.