BlackRock began as a Blackstone side business that its partner later regretted selling
In the late 1980s Larry Fink was still smarting from a 90 million dollar loss at First Boston, and he wanted to build a firm obsessed with risk. Blackstone gave him a credit line in exchange for half the business. The two sides split over shares for new hires, and Blackstone's Stephen Schwarzman sold out, a move he later called a heroic mistake.
Fink founded the company in 1988 with seven partners, several of whom had worked with him at First Boston, where his team pioneered the American market in mortgage-backed securities. Peter Peterson of Blackstone backed the venture with a 5 million dollar credit line and named it Blackstone Financial Management. It was profitable within months, and assets quadrupled to 2.7 billion dollars by 1989.
The firm took the name BlackRock in 1992, when it managed 17 billion dollars. Fink wanted to hand equity to recruits lured from banks, Schwarzman did not want Blackstone's stake shrunk further, and in 1994 the unit was sold to PNC for 240 million dollars. BlackRock went public in October 1999 at 14 dollars a share. In 2000 it launched BlackRock Solutions around its Aladdin system, short for Asset Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network, a platform that now tracks portfolios for many big financial institutions.
Crises repeatedly put it at the centre of finance. The US Treasury hired it in 2009 to value and unwind toxic assets left by the 2008 crash, and in 2020 the Federal Reserve chose it to run corporate bond purchases during the pandemic. The pivotal deal came in 2010, when Barclays, needing capital, sold BlackRock its fund arm, including the iShares exchange-traded funds, for 13.5 billion dollars. By 2014 BlackRock was the world's largest asset manager with 4 trillion dollars.
Growth has continued, with a 12.5 billion dollar purchase of Global Infrastructure Partners in 2024 and a bitcoin fund that same year. As of 2026 it oversaw 15.3 trillion dollars from 70 offices in 30 countries.
Source: BlackRock
