Founder Profile
Larry Fink
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Larry Fink?
Larry Fink is a founder of BlackRock, Inc., which was founded in 1988 with Robert S. Kapito, Susan Wagner, Barbara Novick, Ben Golub, Hugh Frater, Ralph Schlosstein and Keith Anderson.
- Company founded
- BlackRock, Inc.
- Founded
- 1988
- Co-founders
- Robert S. Kapito, Susan Wagner, Barbara Novick, Ben Golub, Hugh Frater, Ralph Schlosstein and Keith Anderson
Background
Laurence D. Fink, born in 1952 in Van Nuys, California, co-founded BlackRock in 1988 and has been its Chairman and CEO ever since. He earned a BA and an MBA at UCLA and spent 1976 to 1988 at First Boston, where he helped build the market for mortgage-backed securities.
Founding Story
Fink joined First Boston in 1976 and became one of its youngest managing directors, running a mortgage-bond desk that was highly profitable until a 1986 interest-rate move cost it about $100 million. The loss convinced him that Wall Street lacked the tools to measure what it owned. In 1988 he started a bond manager inside the Blackstone Group with seven colleagues, and he has led it through the 1994 sale to PNC, the 1999 IPO, the 2006 merger with Merrill Lynch Investment Managers and the 2009 purchase of Barclays Global Investors, which brought iShares. Since 2024 he has pushed BlackRock into infrastructure and private credit through the GIP and HPS deals. His annual letters to CEOs and shareholders are among the most read documents in finance, and his early emphasis on climate risk made BlackRock a target in US politics.
Education: University of California, Los Angeles; UCLA Anderson School of Management. Larry Fink was born in 1952.