Inside a Dark Rock
BlackRock, as far as can be seen from outside
In a casino the bank earns from the game. BlackRock earns from the playing field.
I. The rock
At the end of September 2026 BlackRock managed 15.5 trillion dollars. That is about three times what Germany produces in a year. In the third quarter alone 205 billion dollars of new money came in, and 869 billion in the twelve months before.
This money does not belong to BlackRock. It belongs to pension funds, insurers, foundations, sovereign funds and millions of savers who have bought a BlackRock fund or ETF. BlackRock manages it and charges a fee. On average that is around 15 dollars a year on 10,000 dollars of client money. Little for the individual, enormous in total: 7.75 billion dollars of revenue in a single quarter, almost four fifths of it from such ongoing fees and from lending out the shares it manages.
Who owns BlackRock itself? According to the 2026 proxy statement only two holders have more than five per cent: BlackRock’s own funds with 6.2 per cent and the Kuwait Investment Authority with 5.1 per cent. At the end of 2023 Vanguard reported 8.7 per cent. The rock belongs in part to itself and to its own kind.
At the top, since its founding in 1988, stands Larry Fink. For 2025 he received 37.7 million dollars, 245 times what BlackRock’s median employee earns. At the 2026 annual meeting around a third of shareholders voted against the pay package.
II. The cheap meadow
In “The House Always Wins” we gave savers an honest piece of advice: whoever buys a broadly diversified index cheaply and holds it for decades receives most of the value created. That is exactly what BlackRock sells. Its ETF brand iShares holds 27.5 per cent of all ETF money worldwide and 38.8 per cent in Europe. German investors held ETFs worth 697 billion euros in mid-2026, more than twice as much as in 2023.
For the saver this is good. A BlackRock index fund costs a fraction of what a Riester contract cost. From large pension funds BlackRock takes on average only three to four cents per 100 dollars a year. Nobody is being fleeced here.
But it is precisely the most sensible advice that makes the biggest house bigger still. Every euro that flows into an index buys a piece of every company in that index, and with it that company’s voting rights. The cheap meadow is open to all. But whoever manages the meadow ends up sitting in every annual general meeting.
III. The co-owner of everything
According to a study by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, BlackRock holds around eleven per cent of all DAX shares. At Deutsche Bank it was 8.1 per cent in January 2026 according to a voting rights notification, at Siemens 7.1 per cent in March. Five per cent is often enough to be the largest shareholder. In the United States, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street together are the largest shareholder in 88 per cent of the companies in the S&P 500, and already in 2018 they cast around a quarter of the votes at those companies’ meetings.
Imagine a town with three bakeries. If all three are partly owned by the same owner, that owner has little interest in a price war between them. What one bakery gains, another loses, and he holds them all. Whether this dampens competition in reality is disputed. In 2018 the economists José Azar, Martin Schmalz and Isabel Tecu found higher ticket prices among American airlines on routes with more common owners. A 2025 study found fewer generic market entries in the pharmaceutical industry. Other researchers, using the same airline data, found no effect. A 2024 review notes that no consensus has yet emerged. Honestly, more cannot be said.
What is established is that BlackRock votes with other people’s money. Since 2022 clients have been able to exercise their voting rights themselves. This is possible for just under half of its index equity assets and is used for about a tenth. For the large remainder, BlackRock decides.
IV. A conscience in the wind
How BlackRock decides has changed. In 2018 Fink wrote in his annual letter that every company must show how it makes a positive contribution to society. In 2020 he called climate change a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects. In 2022 he defended “stakeholder capitalism”: it was “not woke”, BlackRock acted this way because its people were capitalists.
Then came the headwind. In August 2022 Texas put BlackRock on a list of firms said to be boycotting the energy industry, and in 2024 the Texas school fund withdrew 8.5 billion dollars. In June 2023 Fink said he no longer used the word ESG. In February 2024 BlackRock largely withdrew from the investor initiative Climate Action 100+, and in January 2025 it left the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative altogether. In June 2025 Texas took BlackRock off its list again. Since November 2024 Texas and other states have been suing BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, alleging that they used their holdings to curb coal production. Vanguard settled in February 2026 for 29.5 million dollars without admitting wrongdoing. BlackRock is fighting the case; trial is set for January 2028.
The votes follow the weather. In 2021 BlackRock supported 47 per cent of shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues. In 2023 it was seven per cent, and in the season to June 2026 just one of 318. Two Dutch pension funds, PFZW and PME, withdrew mandates worth billions from BlackRock, partly for this reason. One need not think the proposals were good to see the pattern. The conscience was part of the product. When it cost clients, it was taken off the shelf.
V. The back rooms
Where BlackRock wants to earn its money today is shown by its third-quarter figures. Investments in markets not traded on exchanges, that is infrastructure, private credit and private equity, make up two per cent of assets under management but bring in eleven per cent of the ongoing fees. On 100 dollars BlackRock takes around 80 cents a year there, twenty times as much as from a pension fund on the meadow.
BlackRock has bought its way into these back rooms: in 2024 the infrastructure manager Global Infrastructure Partners for 12.5 billion dollars, in 2025 the data provider Preqin for 2.5 billion pounds and the credit fund manager HPS for around 12 billion dollars. By 2030 BlackRock wants to raise 400 billion dollars for such investments.
Whoever invests there cannot get out at any time, and the price is not set by a daily stock market quote. For a pension fund with decades of time this may suit. But Fink wants more. In 2025 he wrote that the classic mix of 60 per cent equities and 40 per cent bonds might no longer be enough, and proposed 20 per cent in non-listed assets. Infrastructure, he wrote, was “locked behind high walls”. In 2026 he wrote that for many people retirement is their first and often only meaningful connection to the capital markets, and that he saw a sizable opportunity to bring private markets to more investors.
The door is now being opened. In August 2025 President Trump ordered by executive order that such investments be made easier in American workplace retirement plans, and in March 2026 the Labor Department proposed the rules. BlackRock announced its first target-date fund with private markets for 2026. In Germany the retirement savings depot starts in 2027. BlackRock intends to offer not only ETFs but also active funds and ELTIFs, European funds for precisely such non-listed investments. According to the German lobby register, BlackRock sent statements on the retirement savings depot and the early-start pension to the Bundestag and ministries. That they influenced the wording of the laws is not established.
On 21 October 2026, after the federal government’s investment summit, Fink told Handelsblatt: when the state invests in infrastructure, private capital will follow on a considerable scale. According to a report in der Freitag he also told Handelsblatt: today no fixed pension level is guaranteed any more.
How far the playing field reaches is shown by the sale of the ports of the Hong Kong group CK Hutchison. In March 2025 CK Hutchison agreed with a consortium of BlackRock and the shipping company MSC on 22.8 billion dollars for 43 ports, including two on the Panama Canal. China demanded a stake for its state shipping company COSCO, and in January 2026 Panama’s Supreme Court declared the concession unconstitutional. By late summer 2026 nothing had been signed. A deal about quay walls had become world politics.
VI. The revolving door
From 2016 to March 2020 Friedrich Merz was chairman of the supervisory board of BlackRock Germany. According to the announcement at the time, he was also to cultivate relations with clients, regulators and government authorities. In answers to inquiries by the Left party, the federal government listed his appointments in this role: two meetings with foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel in 2017 and 2018, one with chancellery chief Helge Braun, one with finance minister Olaf Scholz and his state secretary Jörg Kukies on “financial market questions”, and further talks with Kukies up to March 2020. The company denies that Merz brought in mandates for BlackRock. The million euros gross that he named as his income in 2018 came from all his board seats together. What he earned at BlackRock has not been published. We have found no statement by Chancellor Merz about BlackRock.
The door turns in both directions and in many countries. The former British chancellor George Osborne received 650,000 pounds a year as an adviser in 2017 for about four days a month, while he was still a member of parliament. The former Swiss central bank governor Philipp Hildebrand has been vice chairman of BlackRock since 2012. Brian Deese went from BlackRock to become President Biden’s top economic adviser in 2021. Elga Bartsch, until 2022 head of research at the BlackRock Investment Institute, has headed the economic policy department of the German economics ministry since 2023. None of this is forbidden. It merely shows that there is lively traffic between the house and the states that write its rules.
VII. What is not true
There is a good deal of confetti about BlackRock too. Fairness demands that we dissect it as well.
BlackRock does not “own” the world. It manages other people’s money, and clients can withdraw it, as the two Dutch pension funds have shown. Nor does BlackRock own “47 per cent of Ukraine”. Foreign companies may not buy farmland there. The reconstruction fund that BlackRock was to help design pro bono was never launched, and the search for investors was halted in January 2025.
The risk software Aladdin, which other asset managers, insurers and banks also use, does not steer the financial world. The often-cited figure of over 20 trillion dollars on the platform dates from 2020. BlackRock no longer publishes newer figures. Aladdin is not on the list of critical IT service providers that the EU financial supervisors presented in November 2025. BlackRock has never been designated “systemically important”. In the raid over cum-ex transactions at its Munich office in 2018, BlackRock was according to reports at the time not the target of the investigation, and there was no indictment.
What remains is serious enough. When the Fed supported the markets in spring 2020, it hired BlackRock to run its bond purchases. 48 per cent of the ETFs it bought in one week in May were BlackRock iShares funds. BlackRock charged no management fee on these funds of its own. In the same year the European Commission awarded BlackRock a study on how sustainability risks should be built into banking supervision, for 280,000 euros against an estimated 550,000. The European Ombudsman saw a clear risk that BlackRock’s own interests might influence the outcome. She found no formal maladministration because the rules were too vague. Whoever is this big is called when there is a fire, and consulted when rules are written.
VIII. The thesis
BlackRock does not cheat savers. On the open meadow of index funds it is cheap, and for the individual usually a better choice than almost anything sold to him in the past. The problem is not the fee. The problem is the size.
A house that holds a stake in almost every large company no longer earns from the game, but from the playing field. It votes with other people’s money, and its conscience follows the political weather. And because the meadow yields little, it builds back rooms where the fees are twenty times higher, and lets the states open the door to them: the retirement savings of people to whom nobody guarantees a fixed pension level any more. With Riester it was an insurer that earned from the contract. This time it is a rock that earns from the whole.
Further reading: The House Always Wins · The Effects of Zero-Sum Games · The Supervisory Board in the Chancellery · The Forced Purchase