BlackRock: A Case Study in Finance Capital (Part 1)

This post was originally published on July 18, 2025.

Welcome back to This is Fine(ance Capital)! We have for you here the first of what will be a three-part case study on BlackRock, the largest and most well-known asset manager in the world. These posts take some time to prepare and we can’t offer an exact timeline on when the next ones will be out, but we hope they will be worth the wait.

These days, everyone loves to hate BlackRock. Many on the right see the firm as practicing “ wokeness ” in its effort to carry out a “leftist ESG” agenda. Actual leftists, for their part, often characterize asset managers like BlackRock as parasitic forces sucking the life out of the “real” economy.[1] One thing that just about anyone who has heard of BlackRock can agree upon, however, is that it is really big and way too powerful.

Our goal in this series of posts is to provide some conceptual clarity and empirical grounding for thinking critically about what financial institutions like BlackRock are and what they aren’t. As always, our interpretation is informed by the rich body of research on the political economy of asset managers. In particular, we believe that a recent essay by the political economist Benjamin Braun and the geographer Brett Christophers offers a valuable three-pronged framework for approaching the subject:

Asset managers are capitalists themselves;

Asset managers are shapers of other capitalists;

Asset managers are shapers of the broader political and economic system.

This three-part case study will follow the Braun-Christophers framework, beginning with #1: BlackRock as a capitalist entity.[2] To dig into this question, we draw upon BlackRock’s recent financial disclosures, transcripts and related materials from meetings with investors, and the extensive business press reporting on the firm.

Because a lot of this stuff can be pretty technical and dry, we begin by laying out the big-picture takeaways in blue. If that’s all you need or want, feel free to stop there. Readers looking for more granular data and analysis can continue on to the full post. We’ve tried to make this longer version as accessible as possible, and we hope that even those who are brand new to the subject will give it a shot—and give us your feedback!

Key Takeaways

BlackRock itself makes money off fees it charges to investors. Historically, the lion’s share of the firm’s revenues have come from “base fees,” which are simply a percentage of assets under management (AUM). Thus, BlackRock’s overriding objective is to see AUM increase, and they can accomplish this in two principal ways: 1) getting investors to give them more money; and 2) increasing the value of the assets they currently have (something that can happen, for instance, through the stock market going up).

For a decade-and-a-half after the 2008 financial crisis, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy of low interest rates contributed to a boom in the prices of financial assets like stocks (and also real estate). In this context, asset managers embraced a “passive” investment strategy of riding the upswing rather than actively trying to pick winners and losers. The assets under management (AUM) of BlackRock and other asset managers skyrocketed during this period . Put simply, the post-2008 monetary policy regime was an important factor behind the growth of BlackRock.

In response to inflation related to the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the Federal Reserve broke from its post-2008 monetary policy and began increasing interest rates in 2022. Today, the future course of monetary policy is uncertain because the Fed itself faces so many uncertainties, including the volatility surrounding Trump’s tariffs and the potential swings in consumer prices that might come from a reconfiguration of global trade. This changing monetary policy environment might complicate the business model that BlackRock and other asset managers have pursued since 2008.

Over the past year or so, BlackRock has significantly expanded its capacity to undertake “alternative investments”—things like private equity, infrastructure, and private credit. Specifically, the firm recently acquired Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), HPS Partners (a private credit manager), and Preqin (a private markets data provider). BlackRock has also increased its offerings of active public market funds. So, too, has it begun venturing into even more speculative areas like crypto markets. These moves represent a marked departure from the passive investment strategy and focus on public equities (a.k.a. the stock market) in the decade-and-a-half after 2008.

Management of alternative investments and active public market funds provides BlackRock with “performance fees.” Unlike fixed base fees, performance fees are tied to the returns yielded by the investment. To date, performance fees still constitute a small share of BlackRock’s revenues relative to base fees. But the acquisitions of GIP and HPS suggest that the firm may see performance fees as increasingly important to its business model.

So, here are some basic questions that will inspire many of our upcoming posts: How are changes in the global political-economic environment affecting the business model of asset managers? What might this mean for the character of asset managers as capitalist entities themselves? And what could all of that mean for capitalism more broadly?

BlackRock Today

BlackRock is a publicly traded firm tasked with generating returns (cash and stock price appreciation) for its shareholders, which include its senior executives. In pursuit of this goal, the firm has five main levers it can pull:

Increasing its assets under management (AUM);

Increasing the base fees charged per dollar of AUM;

Holding down operating expenses as revenue increases;

Bringing in more revenue from the sale of technology services and other sources; and

Increasing performance fees generated by funds and/or increasing the amount of AUM invested in funds eligible for performance fees.

BlackRock’s role in shaping other capitalists and the broader economic and political system are important parts of this story. However, this post will focus more narrowly on BlackRock’s own operations.

In thinking about BlackRock as a capitalist entity, we want to know how it generates revenue and profit, how it has grown and intends to grow, and to what ends it does all of this. As we noted in our most recent post , the asset management industry does exactly what its name suggests: it manages the assets of others. Open up BlackRock’s most recent annual report and it will tell you as much, stating that it “derives a substantial portion of its revenue from providing investment advisory and administration fees,” which are “primarily based on agreed-upon percentages of AUM” ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, p.48 ). But what does it manage and on what scale?

The chart below tracks the trajectories of the company’s AUM and revenue over the last 20 years.[3] During this period, BlackRock’s AUM increased from approximately $452.7 billion to $11.6 trillion, and revenue increased from about $1.0 billion to $20.4 billion. Revenue as a percentage of AUM peaked at 0.38% in 2008, hit a low of 0.14% in 2009, and averaged 0.23% over the full time period.

Looking at the chart, a few things stand out. First, AUM more than doubled between the end of 2005 and the end of 2006. This largely reflects the acquisition of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (MLIM) in 2006, which not only increased AUM but also expanded BlackRock’s product mix and geographic scope ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2006,p.1 ).[4] Following the acquisition, revenue as a percentage of AUM was relatively high in 2007 and 2008: 0.35% and 0.38%, respectively. At the time, asset management fees were generally higher for many types of investment funds than they are now. However, this increase also reflects the fact that after acquiring MLIM, BlackRock had a new, higher-fee product mix.

The next big jump in AUM—an increase of more than 150%—occurred in 2009. That was largely due to the acquisition of Barclays Global Investors (BGI) in the wake of the global financial crisis, a deal that suddenly made BlackRock the largest publicly traded asset manager ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2009, p.1 ). Importantly, the transaction made BlackRock the owner of Barclays’s iShares Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) platform, which positioned BlackRock to take advantage of the explosive growth in passive asset management after the global financial crisis.[5]

Shifting toward passive funds resulted in lower revenue as a percentage of AUM (0.22%) for the 15 years after the acquisition. However, steadily rising asset prices and an overall increase in AUM propelled total revenue higher over that time. The firm has now reached a scale that has caught the attention of regulators and inspired increased public scrutiny across the political spectrum.

How Does BlackRock Manage Clients’ Money?

Focusing on BlackRock in the present, we can get a little more granular. Let’s start with the assets under management: which types of funds are they invested in, and who are the clients?

The table below, taken from the most recent annual report, shows that the majority (~ 54%) of BlackRock’s $11.6 trillion of AUM was in public equity funds at the end of 2024 ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, p.2 ). While BlackRock’s enormous public equity holdings have attracted the most scrutiny, a substantial portion of AUM (~ 25%) was invested in fixed-income (bond) products. The remainder of Blackrock’s AUM was in alternative investments (~ 4%); cash management, which refers to money market funds and other short-term investments (~8%); and multi-asset portfolios that contain a variety of asset classes(~ 9%). On the far right of the table below, we can see that over the last five years, AUM in alternative investments grew most quickly while fixed-income growth was slowest.

Where does all this money come from? Based on scattered data in the annual report, BlackRock’s investors seem to come disproportionately from world regions with the largest financial sectors. We are told that BlackRock has clients in more than 100 countries. However, clients in the U.S. accounted for about 65% of all AUM ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, p.1 ). The remainder of the Americas accounted for about 3%, while the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and Asia-Pacific regions accounted for 24% and 8% of AUM, respectively ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, p.9 ). BlackRock didn’t provide a geographic breakdown of the assets it ultimately manages on behalf of its clients, but we’ll discuss some research on this question in part 2.[6]

And who are these investors? BlackRock provides a somewhat fuzzy breakdown of its AUM by client type for 2024( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, p.3-4 ). We say “fuzzy” because the company is unable to determine the end-investor for all exchange traded funds (ETFs). The table below, adapted from BlackRock’s disclosures, shows AUM broken out by investor type and product type. Each figure is then presented as a percentage of the total AUM.

About 54% of the total AUM was identified as managed for institutional investors, which include retirement plans (defined-benefit pension funds and defined-contribution plans), foundations, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, banks, insurance companies, central banks, supranationals, multilateral entities, and government agencies. Meanwhile, about 9% was identified as managed for retail clients—individuals who generally make their investments through intermediaries ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, p.3,5 ).

We’ll discuss these client types more in part 2, but for now, we want to highlight one segment of the institutional client base: retirement plans sponsored by corporations. Given the scale of BlackRock’s public equity holdings, there is an obvious tension between exercising governance rights as a shareholder and managing—or seeking to manage—the assets of a retirement plan sponsored by a publicly traded corporation. While shareholders eager to maximize returns may have an adversarial relationship with a given corporation’s management, BlackRock itself may have an interest in maintaining an amicable relationship with management with an eye to securing contracts to steward the company’s retirement plan.

The $4.2 trillion invested in exchange traded funds (ETFs), which made BlackRock the largest ETF provider in the world, is broken out as a separate investor type because, again, the firm cannot be certain who the end investors in those funds actually are. We know that ETFs account for about 37% of AUM, but the thing BlackRock tells us about the client breakdown is that “ETFs have a significant retail component.”

Where Does BlackRock’s Revenue Come From?

Before diving into BlackRock’s revenue, we should note that we sort of lied when we said “the asset management industry does exactly what its name suggests.” BlackRock does manage the assets of others. However, it also generates revenue from other activities, like selling technology services, that aren’t directly tied to AUM. We’ll come back to these revenue sources and performance-related fees, but for now the focus will be on base fees (investment advisory, administration, and securities lending).[7]

Base fees totaled approximately $16.1 billion in 2024—79% of BlackRock’s revenue. As a percentage of the $11.6 trillion of AUM, that is about 0.14%. But not every client pays the same rate. The notes to financial statements provide an incomplete but still useful picture of who likely pays more and less (adapted from BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, F-31 ).

Retail clients appear to pay more: they account for only 10% of long-term AUM but they generate 28% of long-term base fees. There could be two reasons for this. First, we know from the AUM disclosures that about 72% of long-term retail AUM was invested in actively managed funds. Second, retail clients generally have less negotiating power than institutional investors. (Note that for revenue identified as derived from retail clients, BlackRock’s report only provides us with the total base fees for all long-term products. This excludes cash management.)

Institutional investors appear to pay less: they account for about 51% of all long-term AUM but only about 45% of base fees derived from long-term AUM. The same two factors might explain this. Institutional investors have greater negotiating power, and more of their money is invested in lower-fee index funds. As with retail clients, we’re only provided with base fees derived from long-term AUM managed for institutional clients. However, we know from the AUM disclosures that there was a split of approximately 40% invested in active funds and 60% in index funds. Despite that split, about 77% of the long-term institutional base fees were derived from the active funds.

Still, we can’t say for certain what rates retail and institutional clients pay because, as with AUM figures, BlackRock’s report doesn’t assign base fees derived from ETFs to specific client types. Again, we only know that “ETFs have a significant retail component.” ETFs accounted for about 40% of all long-term AUM and about 45% of base fees derived from long-term AUM. Given that we generally think of ETFs as synonymous with index funds and rock-bottom fees, it may be surprising that the overall fee rate on ETFs is higher than the fee rate across all funds. However, BlackRock also manages active ETFs and has branched into new areas, like its Bitcoin ETF. A recent Bloomberg analysis estimated that the Bitcoin ETF was already generating more revenue for BlackRock than its S&P 500-tracking ETF despite the latter being almost nine times larger.

Rounding out the base fees is the shorter-term cash management business. This represented about 8% of all AUM, and almost 99% of that was managed for institutional clients. Cash management represented about 6.5% of all base fees, so the base fees rate for this segment was a little less than the average rate.

Lastly, the geographic breakdown of base fees loosely tracks the AUM: slightly lower in the Americas (65% of base fees vs 68% of AUM), a little higher in EMEA (29% vs 24%), and slightly lower in Asia Pacific (6% vs 8%) ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, p.9 ).

If base fees represent 79% of BlackRock’s revenue, where does the rest come from?. The table below, adapted from the disclosures in the footnotes to the financial statements, breaks out the remaining revenue sources—performance fees, technology services, distribution, advisory and other fees—by dollar amount and percentage of all revenue (adapted from BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, F-31 ).

Performance fees, which accounted for just under 6% of all revenue in 2024, are generally structured as a percentage of profit that BlackRock receives when the performance of a fund exceeds certain thresholds. Earlier we noted that, despite BlackRock’s association with low-cost index funds, the firm does manage active funds. As seen in the table, a relatively small proportion of performance fees (about 18%) were earned across equity, fixed income and multi-asset funds. Alternative investment funds accounted for the bulk (about 82%) of performance fees. Within this category, the majority of performance fees were derived from liquid alternatives (direct hedge funds and hedge funds of funds). However, high-fee private market funds are a targeted growth area for BlackRock after its recent acquisitions of infrastructure manager Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) and private credit manager HPS Partners (HPS).[8]

Technology services revenue totaled approximately $1.6 billion – a little under 8% of all revenue – in 2024. This includes investment, risk management, and advisory software platforms offered to institutions and retail clients through contracts ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, p.10 ). Aladdin, the investment and risk management platform used by both BlackRock and its clients, is the most well-known of the platforms and central to the growth of this business. BlackRock has also acquired and incorporated other technology businesses, including Cachematrix , a cash management platform, and eFront , an alternative investment management platform. Most recently, BlackRock acquired Preqin , one of the largest private markets data and benchmarking providers. In part 2, we’ll discuss the role of technology services in shaping other capitalists.

Distribution fees, which represented a little over 6% of revenue, cover marketing and selling fees. BlackRock notes that these fees are passed through to third-party companies that carry out these functions and, as a result, are also recorded as a cost ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, F-13 ).

Finally, advisory and other fees represented a little over 1% of revenue. This category includes transition management services, which involve BlackRock buying and selling securities on behalf of clients.[9] It also includes BlackRock’s investments in corporate entities where it has significant influence, but not control.[10]

BlackRock’s Profits, Stock Price Valuation, and Plan for the Coming Years

There are a range of ways that asset managers can generate profit. For one type of asset manager, performance at the investment fund level may be most important. BlackRock hopes to make this type of fee more central to its identity with its acquisitions of HPS, GIP, and Preqin. However, as we saw above, performance fees accounted for a little under 6% of all revenue in 2024. For now, most of BlackRock’s revenue is generated by relatively low and steady base fees earned on both index and active funds, and recurring fees for various services.

In order to generate sufficient profitability margins, BlackRock needs to hold costs down (using size and technical infrastructure) while scaling up its AUM and the services it provides (using marketing). We can see in the chart below that BlackRock has consistently done that in a variety of market conditions during the two decades since the global financial crisis.

Of course, BlackRock is itself a publicly traded corporation and its incentives are shaped by its shareholders and their desire for returns—cash payouts from dividends and buybacks and/or share price appreciation—not just accrual accounting earnings.

Over the last 20 years, BlackRock steadily increased its dividend from $1.20 per share in 2005 to $20.40 per share in 2024. With a stock valuation that hovered just above $1,000 at the end of 2024, BlackRock’s payout ratio of roughly 2% was higher than the S&P 500 average over the last few years. The company has also periodically engaged in stock buybacks under 2010 and 2023 programs that together authorized the repurchase of up to 7.9 million shares ( BLK 10-K, 31 Dec 2024, p.35 ).

The company’s profitability in turn shapes its stock price, which is typically valued as a multiple of expected earnings per share. As an example, the image below shows that Wells Fargo analysts have a 1-year target price of $1,105 for BlackRock’s stock based on a multiple of 21x their estimate of earnings per share in 2026.[11] This follows a convention of projecting future earnings—one year ahead in this case—and calculating a terminal value.[12] Noteworthy here is the disclosure that 21x is at the “top end” of traditional asset managers, and the analysts explain that they chose it because of BlackRock’s size, breadth of operations, and stability of results. Elsewhere in the report, the analysts highlight technology services, “durable fund flow” (organic growth of AUM), and “potential major benefits from acquisitions announced in 2024.” Importantly, the last detail refers to the acquisitions of GIP, HPS and Preqin. Preqin itself is not a high-fee business, but its integration with Aladdin and other technology services will be part of BlackRock’s overall strategy for building out its private markets business.

So profitability affects stock prices, and we know that over the coming years, BlackRock wants to increase the total value of its shares—that is, its market capitalization. At its June 12 Investor Day event, BlackRock announced an aspirational target of doubling its market capitalization by 2030. How will it do so? As seen in the slide below , outsized growth in alternative investments and technology services revenue are central to the story that the company is pitching to investors.

Based on the Investor Day presentations, the firm seems intent on using existing hooks—its current relationships with clients whose assets it manages and its contracts for technology services—to cross-sell private markets products. A GIP executive also argued that corporate relationships based on BlackRock’s existing debt and equity ownership presented deal-making opportunities for the infrastructure business.[13]

It’s also clear that this growth plan would involve expanding beyond the typical institutional investor clients that have long invested in private funds by placing private market assets in more retail investor portfolios, taking on more insurance firm assets, and creating target date funds that contain private assets to be offered in defined-contribution plans.[14]

It’s not hard to understand why BlackRock is pursuing this route. A recent Morningstar report notes that mutual fund and ETF fees have declined for decades and some index fund fees are less than 5 bps at this point. From the perspective of BlackRock and other index fund providers, the good news is that there isn’t much left to cut. This, combined with recent growth in active and alternative ETFs, has slowed the overall decline in fees. However, if BlackRock wants to increase its overall revenue per dollar of AUM, the high-fee private markets offer a much shorter path to doing so.

In making these changes, BlackRock hopes to vie with competitors in private markets that have turbocharged their stock valuations by generating much higher revenue and earnings per dollar of AUM. Those competitors aren’t necessarily valued at a higher multiple. At 23.0x expected 2026 earnings per share, Blackstone is valued at a higher multiple by the same Wells Fargo analysts. However, Apollo is valued at only 16.6x expected 2026 earnings per share.[15] The key difference is their high revenue and earnings per dollar of AUM. At the end of 2024, Blackstone and Apollo managed approximately $785 billion and $1.1 trillion of AUM, respectively, compared to BlackRock’s $11.6 trillion.[16] However, Apollo’s market capitalization of $76.1 billion was just over half of BlackRock’s $151.8 billion as of mid-June 2025, and Blackstone’s market capitalization of $166.8 billion exceeded BlackRock’s market capitalization (as of mid-day 19 Jun 2025).

Beyond the private markets and technology focus, Investor Day presentations focused on potential growth in active funds and expansion in markets that were adopting policies that encouraged retirement savings. Comments about crypto assets were also noteworthy. Aladdin is now linked to Coinbase’s platform, and BlackRock is now the “preferred asset manager for the underlying reserves of Circle’s USDC stablecoin.”[17] The mandate for the latter is over $50 billion. And beyond the $70 billion dollar Bitcoin fund, BlackRock also manages an Ethereum ETF and intends to expand into other digital assets and tokenized funds.

Executive compensation

We won’t go into too much detail here. Top corporate executives are typically paid a mix of cash (base salary and bonus payments) and equity (deferred and incentive payments), and we all know that it typically adds up to some outrageous figure . As an example, BlackRock valued CEO Larry Fink’s 2024 compensation at about $36.7 million ( BLK DEF 14A, 4 Apr 2025, p.8) . The company received a fair number of “say on pay” protest votes at its last two annual shareholder meetings. However, those mild revolts only challenged the lack of transparency in how the Board of Directors determines discretionary pay. In general, shareholders of publicly traded firms have been uninterested in and/or incapable of containing the level of executive compensation.

However, we do want to highlight one recent change to Larry Fink’s compensation: the inclusion of an allocation of carried interest generated by BlackRock’s private market funds ( BLK DEF 14A, 4 Apr 2025, pp.69-70) . This is the share of profit typically taken by the general partner in a private equity fund and is present in funds raised by GIP and HPS . Largely as a result of the carried interest he’s received, Scott Kapnick, the founder of HPS, is estimated to be worth $4.3 billion —far more than Fink. The new compensation structure essentially creates a pipeline for carried interest to flow from certain private markets funds to Fink’s compensation.

Because BlackRock’s business has historically been tilted toward index funds and base fees that are charged as a percentage of AUM, a rising stock market has been in its interest. The change in compensation structure—along with the broader private market growth plans—raises questions about how the CEO’s incentives might be changing. We’ll come back to this in part 2. For now, we’ll leave you with comments that Fink made in a CNN interview in March about the possibility of a large fall in stock prices, suggesting that it would be a “buying opportunity.”

Conclusion: More Active Management and Private Market Investing to Come?

As a capitalist entity itself, BlackRock uses these levers to increase revenue and profit[18]:

Increasing its assets under management

Increasing the base fees charged per dollar of AUM

Holding down operating expenses as revenue increases

Bringing in more revenue from the sale of technology services and other revenue sources

Increasing performance fees generated by funds and/or increasing the amount of AUM invested in funds eligible for performance fees

A question to keep our eyes on is which of the levers is the firm focusing on at any given time. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, BlackRock’s growth was powered primarily by #1-3, although #4 also played a role. More recently, the acquisitions of GIP, HPS Partners, and Preqin suggest that #4-5 may prove to be of increasing importance to the firm’s business model. Going forward, the global political-economic context, including the monetary policy approach adopted by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, will be crucial to consider in analyzing the profit-seeking behavior of asset managers like BlackRock.

We hope that going through this exercise has provided some grounding for the discussions that will come next. It will take some time to put part 2 together, so we may push out a shorter post or two in the interim if something catches our eyes.

Thanks for reading!

[1] For extended critiques of the tendencies to view finance as a distinct power bloc within capitalism to confront, see Nick Bernards, Fictions of Financialization Rethinking Speculation, Exploitation and Twenty-First-Century Capitalism (Pluto, 2024) and Scott Aquanno and Stephen Maher, The Fall and Rise of American Finance: from J.P. Morgan to Blackrock (Verso, 2023).

[2] Their essay uses Braun’s framework of “asset manager capitalism.” We could have easily used “asset manager capitalism” in naming this Substack but it is much harder to fit into the pun we had in mind!

[3] Data from BlackRock, Inc., Form 10-K filings for the years ended December 31, 2005 through December 31, 2024, available at https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/ .

[4] The entity that became BlackRock was founded in 1988 as a fixed-income unit within Blackstone (yes, Blackstone—that’s not a typo). During the mid-1990s, it became a subsidiary of PNC and began managing equities, and in 1999, it became a publicly traded company. However, it remained relatively focused on fixed-income investments (bonds) until it acquired MLIM. See BlackRock, "History," archived from the original on May 16, 2018, retrieved May 20, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20180516014614/https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/about-us/blackrock-history

[5] ETF is the acronym for exchange traded funds, which are publicly traded investment funds that hold securities and can be bought and sold throughout the day. Please see our April 5, 2025 post for further background on the rise of passive asset managers, https://thisisfincap.leaflet.pub/3memljylzi22x .

[6] If you want to read some of this work before we post part 2, see Albina Gibadullina, “Who Owns and Controls Global Capital? Uneven Geographies of Asset Manager Capitalism,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 56, no. 2 (2024): 558-585. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231195890

[7] Securities lending involves lending client securities out to other institutions, mostly to banks and broker-dealers. BlackRock generates revenue, which is typically shared with the client, from the cash or securities that the borrower provides as collateral.

[8] 2024 financials include contributions from Global Investment Partners, the private markets infrastructure firm acquired by BlackRock, but not HPS Partners, the just-closed private credit firm that agreed to be acquired by BlackRock. The end of 2024 AUM totals for private markets were: $110 billion for infrastructure, $36 billion for private equity, $32 billion for private credit, $26 billion for real estate, and $7 billion for multi-asset customized portfolio. BlackRock, Inc., Form 10-K for the Period Ending December 31, 2024 (filed February 25, 2025), Notes to the consolidated financial statements, p.8; The GIP acquisition was complete last fall, https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/newsroom/press-releases/article/corporate-one/press-releases/blackrock-completes-acquisition-of-global-infrastructure-partners ; The HPS acquisition was announced at the end of 2024, https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/newsroom/press-releases/article/corporate-one/press-releases/blackrock-agrees-to-acquire-hps .

[9] For example, a pension fund client may hire BlackRock for these services if they have decided to end a relationship with one asset manager and need to transition assets to a new one. BlackRock’s role in transitioning assets for the U.S. government during the global financial crisis has also been widely discussed in the press.

[10] Investments where a company has significant influence but not control are accounted for using the “equity method.” For a brief overview, see CFA Institute, “Refresher Reading: Intercorporate Investments,” 2025, https://www.cfainstitute.org/insights/professional-learning/refresher-readings/2025/intercorporate-investments .

[11] Brown, M, Ryan, R., and Patel, R., “BlackRock, Inc. Investor Day Wrap: Nothing Rocky Here,” Wells Fargo, June 12, 2025.

[12] The analysts apply a multiple to EPS in this case. Another method of calculating the terminal value divides the future earnings (or cash flow) by r minus g. The r here is determined by the riskiness of the future earnings/cash flow and the g is determined by expectations for the future growth of those earnings. All else equal, lower risk = higher valuation. Alternatively, higher growth expectations = higher valuation (all else equal).

[13] Comments by Raj Rao: “Origination. This is what I talked about, proprietary origination with corporates. Now BlackRock being the largest shareholder or the largest bondholder of many of the biggest corporations in the world, we now have access to the senior most decision-makers in big companies. That enables proprietary origination.” From transcript for BlackRock Investor Day, June 12, 2025, via Tikr.com .

[14] At the end of June, BlackRock announced that it was partnering with Great Gray Trust on target date funds that will hold private assets and, during its Q2 earnings call on July 15, BlackRock said that it expected to launch its own target date funds with private assets in 2026. See Silla Brush, “BlackRock’s Key Retirement Funds to Get Private Assets in 2026,” Bloomberg, July 15, 2025, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-15/blackrock-s-key-retirement-funds-to-get-private-assets-in-2026 .

[15] M. Brown, R. Ryan, and R. Patel, “Alt Managers: Shuffling the Deck,” Wells Fargo, May 23, 2025. The analysts use a sum-of-parts analysis and apply different multiples to each type of revenue stream.

[16] See Blackstone and Apollo 10-K’s for the periods ended December 31, 2024.

[17] Comments by Robert Goldstein from transcript for BlackRock Investor Day, June 12, 2025, via Tikr.com .

[18] Although we didn’t discuss it, you could also add lowering its tax rate to this list.