There was a time when the biggest number in finance belonged to a bank. It now belongs to a fund manager on the West Side of Manhattan.
BlackRock, from its headquarters at 50 Hudson Yards, reported on October 14 that it ended the third quarter with $15.49 trillion of assets under management, up from $13.46 trillion a year earlier. Clients added $205 billion of net new money in the quarter and $869 billion over twelve months. Revenue rose 19 percent to $7.75 billion. Adjusted earnings per share were $15.93, up 38 percent; the adjusted operating margin was 47.8 percent. The firm bought back $550 million of its own shares.
To put the asset figure in context: it is larger than the annual economic output of any country other than the United States and China. That comparison is imperfect, because BlackRock does not own the money; it manages it on behalf of pension funds, insurers, sovereign wealth funds, financial advisers and tens of millions of individuals who own its exchange-traded funds. But it is the right order of magnitude for thinking about the firm’s place in the system.
What Fink said
Laurence D. Fink, the firm’s co-founder, chairman and chief executive, described the results in the expansive terms he favors. “BlackRock’s results demonstrate the value of our integrated platform, as clients increasingly choose us as a partner across investing, financing, and technology,” he said in the release.
He went further: “It’s why BlackRock is winning mandates at the cutting edge of capital markets, from hyperscaler financings to pension outsourcings to Aladdin and Preqin partnerships.” And, toward the end: “Demand for capital is growing across the global economy, and BlackRock is increasingly at the center of how that capital is deployed and managed.”
That last sentence is the thesis of the modern BlackRock, and it has been executed through acquisitions. In the last two years the firm bought Global Infrastructure Partners, the infrastructure investor; HPS Investment Partners, the private-credit firm; and Preqin, the private-markets data provider. Fink said BlackRock had raised $68 billion in private markets over the last twelve months and that its AI Infrastructure Partnership, a vehicle formed with partners to invest in data centers and power, had made its first deployment in the quarter.
The index machine
The bulk of the inflows, as usual, came through the products that made BlackRock what it is. iShares exchange-traded funds took in $135 billion in the quarter. Active strategies, led by fixed income and systematic equities, brought in $66 billion. Technology services revenue, primarily from the Aladdin risk and portfolio management platform that BlackRock licenses to other investment firms, rose 14 percent.
Not every channel grew. Institutional index mandates saw net outflows of roughly $27 billion, a reminder that large pension clients periodically rebalance away from passive accounts or bring them in-house.
A smaller line rewards attention. Performance fees rose $114 million from a year earlier to about $630 million, which the release attributed to higher revenue from liquid alternatives, “largely related to a single hedge fund with an annual performance measurement period that ends in the third quarter.” BlackRock does not name the fund. It is a reminder that inside the world’s largest index manager sits a hedge-fund business of real consequence.
The politics of size
BlackRock’s scale has made it a political subject in a way no asset manager was a generation ago, and the criticism comes from both directions.
From the right, Republican state treasurers and attorneys general have argued for years that the largest asset managers used their voting power to push environmental and social goals that their clients had not asked them to pursue, and that this conflicted with the managers’ fiduciary duty to maximize returns. Texas and a group of other states sued BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard in 2024, alleging that their climate commitments amounted to an antitrust violation in coal markets; the firms have denied the allegations. Several Republican-led states have pulled public funds from BlackRock management. These critics’ core argument, that an index manager voting trillions of dollars of other people’s shares should not be advancing its own policy preferences, is a serious one about accountability, and it has influenced how the firm talks and votes.
From the left, Democratic officials and climate advocates have criticized BlackRock for retreating from climate commitments it once championed, including its 2025 departure from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, and have raised concerns about the concentration of corporate ownership in three index providers.
BlackRock’s response has been to broaden choice, offering clients more control over how their shares are voted, and to emphasize, as Fink did again this quarter, that it is a fiduciary serving its clients rather than a policymaker. Whether that answer satisfies either camp is doubtful. But the persistence of criticism from both sides is, in its way, a measure of how central the firm has become.
The commodity footnote
One more figure from the release belongs in any buy-side column this autumn. BlackRock’s commodity exchange-traded products held $156.9 billion at the end of September, after $6.9 billion of net inflows in the quarter, in a year dominated by the oil shock. For a firm built on equity and bond indexes, it is a small line. For the commodities industry, it is a large and growing source of demand.
The view from Hudson Yards
Fink, who co-founded BlackRock in 1988 with seven partners, said the firm was entering its “seasonally strongest fourth quarter with accelerating momentum.” It is the kind of sentence chief executives say every October. In BlackRock’s case, the numbers that preceded it were large enough that the market took it at face value.
Featured image: 50 Hudson Yards, BlackRock’s headquarters. Photo by Kidfly182 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
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