Larry Fink Net Worth: Inside the Blackrock CEO’s Riches

Larry Fink is the cofounder, chairman, and CEO of BlackRock, the biggest money-management firm in the world. Fink is well known as a powerhouse in finance, with The Financial Times describing him as the “undisputed king of Wall Street,” while Barron’s named him one of the world’s top CEOs fifteen times. Thanks to his sheer influence and business prowess, Fink has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion.

Fink is a controversial figure and played a leading role in guiding the financial industry through the 2008 crisis. He also pioneered the institutional adoption of cryptocurrency in investment banking. His advocacy for environmental and social concerns led Barron’s to call him “the new conscience of Wall Street,” though his critics aren’t convinced.

Breaking Down Larry Fink’s Net Worth in 2025

Larry Fink has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion in 2025. The majority of his wealth comes from his salary and other compensation as the CEO of BlackRock, as well as his ownership of BlackRock stock. His net worth fluctuates according to the value of BlackRock stock and his performance as CEO.

According to Blackrock’s regulatory filings, Fink’s total pay in 2023 was $26.9 million. BlackRock’s annual report for 2024 shows that Fink owned 414,146 shares in May 2024 which is worth close to $400 million at the current share price.

As a major shareholder, Fink receives dividends on a quarterly basis. In January 2025, shareholders received $5.21 per share of common stock – around $2 million for Fink. In 2024, dividend payouts totaled $20.40 per share, which equates to around $8 million for Fink.

In the year to August 2024, he sold 106,791 shares of BlackRock. Over that period, the share price ranged from $598 to $836, meaning that Fink cashed out more than $63 million from the sales.

As the king of investment banking, Fink has certainly generated considerable wealth from his own investments, although this income is not publicly known.

Larry Fink’s Early Life

Laurence (aka Larry) Douglas Fink was born in 1952 in Van Nuys, California. He comes from a Jewish family. His mother was an English professor at California State University. Fink was not especially academically gifted so his parents made him help out in his father’s shoe store.

He attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science in 1974. In his final year, on a whim, he signed up for some graduate real estate classes. He enjoyed them so much that he signed on for an MBA in Real Estate. The summer before he started at business school, he married his high school sweetheart, Lori, with whom he would later have three children.

Larry Fink’s Legendary Career Begins at First Boston

In 1976, after graduating with an MBA, Fink looked for a job on Wall Street. He got several offers from top investment banks but flunked his final interview with Goldman Sachs. He ended up in the bond-trading department at First Boston, where he focused on structuring and trading mortgage-backed securities. This was a new market at the time and Fink was instrumental in its development. Simply put, he was buying up mortgage debt from banks and selling little pieces of it to thousands of investors.

Just two years later, Fink was in charge of the department and, by the time he was 31, he was the youngest managing director in the history of the company. Fink was happy and successful at First Boston. He was a Wall Street rising star – cocky, ambitious, and brilliant. There were even rumors that he might be named co-CEO.

In the second quarter of 1986, everything changed. His team lost $100 million after some risky trades went bust. The offsetting trades they’d made to hedge their positions had failed too. It was a humiliating failure for Fink and his entire team.

Fink’s own faulty research seemed to have been behind the fiasco. It turned out that the data and technology available at the time did not provide sufficient insight to allow traders to make the big, risky trades that Fink was confidently making. His failure cost his colleagues their annual bonuses and he became a pariah. He soon resigned.

The History of BlackRock

Today, BlackRock controls close to $5 trillion in assets, making it the world’s largest asset manager by a large margin. It has 78 offices in 36 countries and 19 thousand employees and is ranked at number 22 on Fortune’s list of the most admired companies. Here’s how it came to be a global investment behemoth.

Founding Story

In 1988, having left First Boston in disgrace, Fink set up a new group at investment management company Blackstone. He did so along with partners Robert Kapito, Susan Wagner, Barbara Novick, Ben Golub, Hugh Frater, Ralph Schlosstein, and Keith Anderson. Blackstone gave them a $5 million line of credit and they rented a small office at Bear Stearns. Five years later, they were managing $20 billion.

From Blackstone to BlackRock

In 1994, there was a power struggle between Fink and Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, mostly over compensation. Schwarzman sold Fink’s group to PNC Bank (a Pittsburgh bank) for just $240 million. It was a move Schwarzman later called a “heroic mistake”. Fink’s group changed their name to BlackRock.

Growth Phase

BlackRock grew fast, attracting clients like never before. In 1999, it went public. A number of large acquisitions followed: State Street Research in 2004, Quellos in 2007, and Barclay’s Global Investors (BGI) in 2009. There was also a merger with Merrill Lynch Investment Managers in 2006.

After considerable growth in assets and capacity, BlackRock expanded from bonds into other investments. At the heart of the company’s success was Aladdin – an enormous bank of computers conducting millions of calculations every day to help guide investment decisions and manage risk with the most insightful data analysis in the industry.

On #October1st 1999, we listed on the @NYSE. As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of our IPO, we reflect on how we’ve delivered on our promises over the past twenty years–not just to shareholders, but to our clients, our employees and other stakeholders. https://t.co/rM1euMPly6 pic.twitter.com/KlTkTaXiDf

— BlackRock (@BlackRock) October 1, 2019

In 2000, BlackRock formed BlackRock Solutions, an advisory division that used Aladdin to evaluate client assets and run daily risk-assessment. It was so successful that even the U.S. government became a client. The division also gave some clients direct access to Aladdin. BlackRock has essentially become a technology provider in addition to being an investment manager.

BlackRock has continued to expand and grow, offering an ever widening array of investment options. As a result of his embarrassment at First Boston, Fink has applied a fastidious approach to risk management that has helped guide BlackRock to success.

If you want to dive deeper into the history of Blackrock, checkout CNBC’s breakdown of its prolific past below.

Fink: A Wall Street Leader

At BlackRock, Fink became a person that other CEOs would turn to for advice. For example, he got the New York Stock Exchange board out of a crisis when he helped broker the resignation of CEO Richard Grasso in 2012. He was also considered for the CEO role at Citigroup and Merill Lynch around 2007.

Fink and the Financial Crisis

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, BlackRock played a vital role in helping institutions navigate the situation. For example, Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan hired BlackRock to analyze Bear Stearns’ assets. The resulting insights allowed JPMorgan to buy Bear Strearns the next day – staving off a major market collapse.

Fink also advised the US Treasury, helping them structure their relief program and persuading them to guarantee money-market funds to avoid a credit market collapse. BlackRock was so involved through this period that it later attracted scrutiny for its many government contracts.

Fink was also heavily scrutinized for popularizing mortgage-backed securities, which ended up being a major driver of the 2008 crash, decades before. However, the realm of mortgage-backed securities evolved in the decades after he left First Boston as Wall Street firms sought higher leverage and took on much more risk, eventually leading to the financial crisis.

Larry Fink on ESG

In 2019, in his influential annual letter to CEOs, Fink wrote, “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

The letter seemed to be a watershed moment that propelled companies to focus on ESG – environmental, social, and governance – in their investing and company policies. Fink spoke about his new ESG plans on CNBC’s Squawk Box in 2020.

BlackRock claimed that it put this philosophy into practice in a number of ways including offering ESG investment funds that excluded certain industries – e.g. firearms, coal, and tobacco.

Fink received criticism for his advocacy from both sides of the isle. Real estate billionaire Sam Zell said, “I didn’t know Larry Fink had been made God” while Warren Buffett said, “I don’t believe in imposing my political opinions on the activities of our businesses.” Entrepreneur and politician Vivek Ramaswamy called Fink “the king of the woke industrial complex.”

Climate activists also argued that Fink and Blackrock were only “greenwashing” the firm and its investments, pretending to help fight the climate crisis without actually taking action. They pointed to the fact that Blackrock was still one of the largest investors in fossil fuel companies in the world and that it could easily push these companies to reduce emissions if it wanted to. Blackrock also consistently voted against climate-related shareholder resolutions, despite its stated ESG mission.

In recent years, BlackRock has made a significant retreat from its ESG policies and Fink’s 2025 annual letter made no mention of DEI, ESG, or the environment.

Larry Fink’s Crypto Advocacy

Fink started out as a self-described crypto skeptic but after learning more about it, he seemed to change his mind. “I believe Bitcoin is legitimate,” he told CNBC TV, adding, “It is a legitimate financial instrument.” He sees crypto as “an alternative form of wealth-holding” or an “asset class” but does not believe it will ever be a currency. “I look at it as digital gold,” he says, theorizing that gold will be a reference point for the price of crypto.

BlackRock Crypto ETFs

In January 2024, BlackRock’s request to launch a Bitcoin ETF request was approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and it became one of the first institutional investors to offer the product in the U.S. It was the most successful ETF launch of all time with over $100 billion in assets flowing in. Blackrock soon followed up with an Ethereum ETF.

An ETF is a publicly listed investment fund which packages up financial assets such as shares or bonds (or cryptocurrencies) in a single investment. Investors can buy shares in an ETF just like they can buy shares in a company. A Bitcoin ETF tracks the price of Bitcoin, allowing investors to gain exposure to Bitcoin through their brokerage within a regulated environment. Instead of setting up a crypto wallet, investors can instead keep all their investments in the same place.

BUIDL Project

BlackRock has also launched a tokenized money market fund called BUIDL. The fund is tokenized by the security token platform Securitize. As of March 2025, BUIDL has $1.7 trillion in assets spread across seven blockchains, making it the largest fund of its kind by far.

A money market fund combines money from multiple investors to build a professionally-managed portfolio of assets. BUIDL gives investors the opportunity to earn US dollar yields with trading and ownership taking place on the blockchain. It uses blockchain technology to facilitate investment in real-world assets such as U.S. Treasury bills. Unfortunately, most retail investors won’t have access to this fund as its minimum initial investment is $5 million.

Other Asset Tokenization Projects

In March 2024, BlackRock set itself a goal to tokenize $10 trillion of its assets. This would mean converting assets like bonds, real estate, and equities into blockchain-based tokens. The process would make transactions more transparent, provide proof of ownership and boost liquidity.

Larry Fink’s Crypto & NFT Holdings

Larry Fink’s crypto and NFT holdings are not public knowledge. He has previously stated that there are limitations on the investments he’s allowed to make as BlackRock CEO which prevented him from buying crypto directly. Now that BlackRock offers a Bitcoin ETF, however, he does have the opportunity to gain exposure to Bitcoin.

Larry Fink’s Real Estate Portfolio

Larry Fink has made significant investments in real estate over the years. In 2004, he bought a $3.7 million property called Finch Farm in North Salem, New York, from actor Stanley Tucci. He has since bought more land in the area including a 27.2 acre property which he bought for $5.4 million in 2019. He spent an estimated $7 million doing work on the property. He is known to have owned an apartment in Manhattan, New York City, and a home in Aspen, Colorado.

Other Roles

In addition to his role at BlackRock, Larry Fink serves on the board of:

• New York University (NYU)
• The World Economic Forum
• The NYU Langone Medical Center
• The Council on Foreign Relations
• The International Rescue Committee
• The Museum of Modern Art

He is also on the Advisory Board of the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management and the Executive Committee of the Partnership for New York City.

Larry Fink Net Worth: The Verdict

Larry Fink has an estimated net worth of about $1.2 billion, though the precise figure is hard to pin down. His compensation as CEO of BlackRock contributes significantly to his wealth, with annual pay packages often exceeding $25-30 million. As the head of the world’s largest asset manager, he remains a dominant force in global finance, with no signs of stepping down anytime soon and no obvious successor.

A substantial portion of Fink’s wealth is tied up in BlackRock stocks, where he remains a major shareholder. In the year to December 11, 2024, shares of BlackRock are up 32%, further boosting his fortune.

Larry Fink has proved himself an industry leader time and time again. He was a key figure in the response to the 2008 financial crisis, providing guidance to investment managers and the government alike. Moving forward, he remains focused on furthering Blackrock and the U.S. financial system as a whole, working on various projects ranging from tokenization and other emerging technologies to expanding access to capital markets globally.

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