BlackRock’s boss shifts from money to manpower

Choosing someone to manage your money is a sacred thing,” writes BlackRock boss Larry Fink in his annual letter to investors. It is an odd choice of words for someone whose business is dedicated to the service of mammon. Yet in what has become a tradition of epistle writing by leading capitalists, sandwiched between letters by Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett (and from this year, his successor Greg Abel) and JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon (coming soon), Fink’s tend to be the most preachy.

Once he was the high priest of “woke capitalism”, urging companies to take seriously their environmental, social and governance responsibilities. Now ESG is out, and 2020’s climate change crusader has vanished. This year Fink is using his pulpit to address rising inequality: a “deeper feeling that capitalism is working – just not for enough people”.

As he says, this has become an urgent conversation, especially given the recent “reshuffling” of global trade (aka Trump’s tariffs) and looming danger that AI will make things worse. Fink does not believe in the AI apocalypse predicted by some of his peers, especially in Silicon Valley. He expects building AI infrastructure to create jobs for skilled tradespeople – currently in short supply, which is why BlackRock has created a $100m fund to train 50,000 people in the next five years.

But Fink does fear the broader adoption of AI could significantly widen wealth inequality.Unless, that is, more people invest their savings in the financial markets, so they can share in the economic upside of AI (and other investments by countries in increasing their economic self-reliance). This advice is self-interested – where better to invest than BlackRock? Yet judging by how much of the financial fruit of the past half-century went to asset-owners rather than workers, it may well be right.

Photograph by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images