What is Larry Fink's Net Worth and Salary?
Larry Fink is an American financial executive who has a net worth of $1 billion. Larry Fink is the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, an American investment management corporation that has over $10 trillion in assets under management. That makes it the largest money management firm. Larry co-founded BlackRock in 1988 under The Blackstone Group before it split in 1994. The company went public in 1999. He has also been Chairman of the Board, Chair of the Corporate Council, Chairman of the Executive and Leadership Committees, and Co-Chair of the Global Client Committees.
Billionaire Status
Larry Fink achieved billionaire status for the first time in April 2018. At that point, roughly $600 million of his net worth was his equity in BlackRock. Larry Fink owns 0.7% of BlackRock's total outstanding shares.
Salary
In a typical recent year, Larry has earned as little as $20 million and as much as $40 million in salary compensation. That has made him, at times, one of the 20 highest-paid CEOs in the world. For example, in 2021, Larry earned $36 million in total comp. That comp was made up of:
- $1.5 million base salary
- $11.3 million bonus
- $18.4 million equity incentives
- $4.9 million deferred equity
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Early Life
Lawrence Douglas Fink was born on November 2, 1952, in Van Nuys, California, to Lila and Frederick Fink. His mother worked as an English professor, while his father owned a shoe store. He grew up in a Jewish family with his two siblings. After completing high school, he enrolled at the University of California Los Angeles, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science. He was also a member of the Kappa Beta Phi fraternity. He then received an MBA degree in Real Estate at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management in 1976.
Early Career
In 1976, after finishing his graduate degree, Fink started his career at First Boston, a New York-based investment bank. He was one of the first mortgage-backed security traders at the firm and also managed the firm's bond department. He also became the firm's managing director and headed a number of the firm's financial groups. Fink helped increase First Boston's bottom line by around $1 billion. He was considered to be very successful there until 1986 when he lost the firm $100 million due to his incorrect interest rate predictions. From that experience, he learned the importance of incorporating comprehensive risk management into future investments.
BlackRock
In 1988, Fink co-founded BlackRock under the corporate umbrella of Stephen Schwarzman's Blackstone Group. He became its director and CEO. BlackRock later split from The Blackstone Group in 1994, and Fink retained his position as director and CEO. He led the company as it went public in 1999.
Throughout the 2000s, Fink was involved in some headline news story events in the financial industry. In 2003, Fink was part of the negotiation of the resignation of the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Grasso. Grasso had been widely criticized for his $190 million pay package. In 2006, he led the BlackRock merger with Merrill Lynch Investment Managers. The result of the merger doubled BlackRock's asset management portfolio.
In 2006, BlackRock also purchased a Manhattan housing complex, the Stuyvesant Town – Peter Cooper Village, for $5.4 billion, It was the largest residential real estate deal in American history. However, the project ultimately ended in default, and BlackRock's clients lost millions. In the years that followed, however, BlackRock would become a huge investor in real estate projects around the country.
In 2008, the U.S. government contracted with BlackRock to help restore health to the financial industry following the financial meltdown of 2008. His contract allowed Fink to build relationships with members of President Obama's administration. Some questions have since been raised about whether conflicts of interest have arisen due to this close relationship, as BlackRock later hired many former executive branch appointees to the firm.
In December of 2009, BlackRock purchased Barclays Global Investors. Following the deal, BlackRock became the largest money management firm in the world. By 2016, BlackRock had $5 trillion under management, with over 12,000 employees in 27 different countries.
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In 2016, Fink received the ABANA Achievement Award in New York City. The award recognizes an individual who exemplifies leadership in banking and finance, specifically in their focus on financial cooperation between the United States and the Middle East and North Africa. In 2018, Fink was ranked in the 28th spot on the "Forbes" list of the World's Most Powerful People. In 2019, he received the Charles Schwab Financial Innovation Award.
Fink has tried to manage the public perception of BlackRock. In 2018, he wrote in a letter to shareholders that large companies like BlackRock should be aware of their impact on society. However, several anti-war organizations were unhappy with the statement, considering BlackRock is the largest investor in weapons manufacturers through its U.S. Aerospace and Defense ETF. Fink dealt with an awkward on-stage encounter with the U.S. non-profit organization Code Pink at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit in 2018.
He also announced that environmental sustainability is one of the core goals of BlackRock's future investment decisions. He published a 2020 open letter in which he explained this goal and discussed how BlackRock would be cutting ties with former investments that involved large environmental risks. However, despite this effort, Fink was still named one of the country's top "climate villains" by "The Guardian" in 2022, as BlackRock was known to profit from deforestation. BlackRock has also faced heat for its close ties to the Federal Reserve System, anticompetitive behavior, and investing heavily in China.
Personal Life
Larry and his wife Lori have been married since 1974. They own homes in Manhattan, North Salem, New York, and Colorado. Together, they have three children. Fink has been a lifelong supporter of the Democratic Party. Fink has served on the board of trustees for New York University and also co-chairs the NYU Langone Medical Center, and is a trustee of the Boys and Girls Club of New York.
