The Fink Letters: BlackRock's Arc from Activist to Retreat (2018-2024)

In 2018, the CEO of the world’s largest asset manager wrote an open letter telling every public company that they needed a social purpose or they would lose access to capital. In 2023, he dropped the word “ESG” from his vocabulary. In between, BlackRock’s support for environmental and social shareholder proposals collapsed from 22 percent to 7 percent, six major US banks walked out of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, and roughly $4 billion left BlackRock for state treasuries that wanted nothing to do with the agenda Larry Fink had been preaching at them.

The man did not change his mind. The market changed its weather. The infrastructure he built during the warm period did not get dismantled when the temperature dropped.

2018: A Sense of Purpose

The annual letter Fink sent to CEOs in January 2018 was titled “A Sense of Purpose.” Its opening line: “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose.” The tone was ultimatum. Companies that failed to demonstrate “how it makes a positive contribution to society” would lose support from BlackRock.

This was the high-water mark. BlackRock managed roughly seven trillion dollars at the time. When a fiduciary of that size publicly threatens to vote against management for insufficient social purpose, boards listen. The 2018 letter was the moment ESG stopped being a niche European compliance topic and became the explicit lobby of the world’s largest pool of investible capital.

2019: Purpose and Profit

The 2019 letter, “Purpose & Profit,” refined the pitch. Social purpose was not a constraint on returns. It was the foundation of them. Companies with clear purpose attracted talent, customers, and capital at lower cost. The argument’s elegance was that it asked CEOs to do what they already wanted to do, issue press releases about their values, and treated the press releases as financially material.

2020: A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance

The 2020 letter was the one that mattered. “Climate risk is investment risk.” BlackRock would exit thermal coal investments in actively managed portfolios. It would demand companies disclose against the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board frameworks. It would vote against management on climate.

The mechanism was now explicit. Disclose against the standard, or lose the vote. BlackRock did not need to pass legislation. It controlled enough of the float in enough companies to make voluntary frameworks function as regulation.

2021: Net Zero

The 2021 letter committed BlackRock to net-zero alignment and demanded Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions disclosure from portfolio companies. Scope 3 includes emissions from a company’s customers using its products. The metric that turns an oil company into a defendant for every car that burns its gasoline. Demanding it from CEOs was the moment the framework crossed from disclosure to liability.

BlackRock supported 22 percent of environmental and social shareholder proposals in proxy season 2021. That sounds modest. It was the highest support rate the asset manager had ever recorded.

2022: The Power of Capitalism

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Energy prices spiked. The 2022 letter, “The Power of Capitalism,” began the pivot. “Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics,” Fink wrote. A sentence nobody writes unless their stakeholder capitalism has begun to look very much about politics. The letter defended ESG against critics on both flanks while reframing the climate transition as a long-term reallocation problem rather than a short-term divestment mandate.

The walk-back had begun. It was not yet visible to anyone who wasn’t reading the letters carefully.

2023: The Word Drops Out

The 2023 letter did not contain the term “ESG.” Fink later explained that the acronym had been “weaponized by far left and far right.” The framework he had spent five years building was now too radioactive to name. He replaced it with “energy transition”. A phrase chosen for its political illegibility.

The numbers tell the rest. BlackRock supported 7 percent of environmental and social shareholder proposals in 2023, down from 22 percent two years prior. BlackRock left Climate Action 100+. State Street left the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative. Vanguard had already left NZAM in late 2022. The Big Three asset managers, which collectively hold positions in 88 percent of S&P 500 firms, had collectively walked away from the coalitions they had spent the previous decade joining.

2024: Infrastructure CEO

The 2024 letter reads like a traditional finance executive talking about traditional finance topics. Infrastructure investment. Private markets. Retirement security. ESG is absent from the vocabulary, not as a strategic silence but as a closed file. The pivot was complete.

The acquisitions tell the same story. BlackRock spent $12.5 billion to acquire Global Infrastructure Partners and roughly $3.2 billion on Preqin, the private-markets data provider. The firm was repositioning around the assets that conservative state treasurers and sovereign wealth funds want to buy, not the assets they want to divest from.

The Six Banks

In the first nine days of 2025, every one of the six largest US banks exited the Net Zero Banking Alliance. Goldman Sachs in December 2024. Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley over the following two weeks. JPMorgan completed the set on January 7, 2025.

NZBA was the banking-industry parallel to GFANZ. The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero that Mark Carney had assembled at COP26 in 2021. At its peak it covered roughly 40 percent of global banking assets. The departures did not formally dissolve it. They just emptied the chairs.

The official reasons were legal exposure: anti-trust risk from coordinated divestment commitments, state-treasurer litigation, the prospect of Republican attorneys general filing every kind of suit a bank’s general counsel does not want to spend a decade defending. The unofficial reason was that the political alignment that made NZBA membership rewarded in 2021 had inverted by 2024.

The State Treasurers

The anti-ESG backlash was tracked by Pleiades Strategy. By 2024, 165-plus bills had been introduced in 40-plus states restricting state pension and treasury investment with asset managers deemed to be “boycotting” fossil-fuel or firearms companies. Texas, Florida, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Louisiana led the legislative campaign.

State treasurers withdrew more than $4 billion from BlackRock specifically. Texas alone moved around $8.5 billion across multiple anti-ESG actions. The withdrawals were political theater and material business at the same time. The dollars were a rounding error on $10 trillion in assets under management, but the optics were a daily reminder that the asset manager’s largest single-customer category had turned hostile.

The Counter-Move

The Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling in SFFA v. Harvard did not technically address corporate ESG. It addressed race-conscious admissions in higher education. The implications for corporate DEI programs, the second pawl of the same broader stakeholder-capitalism framework, were immediate. By mid-2024, Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Ford, Walmart, Target, and Boeing had all reduced or eliminated DEI programs. Chief Diversity Officer tenure dropped to roughly two years. The infrastructure that had been presented as moral necessity was dismantled as business liability inside eighteen months.

Reversed, or Just Rebranded?

The rhetoric reversed. The architecture did not.

BlackRock’s internal ESG teams remained largely intact. The lending criteria did not change materially. The TCFD framework that the 2020 letter demanded became absorbed into the International Sustainability Standards Board in 2023 and codified into the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive. Mandatory for roughly 50,000 firms beginning in 2025. The SEC climate disclosure rule, finalized March 2024, applies to all SEC-registered large-cap issuers on a phased schedule through 2027. Voluntary in 2015. Standardized in 2021. Mandatory by 2025.

Markets can vote against ESG funds. ESG funds saw outflows. The disclosure mandate still applies. The architecture survives the rhetoric’s collapse. That is the defining feature of a ratchet. Public sentiment cannot reverse what regulatory accretion has locked in, and the regulatory accretion was the part of the agenda that did not depend on Larry Fink’s letters.

The Network for Greening the Financial System, founded by eight central banks in 2017, now coordinates climate-stress-test methodologies across 114 central banks in more than 40 jurisdictions, including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Canada. Member banks do not vote on climate policy. They harmonize stress-test methodologies. The harmonization is the policy. Whether Larry Fink mentions the word “ESG” in next year’s letter has no bearing on whether the Fed’s bank examiners are using NGFS scenarios in their next supervisory cycle.

The 2018 letter demanded social purpose. The 2024 letter sold infrastructure funds. The word changed. The acronyms changed. The lobbying coalitions changed. The asset manager left some coalitions and joined others. The state treasurers retaliated. The Big Three asset managers walked back from coordinated climate voting.

The disclosure standards survived. The central-bank stress tests survived. The EU mandate survived. The SEC rule survived. The voluntary framework became the mandatory framework on schedule, and the mandatory framework outlasts the personalities that animated the voluntary one.

The man stopped saying the word. The infrastructure he built before he stopped saying it does not need him to say it.

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The receipts (free, on this site): the climate / ESG ratchet

This research appears in The Ratchet, Chapter 7.