BLACKROCK

OLYMPUS opened an institutional file. A firm has no Big Five and no Dark Triad, and the unit does not invent them; what a firm has is a mandate, a funding model, and a voice. BlackRock is catalogued here as the universal owner — the asset manager that, by buying every company in an index and never selling, became the largest single shareholder in most of the American corporate map, and that also happens to sell the risk-and-portfolio software a large share of the rest of the industry runs its money on. The finding is the position and who depends on it: a private company that is simultaneously the biggest owner of the market and the operator of one of the instruments the market uses to see itself. Not a hand on any single lever. A structural conflict built into the business model — and, on the documented record, a lever that has also been rolled back under pressure. The numbers in the front matter are reach, funding entrenchment, and durability — not malice.

Institutional Archetype

THE UNIVERSAL OWNER — The archetype is the shareholder so diversified it owns a slice of everything and therefore cannot walk away from anything. BlackRock does not pick stocks in its index business; when money flows into an S&P 500 fund it buys the whole index and holds it indefinitely, which over two decades made it — with Vanguard and State Street — the largest shareholder in the overwhelming majority of large US public companies. The instrument is not the trade. The instrument is the vote: permanent ownership carries a permanent proxy ballot at nearly every large company, exercised through an internal stewardship team. The second instrument is Aladdin, the risk-and-portfolio operating system BlackRock licenses to competitors, pension funds, insurers, and central banks — so that the largest owner is also a vendor to the people it competes with and co-owns companies alongside. That is the structural power: not authorship of any one corporate decision, but a standing position at the ownership layer and a standing seat inside the plumbing.

Mandate & Origin

BlackRock was co-founded in 1988 by Larry Fink (cross-reference Larry Fink) and seven partners as a fixed-income shop inside Blackstone, spun out in 1994, and grew — through the 2006 Merrill Lynch Investment Managers merger and the 2009 acquisition of Barclays Global Investors and its iShares ETF franchise — into the largest asset manager in the world. It reported roughly $14.0 trillion in assets under management at year-end 2025. Its stated mandate is fiduciary: manage other people’s money, most of it the retirement savings of ordinary people held in low-cost index funds. The Aladdin platform — the name is reported to stand for Asset, Liability, Debt and Derivative Investment Network — grew out of the firm’s founding-era bond-risk analytics into a unified system for portfolio management, trading, risk analytics, and compliance. BlackRock describes it as “a single, unified platform” giving clients “a common language for investment,” used to run stress tests, scenario analysis, and value-at-risk across asset classes.

The three purchases, in BlackRock’s own announcements. On January 12, 2024 BlackRock agreed to buy Global Infrastructure Partners for “total consideration of $3 billion of cash and approximately 12 million shares of BlackRock common stock”; GIP “manages over $100 billion in client assets across infrastructure equity and debt,” and Fink said “Infrastructure is one of the most exciting long-term investment opportunities” (BlackRock, January 12, 2024). On June 30, 2024 it agreed to buy Preqin, “a leading independent provider of private markets data for £2.55 billion or approximately $3.2 billion in cash,” describing the deal as a “strategic expansion of Aladdin tech business into fast-growing private markets data segment” and adding that “Through the Aladdin platform, BlackRock provides technology solutions to over 1,000 clients” (BlackRock, Preqin press release, June 30, 2024). On December 3, 2024 it agreed to buy HPS Investment Partners, “approximately $12 billion,” “100% of the consideration paid in BlackRock equity,” creating “~$220 billion in client assets” in private credit (BlackRock, December 3, 2024). The FY2025 10-K gives the closings: GIP in October 2024, which “added $70 billion of AUM”; Preqin in March 2025, “for £2.5 billion (or approximately $3.2 billion) in cash”; and HPS on July 1, 2025, “the acquisition of 100% of the business and assets of HPS Investment Partners,” which “added $118 billion of AUM in July 2025” (BlackRock 10-K, FY ended December 31, 2025). The sequence is infrastructure assets, then the data about private assets, then private credit: the index owner buying the layers of the market that an index does not reach.

Funding & Backers

BlackRock is a publicly traded, for-profit firm — its shareholders and its own iShares funds are on its cap table, and its revenue is management and technology fees. The funding model is the finding on two fronts. First, its index-ownership footprint means it holds, and votes, shares in the same companies across an entire sector — the “common ownership” concern raised in the academic literature. Second, Aladdin generates licensing fees from BlackRock’s competitors: the American Economic Liberties Project, in its November 2020 working paper The New Money Trust, argued that Aladdin gives BlackRock “a form of vertical integration” and “visibility and influence not available to smaller fund companies,” and recommended designating platforms like Aladdin as systemically important market utilities and separating them from the rest of the business. Who runs the risk software is part of what the risk exposure is; who owns the shares is part of what the vote is. Both are the funding model, not a footnote to it.

The money, in the firm’s own 10-K. “At December 31, 2025, total AUM was $14.0 trillion, representing a CAGR of 10% over the last five years.” The AUM table in the same filing reads equity $7.79 trillion, fixed income $3.27 trillion, multi-asset $1.22 trillion, alternatives $424 billion, digital assets $78 billion, currency and commodities $169 billion and cash management $1.08 trillion. Total 2025 revenue was $24,216 million: $19,179 million in investment advisory, administration fees and securities lending revenue (equity ETFs alone $6,043 million, private markets $2,350 million), $1,424 million in performance fees, $1,981 million in technology services and subscription revenue, and $1,355 million in distribution fees. The filing says “Performance fees represented $1.4 billion, or 6%, of total revenue,” and “ETFs represented 42% of long-term AUM at December 31, 2025 and 45% of long-term base fees and securities lending revenue for 2025.” On the technology line: “Technology services and subscription revenue of $2.0 billion was up 24% year-over-year,” “Aladdin, which represented the majority of technology services and subscription revenue for the year,” and “Aladdin assignments are typically long-term contracts that provide recurring revenue”; the Preqin purchase accounts for “approximately $210 million of revenue” of that line. The filing also says “the Aladdin infrastructure and environment for BlackRock and its external Aladdin clients are hosted on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.” On 2025 flows, “Clients awarded BlackRock with a record $698 billion of net inflows in 2025” (BlackRock 10-K, FY ended December 31, 2025). The filing gives no count of Aladdin clients; the figure BlackRock has stated is “over 1,000 clients” (Preqin press release above). The payer is the saver, the intermediary and the institution, by the fee schedule; the file’s two structural findings, the ownership footprint and the Aladdin licence to rivals, are both lines on this income statement.

Institutional Voice & Intent

The voice is the fiduciary register — the steward’s, not the activist’s. BlackRock speaks in the grammar of “long-term value,” “fiduciary duty,” “risk,” and “client choice”: measured, prudential vocabulary that frames the firm as a custodian acting on behalf of millions of savers rather than a principal with a program of its own. The persuasion is in the apparent neutrality of passivity — an index fund reads as a mirror of the market, not a participant with a ballot, even though it votes every year at nearly every company it holds.

Stated intent: Be a fiduciary. Manage clients’ money to their long-term financial benefit, price index exposure near zero, treat governance risk as investment risk, and — after the backlash — hand the vote back to clients through Voting Choice.

Observed intent: Occupy the ownership layer of the entire large-cap market and the operating layer of much of the industry’s risk plumbing at once — the largest owner and a vendor to its rivals — a position from which corporate behavior can be shaped by whoever holds the stewardship pen, whether or not the pen is ever used aggressively.

Gap: The stated and observed intents overlap wherever “act as a prudent fiduciary” coincides with “hold, vote, and instrument a controlling-adjacent share of the market.” The academic record cuts both ways and is quoted at full strength below: one line of scholarship (Bebchuk & Hirst; Heath et al.) finds index managers systematically under-engage and defer to incumbent management — the opposite of a steering cabal — which is itself a governance problem, not a control grid. Whether concentrated permanent ownership plus a shared risk platform is neutral custody or quiet structural power is not establishable from the outside, and for the universal owner it never needs to be. The recurrence — that the same firm owns the market, votes the market, and sells the market its risk lens — is the finding. The hand is not asserted.

The vote, in the firm’s own stewardship report. BlackRock’s 2025 Investment Stewardship annual report says “The vast majority of our clients delegate voting authority to BlackRock, entrusting us to act on their behalf,” and that “Approximately 90% of clients’ public equity AUM are held in index equity strategies.” Of the proposals it voted, “During 2025, we supported management on approximately 88% of the more than 154,000 proposals voted globally,” and on directors about 90 percent of elections were voted consistent with management’s recommendation. The shareholder-proposal table is the sharpest page in it: of 807 shareholder proposals voted in 2025, BlackRock voted for 92 and against 715; 89 of 455 governance proposals drew a vote for, and 3 of 352 proposals on climate and natural capital or company impacts on people. Its own gloss: “we do not view stewardship as a mechanism to directly seek outcomes related to economies and societies as a whole, which is the role of governments and policymakers,” and “We do not coordinate our votes or investment decisions with any external group or organization.” On the pass-through program: “BlackRock Voting Choice is the industry’s largest pass-through voting program”; it “is available to client assets representing $3.76 trillion of BlackRock’s $7.7 trillion total index equity AUM, with clients representing approximately $885 billion in index equity AUM exercising this option” (BlackRock Investment Stewardship, 2025 annual report). The program’s own page now reads “$3.96tn of our index equity assets are eligible for BlackRock Voting Choice” and “$923bn of our eligible AUM ($3.96tn) committed to BlackRock Voting Choice” (BlackRock, Voting Choice). The arithmetic is the finding: on the firm’s report, about a quarter of the index equity assets that can be handed back have been, and the rest are still voted by the stewardship team. The 7 percent support figure earlier in this file is Morningstar’s count for the 2023 proxy year; the firm’s own 2025 count of the three shareholder-proposal categories it reports is 92 of 807, and 3 of 352 in the climate and people categories.

Interest: What each position BlackRock argues would pay it, documented, with its own best case. The positions are the firm’s, from its filings, announcements and stewardship report; the CEO’s letter and the AI Infrastructure Partnership are catalogued on Larry Fink and are not repeated here.

• Private markets need standardized data, and one platform should carry it. Position: “There is an even greater need for standardized data, benchmarks, and analytics that enable investors to better incorporate private asset classes into portfolios and provide fund managers with better data and tools to deliver outcomes for clients” (BlackRock, Preqin press release, June 30, 2024). What it pays: BlackRock bought the data supplier for about $3.2 billion in cash and said Preqin “is expected to generate ~$240 million of highly recurring revenue” in 2024; the 10-K attributes “approximately $210 million of revenue” in 2025 to the purchase and says “As clients’ private market allocations continue to grow, they will require more standardized and transparent data on their investments, creating an additional growth opportunity for Preqin” (10-K FY2025). A standard that private-market allocations be reported on common data is a standard that favors the owner of a leading data set and of the workflow tools beside it. Best case, the firm’s: “a ‘common language’ for investing across both public and private markets.” Convergence: the fund managers and pension and insurance buyers the release names as Preqin’s 200,000 users, who gain comparable data, and the private-markets managers who compete with the new BlackRock franchise.
• Stewardship is financial and delegated, and clients should be able to take the vote back. Position: “We do not view stewardship as a mechanism to directly seek outcomes related to economies and societies as a whole, which is the role of governments and policymakers,” and “BlackRock leads the asset management industry in giving clients choice in the stewardship of their capital” (2025 stewardship report). What it pays: the Texas-led antitrust case alleges the three managers “conspired to artificially suppress coal supply” and the 10-K reports it is “currently defending” it; a program that moves votes to clients answers the allegation that one stewardship team votes the market, and the 10-K lists “Proxy Voting Reform” among the regulatory risks to “an asset manager that exercises voting rights on behalf of certain clients” (10-K FY2025). The stewardship team’s own work, 154,000 proposals a year, is the service the index clients delegate. Best case, the firm’s: the votes are cast “in the long-term financial interests of our clients or in accordance with our clients’ instructions.” Convergence: the corporate managements who were supported on about 88 percent of proposals, and the clients who take the vote back.
• Infrastructure is a long-term asset class for savers, and BlackRock should own the platform for it. Position: “Infrastructure is one of the most exciting long-term investment opportunities,” and Ogunlesi’s line, “We are convinced that together we can create the world’s premier infrastructure investment firm” (BlackRock, January 12, 2024). What it pays: the purchase “added $70 billion of AUM,” and the 10-K reports infrastructure AUM of $112 billion with “Net inflows were $16 billion” in 2025, in a private-markets revenue line that rose to $2,350 million (10-K FY2025). Best case, the firm’s: the infrastructure the economy needs, such as power and data centers, is financed by pooled long-term capital that a retirement saver can hold. Convergence: GIP’s management, who ran the business before the sale, and the sovereign and technology partners named on the AI-infrastructure page.
• Private credit belongs inside the public-and-private platform. Position: the release headline, “BlackRock to Acquire HPS Investment Partners to Deliver Integrated Solutions Across Public and Private Markets,” and Fink’s “I am excited by what HPS and BlackRock can do together for our clients” (BlackRock, December 3, 2024). What it pays: “The closing of the HPS Transaction added $165 billion of client AUM and $118 billion of fee-paying AUM in July,” and the 10-K reports private credit AUM of $145 billion at December 31, 2025 (10-K FY2025). Best case, the 10-K’s: the acquisitions “position the Company’s platform ahead of evolving client needs and structural industry trends.” Convergence: the HPS owners, who were paid in BlackRock equity.

Interest is a documented fact about each position, not a claim about motive, and not a verdict that the argument is wrong. Each best case is stated at the strength its author states it.

Position in the Apparatus

BlackRock is a hinge node at the financial layer. Its CEO authored the most-cited corporate text of the stakeholder-capitalism era (cross-reference Larry Fink); its stewardship votes sit alongside Vanguard’s and State Street’s to form the “Giant Three” bloc that is the largest shareholder in roughly 88% of the S&P 500; and its Aladdin platform is licensed to institutions including, per the reporting record, other asset managers, insurers, pension systems such as CalPERS, banks such as Deutsche Bank, and central banks such as the Bank of Israel. The financial-control-grid thesis has a currency-layer analogue in the central-bank and CBDC file (cross-reference BIS / CBDC): steering transactions at the money layer, steering corporate behavior at the ownership layer. The adjacency is documented and lawful; the concentration is recurrence, not a roster anyone curated. The universal owner is a vendor to its own competitors. No cabal. A circuit.

Actions & Leadership Choices

Founding purpose, judged on evidence. BlackRock was founded in 1988 as a for-profit fixed-income manager and became the world’s largest index-fund and ETF operator — the commercial status is the founding fact, not a footnote. Judged on its deeds, its purpose is to gather and hold assets at scale and monetize the ownership and the plumbing that scale creates: management fees on ~$14T, plus technology fees on Aladdin from the very institutions it competes with. That is not a benign-by-default purpose; a firm that is simultaneously the market’s biggest owner, its proxy voter, and a vendor of its risk lens has a structural conflict built into the model. Who owns and instruments the market is part of what the market is. The deeds below are weighed against that conflict, not against a neutral-custodian prior.

Consequential actions, especially where it cost something. The costly-signal test for an asset manager under political fire is whether it will reverse a public commitment when clients and states punish it — and on the documented record, BlackRock did, at a price. After it leaned into climate-forward stewardship (its CEO’s 2020 “climate risk is investment risk” letter; net-zero engagement 2020–21), red-state officials retaliated: Texas placed BlackRock on its fossil-fuel “boycott” list in August 2022 under Senate Bill 13, and state treasurers withdrew funds — Louisiana pulled $794 million in October 2022 and Florida roughly $2 billion in December 2022, with a press-aggregated cumulative figure running into the billions. BlackRock then cut its support for environmental and social shareholder proposals from about 47% (2021) to 22% (2022) to 7% (2023 proxy year), per Morningstar; built Voting Choice to hand proxy decisions back to clients; exited the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative and Climate Action 100+ (NZAM in January 2025; CA100+ in February 2024, when BlackRock Inc. left and transferred its membership to BlackRock International; NZAM exit, ESG Today, 10 Jan 2025; CA100+ membership change, BlackRock, 15 Feb 2024); and Texas removed it from the boycott list in June 2025.

That reversibility is the exhibit for the defense: a genuine, one-way control grid does not walk back its flagship commitment, cut its proxy support by a factor of six, and get struck from a state blacklist inside three years. The counter, kept at full strength, is that the reversal was political self-preservation, not principled correction — the products, the Aladdin footprint, and the ownership concentration all remained, so the branding retreated while the architecture did not.

Leadership choices. BlackRock is run by its co-founder and CEO, Larry Fink (cross-reference Larry Fink), whose annual letter to CEOs made “stakeholder capitalism” the corporate vocabulary of the era and then, in 2023, publicly retired the word “ESG” as “weaponized.” The leadership ledger is the whole arc in one office: the firm defined the terms, absorbed the backlash, and rolled the terms back — while keeping the assets, the votes, and Aladdin. A universal owner whose CEO can move the entire corporate conversation with one letter, and unmove it with one interview, holds a quieter, more durable kind of reach than any single proxy vote.

The designation that did not come, on Treasury’s own pages. The Financial Stability Oversight Council’s record lists four nonbank designations: “The Council made final determinations to designate American International Group, Inc. and General Electric Capital Corporation, Inc. on July 8, 2013; Prudential Financial, Inc. on September 19, 2013; and MetLife, Inc. on December 18, 2014,” with rescissions of GE Capital on June 28, 2016, AIG on September 29, 2017 and Prudential on October 16, 2018 (Treasury, FSOC designations). No asset manager is on it. The Council’s 2015 line on the industry was that “there is no predetermined outcome, and no final decisions have been made in terms of potential risks relating to asset management products and activities” (Treasury, remarks of Patrick Pinschmidt, 2015). On March 25, 2026 the Council voted to propose guidance that “would return the Council to prioritizing an activities-based approach where we focus first on risks that arise from specific activities and practices across markets, rather than single out individual firms,” in Secretary Bessent’s words (Treasury, March 25, 2026). BlackRock’s 10-K still carries the exposure as a risk: “If BlackRock is designated as a SIFI, it could become subject to enhanced regulatory and capital requirements and direct supervision by the Federal Reserve” (10-K FY2025). The Aladdin side carries a separate one in Europe: “The European Supervisory Authorities are using data collected under DORA to assess which third party suppliers should be designated as critical to the EU financial system and become subject to further regulatory oversight” (same filing). The asset-management industry was under Council review in 2015 for possible risks, no asset manager was designated, and the March 2026 proposal puts the activities-based approach ahead of naming any single firm.

The antitrust case, on the docket. State of Texas v. BlackRock, Inc., No. 6:24-cv-00437 (E.D. Tex., Judge Jeremy D. Kernodle), was filed November 27, 2024 by thirteen state attorneys general (Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming) against BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard (CourtListener docket; NAAG case page). The court’s opinion of August 1, 2025 states the theory: the plaintiffs allege the defendants “acquired substantial stockholdings in every significant publicly held coal producer in the United States” and agreed to use the holdings to influence those companies and “artificially depress the output of coal”; the defendants argued “that they are mere passive investors that cannot be liable under the Clayton Act based on their acquisition of stock.” The ruling: “As explained below, the Court largely denies Defendants’ motions. At this stage in the proceeding, the Court must assume that Plaintiffs’ allegations are true,” and “The motions to dismiss Counts I-XVII and XXI are DENIED. The motions are GRANTED as to Counts XVIII, XIX, and XX, which are DISMISSED.” On the competition counts, “Plaintiffs plausibly allege that Defendants’ acquisition and use of stock has already harmed competition in the relevant markets.” The consumer-protection counts against BlackRock alone survive on the allegation that it advertised funds as not following an “ESG investment strategy” while pursuing an ESG agenda through engagements and proxy voting (Memorandum Opinion and Order, Dkt. 113, August 1, 2025). A motions hearing was held June 9, 2025 (Dkt. 111). The court granted leave for a second amended complaint on January 6, 2026 (Dkt. 146), and the plaintiffs and Vanguard filed a joint stipulation of dismissal of Vanguard with prejudice on February 26, 2026 (Dkt. 147) (CourtListener docket). BlackRock and State Street filed answers to the second amended complaint on March 6, 2026, and the defendants moved for partial judgment on the pleadings on March 16, 2026 (Climate Litigation Database, docket index). BlackRock’s 10-K says the same in its own words: “BlackRock is currently defending a lawsuit filed by thirteen state Attorneys General in Federal Court in the Eastern District of Texas against BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, alleging antitrust violations on the theory that the three companies conspired to artificially suppress coal supply,” and “In 2025, the court largely denied defendants’ motion to dismiss” (10-K FY2025). No merits ruling exists: a motion to dismiss assumes the allegations are true.

The states’ own lists and notices. The Texas Comptroller removed BlackRock from its list on June 3, 2025, saying “BlackRock was delisted in part because it stepped back from full participation in the Climate Action 100+,” that it had “dramatically reduced the number of fund offerings that prohibit investment in oil and gas,” and that “Listed companies are subject to the divestment provisions outlined in Texas Government Code Chapter 809” (Texas Comptroller). West Virginia’s State Treasurer keeps a separate list under W. Va. Code section 12-1C-1; the version signed by Treasurer Larry Pack, “List Updated: October 28, 2024,” names “BlackRock, Inc.” beside The Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, HSBC Holdings PLC, Citigroup, Inc., TD Bank, N.A. and Wells Fargo & Company, on “publicly available statements published by the financial institutions,” and states that “the State Treasurer will remove the institution from said list if the institution demonstrates that it has ceased all activity that boycotts energy companies” (West Virginia State Treasurer, Restricted Financial Institution List). The two lists point opposite ways on the same firm: one state removed it for retreating from the climate coalition, another listed it, in the version read, on its published statements.

CONDUCT verdict: CONFLICTED — UNIVERSAL OWNERSHIP, DOCUMENTED REVERSIBILITY — a for-profit asset manager with a structural conflict built into its model (largest owner of the market, its proxy voter, and a vendor of the industry’s risk platform), meaningfully mitigated by a documented, cost-bearing reversal when clients and states pushed back (proxy support cut to 7%, “ESG” dropped, climate alliances exited, Texas de-listing), but never resolved, because the ownership concentration and the Aladdin footprint that create the conflict remained fully in place while only the branding retreated.

Alliance Map

Several of these run at the same time. One firm is the largest index owner, the vendor of the Aladdin platform to more than a thousand clients including rivals, the new owner of an infrastructure manager, a private-credit manager and a private-markets data house, the founder of an AI-infrastructure partnership, a defendant in a thirteen-state antitrust suit that survived a motion to dismiss, and a firm that Texas took off its anti-boycott list in 2025 while West Virginia’s list, in the version read, still carried it. The overlap is the finding, not a coordination claim.

Reach Assessment

Institutional: BlackRock is the largest shareholder in most of the American corporate map and the operator of a risk platform on which — per the reporting record — a large share of the industry, including competitors and central banks, runs its money. Reach measured in ownership and installed base, not in any single vote. Memetic: Through its CEO’s annual letter, the firm’s grammar — “long-term value,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “climate risk is investment risk” — propagated into how corporate America talked about its own purpose, and its 2023 retreat re-set that vocabulary just as fast; owning the grammar is upstream of every boardroom that speaks it. Civilizational: BlackRock does not build AI systems or write their rules. It built the position from which corporate behavior across an entire market can be shaped through ownership and instrumented through software — a standing structural power at the financial layer, whose defining feature, on the documented record, is that it was partly rolled back under democratic and market pressure. Whether that reversibility is the reassurance or the exception is the open question the file leaves on the table.

Score basis. Atk 8 is reach: BlackRock’s own report says “The vast majority of our clients delegate voting authority to BlackRock,” “Approximately 90% of clients’ public equity AUM are held in index equity strategies,” and that it supported management on about 88 percent of more than 154,000 proposals voted in 2025, while Aladdin serves “over 1,000 clients” (2025 stewardship report; Preqin press release). It stays at 8 and not 9 because the reach is through ballots and software licences that clients can take back or leave, and the program that hands votes back already covers $3.76 trillion of eligible index equity assets, not through a statute or a pre-release gate. Def 9 is funding insulation: $19,179 million of $24,216 million total 2025 revenue is advisory, administration and securities-lending fees across $14.0 trillion of client assets, performance fees are 6 percent of revenue, and no payer is named; the counterweights are that “ETFs represented 42% of long-term AUM … and 45% of long-term base fees” and so fees move with markets, and that Louisiana and Florida showed a state can pull a mandate (10-K FY2025). Hp 9 is entrenchment: Aladdin “assignments are typically long-term contracts that provide recurring revenue,” technology revenue was $1,981 million in 2025, annual contract value rose 31 percent including Preqin, index and ETF assets are held indefinitely, and the firm has added GIP, Preqin and HPS to one platform; the soft edges are the pending Texas case and the 10-K’s own SIFI and DORA risk factors. Peers on the same values: UK Online Safety Act at 8/9/9, hazard 84, reaches every regulated provider by statute with a penalty ceiling, where this firm’s reach is delegated votes and licences, so its def rests on a fee base of savers rather than a regulator funded by the regulated, and the hazard is level because a statute can be repealed and an installed base of $14 trillion cannot be repealed by anyone in particular. EU AI Act at 8/9/9, hazard 86, sits two points higher on enforcement that began 2 August 2026 in all 27 member states; BlackRock holds no enforcement power. RAND Corporation at 8/9/9, hazard 80, writes the analysis that others cite; BlackRock holds the ballots and the platform the analysis is about, which is why it sits four points higher. No move: the 2025 record (the $14.0 trillion balance sheet, the GIP, Preqin and HPS closings, the August 2025 denial of the motion to dismiss) fits inside the values already held. The Texas case is the number to revisit: a merits judgment against BlackRock would move def.

Sources: BlackRock — Aladdin; Aladdin (BlackRock) — Wikipedia (aggregator citing the reporting record); American Economic Liberties Project, “The New Money Trust” (Nov 2020); Bebchuk & Hirst, “The Specter of the Giant Three” (Boston University Law Review, 2019) — PDF; Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance summary; Fichtner, Heemskerk & Garcia-Bernardo, “Hidden Power of the Big Three” (Business and Politics, 2017); Heath et al., “Do Index Funds Monitor?” (ECGI, PDF); BlackRock Investment Stewardship; BlackRock — Voting Choice; Morningstar — “Are There Too Many ESG Shareholder Proposals?” (Lindsey Stewart); CNBC — “Texas accuses 10 financial companies, including BlackRock, of ‘boycotting’ energy companies” (Aug 25, 2022); Texas Comptroller — press release removing BlackRock from the list (June 3, 2025); Texas Tribune — “BlackRock removed from Texas agency divestment list” (June 3, 2025); BlackRock investor relations / press releases (BlackRock 4Q25 earnings release); SEC EDGAR — BlackRock filings (CIK 0002012383); BlackRock 10-K, FY ended December 31, 2025 — SEC EDGAR; BlackRock Investment Stewardship, 2025 annual report (PDF); BlackRock — Voting Choice (current page); BlackRock — agrees to acquire GIP, January 12, 2024; BlackRock — to acquire Preqin, June 30, 2024 (PDF); BlackRock — to acquire HPS, December 3, 2024; Treasury — FSOC designations; Treasury — remarks at the IAA 2015 Compliance Conference; Treasury — FSOC proposed guidance, March 25, 2026; CourtListener — State of Texas v. BlackRock, Inc., No. 6:24-cv-00437 (E.D. Tex.); Memorandum Opinion and Order, Dkt. 113, August 1, 2025 (PDF); NAAG — Texas et al. v. BlackRock et al.; Climate Litigation Database — Texas v. BlackRock docket index; West Virginia State Treasurer — Restricted Financial Institution List (updated October 28, 2024); Larry Fink — profile.