BlackRock - The company that owns the world?

There's a good chance you've never heard of BlackRock. Founded in only 1988, in less than 30 years this American financial firm would grow to become "the company that owns the world," managing assets worth 6.3 trillion dollars. These are assets that belong to their clients, mainly the pension funds of ordinary people: teachers, police officers, nurses, and many more.

And that's just the beginning. BlackRock has also developed a software platform called Aladdin to perform risk analysis for its clients. It receives sensitive data from banks, insurance companies, and other important institutions. Through Aladdin, BlackRock has insights about the management of financial assets worth another 20 trillion dollars.

BlackRock also has shares and voting rights in many of the biggest European companies in sectors such as energy, oil and gas, transportation, food, and of course finance. The company holds public debt in the form of bonds and has real estate interests. And still, there's more. Our rock, you see, wears many hats.

Aside from being an investor, it is also an auditor and an advisor. Governments and central banks invite a BlackRock subsidiary called "BlackRock Solutions" to audit them and to provide advice about the management and rescue of banks. Yet at the same time, BlackRock is often a major shareholder in these same banks.

In other words, the company often sits on both sides of the table. BlackRock Solutions gets privileged access to highly sensitive information—information that could be valuable to BlackRock itself. Does this constitute a conflict of interest? "No," says BlackRock, which claims that the company has established "Chinese Walls" between its different subsidiaries.

In January 2018, BlackRock's founder and chairman Larry Fink sent a letter to all of the CEOs of the companies BlackRock is invested in, asking them to do more than deliver financial performance and make a... "positive contribution to society." So BlackRock not only owns the world... it also wants to save it?