10 April, 2026

Every year, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, writes a letter that is often seen to set the tone for global finance. This year, his message is that capitalism is working, but too few people are benefiting from it.

This chimes with our thinking. For the past 30 years, we’ve been motivated by the idea that business can be part of the solution – because capitalism, done well, can drive progress, innovation, and positive impact.

Fink points to a reality that is hard to ignore. Over the past decades, a huge amount of value has been created, but it has not been shared equally. Since 1989, a dollar invested in the stock market has grown more than 15 times faster than a dollar tied to median wages. In practice, this means that those who already own assets have seen their wealth grow significantly, while those who rely on income from work have benefited far less, a trend that AI is likely to compound.

Fink’s response is to bring more people into the system. He argues that more people accessing long-term investing, retirement systems, and new technologies that make investing easier, means more people benefitting from the growth that is already happening. It makes sense: if wealth is increasingly created through ownership, then access to ownership matters.

What’s important to recognise, however, is that Larry Fink has a clear stake in this vision. As the head of BlackRock, a company managing more than $10 trillion in assets, his business depends on capital markets growing, on more assets being invested, and on more people participating in them. This is not a system observed from the outside; it is one BlackRock has helped shape. Encouraging wider ownership is therefore not only a societal argument, it also aligns with the growth of the system his company benefits from.

That doesn’t make his argument wrong, but it does raise a more fundamental question: if people are not earning enough, how can they realistically participate in the system he is asking them to buy into? If wealth continues to concentrate at the top, and wages fail to keep pace, it is not clear where most people will find the means to invest in the first place. Larry Fink has identified a real system failure, but he stops short of addressing the full system in his solution. Access alone cannot solve a system where the starting point remains unequal.

For leaders like Fink, who hold both influence and power at a global scale, the question is whether they are willing to address not only how people enter the system, but also how value is distributed within it. Because in the end, participation means little without the means to participate.

By Justine Bahoumina