One tiny detail in the short, tragic life of Thomas Matthew Crooks, the 20-year-old who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania, has become the subject of online attention. In 2022, Crooks, who was then still at school, briefly appeared in a promotional video for the asset manager BlackRock. Crooks can be seen for a couple of seconds, turning to look at his teacher. He doesn’t speak in the video and was not paid for his appearance; he has never worked for the company. This tenuous connection was enough, however, to reignite a conspiracy theory that has long focused on BlackRock.
The first tweet revealing Crooks’ appearance in the BlackRock video was viewed more than 17 million times in less than 24 hours. Among the thousands of replies, the overriding sentiment was that the assassination attempt was an “inside job”, that there are “no coincidences”, and that BlackRock had had some role in the attempt to assassinate Trump.
For years, conspiracy theorists have claimed that BlackRock secretly controls much of what happens in the world for its own nefarious ends. This theory is particularly prevalent, in varying strengths, on the American right. When Fox News was sued by the voting-machine manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems, the theory spread online that BlackRock owned both companies (it doesn’t) and had either rigged the 2020 US election using the machines, or was secretly orchestrating the lawsuit to remove the Fox News anchor, Tucker Carlson (a leading Trump advocate who had made false claims about Dominion’s machines). Robert F Kennedy Jr, the independent candidate, is a proponent of the false conspiracy theory that BlackRock is quietly buying up most of the homes in America. Vivek Ramaswamy, who sought the Republican nomination before endorsing Trump, has described BlackRock and two other asset managers as “arguably the most powerful cartel in human history”.
BlackRock appeals to conspiracy theorists because it is the world’s largest asset manager. It invests more than $10trn of other people’s money in financial markets, which makes it possible to draw a line between BlackRock and almost anything. It really does own large chunks of very large numbers of companies. There is a very good chance that your retirement savings are invested by BlackRock or a similar market mega-manager such as Vanguard.
These institutions have grown to such enormous size not through subterfuge but by the success of a trading strategy. “Active” investment means buying specific assets (such as shares in particular companies) in the hope they will rise in value. “Passive” investment means buying a little chunk of everything, in the expectation that the whole index will rise over time. This is a safer and more lucrative way of investing money; the fees are lower, too. Asset managers such as BlackRock create index funds to allow other institutions, such as banks and pension funds, to spread the world’s retirement savings across whole markets. They buy shares in everything not because they have a secret desire to own the world but because this is the easiest and most reliable way to invest other people’s money. BlackRock’s largest fund, which owns shares in of the 500 largest companies in America, is worth more than half a trillion dollars.
The numbers involved are so large that it is hardly surprising people find them sinister. Several years ago, I was interviewing a senior BlackRock executive about the company’s risk management software – a system called Aladdin – which is used to inform the investments of BlackRock’s clients as well as its own strategies. I will never forget the exec’s casual admission that the amount managed using Aladdin ($20trn, about the same as America’s total GDP for that year) certainly sounded like a lot of money.
It’s also fair to say that BlackRock has a lot of power. Asset managers vote in shareholder meetings on behalf of all the people whose money they are investing; when they do so at such a huge scale, that power becomes significant. But it also makes the company a target for opportunists. When BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, wrote in his 2021 letter to CEOs that “climate risk is investment risk” and that BlackRock would expect the companies it invested in to disclose their plans for net zero, he incurred the wrath of others who see net zero as another sinister conspiracy. The Florida governor (and former Republican presidential hopeful) Ron DeSantis pulled $2bn of his state’s investments from management by BlackRock, which he and others on the US right saw as the epitome of “woke capitalism”.
Elsewhere, cryptocurrency promoters have been quick to use the animosity towards BlackRock to avoid the blame for the collapse of their doomed schemes. The faceless giant makes a useful cover for their own fleecing of investors.
The conspiracy theories around BlackRock are of course untrue, and on social media discussion of the company reeks of anti-Semitism. But the fascination with BlackRock, among people of all political persuasions, is also an indicator of the large and growing influence that financial markets have in all our lives. Millions of people have found that their real wages haven’t grown, that homes have become unaffordable, that public services are under pressure from the ever-growing cost of government debt, and they know that somehow, these problems are linked to the decisions made by financial institutions. Egged on by the likes of Russell Brand – who suggested the 2023 wildfires on Hawaii were started for BlackRock’s benefit using a laser owned by Bill Gates – they have channelled this inchoate sense of injustice into a story about one company that represents “elites”.
BlackRock is in many ways the perfect subject for a conspiracy theory – it handles vast sums of money, is connected to everything, and most people don’t really understand what it does. In a world in which people feel they lack control of their finances, it is easy to see why they have constructed a story about a company that appears to control everything.
[See also: The alarming rise of BlueAnon]
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