Recently, FAIR (2/3/26) took a look at the owners of the biggest online media outlets. It focused on the controlling owners of those outlets, which are mostly publicly traded corporations. But a lot of the money—about $2 trillion dollars—invested in the top 50 online media outlets in the US is not the controlling owners’. Rather, it is possessed by minority institutional investors that manage assets for others.
Take BlackRock, Inc., for instance. Innovation & Tech Today (7/8/22) called it “the biggest company you’ve probably never heard of.” The multinational’s influence comes from the $13.5 trillion it manages on behalf of retirement funds, governments, other corporations and individual investors. That figure is enough to purchase every share of Amazon five times over.
BlackRock is just one of the Big Three US asset management firms. The other two, the Vanguard Group and State Street Corporation, are similarly big financial players. Vanguard manages $12 trillion and State Street manages about $5.5 trillion. Collectively, the Big Three “steward” almost 7% of all of the wealth in the entire world: stocks, bonds, cash, everything, everywhere. And while they are not a cartel, they hold the same interests, by dint of owning a small slice of almost everything.
The sheer amount of capital the Big Three can throw around gives them weight. When President Donald Trump went off on an extended tirade about Chinese control of the Panama Canal, BlackRock was there with a solution: “An investor group led by BlackRock will acquire two ports near the Panama Canal,” the New York Times (3/4/25) reported. And when the US economy went into a financial tailspin in 2007–08, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink was the person that central bankers and presidents had on speed dial. They’re invested in private prisons and residential real estate and Kellogg’s cereals, to name just a few.
Hellbound and Down 