- At least nine people have left or are transitioning out of BlackRock’s communications group.
- Brian Beades, who joined the company in 1999 and is now a top PR executive, is exiting.
- The departures come as the firm and CEO Larry Fink aim to counter tremendous criticism.
In the last year eight people from BlackRock’s corporate communications team, including a speechwriter who guided Chief Executive Larry Fink’s messaging, have left the group, people familiar with the matter said. Another employee from the group, a top public-relations executive who years ago helped establish the firm’s investor relations and communications operations, is in the process of leaving the company.
Longtime BlackRock executive Brian Beades has taken on a new role as advisor as he transitions out of the company, global head of corporate communications Jim Badenhausen said in a memo to employees on January 30.
“Last spring, Brian expressed an interest in exploring new career opportunities, and we are very pleased that as he does, he will continue to serve as a consultant to the firm focused on the critical public affairs issues we are navigating in the US,” Badenhausen said in the memo.
Felicity Barber, who advised on communications for executives of the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and San Francisco before she managed Fink’s influential messaging at BlackRock, left this month.
The exits come as BlackRock walks a communications tightrope. The sustainable investing boom that the firm has profited from and become the face of has made it a political punching bag. The company, personified by its high-profile CEO, has drawn extraordinary criticism that intensified last year and has commanded vigorous defense from the firm.
State treasurers and lawmakers, mainly on the right, have banded together to lambast Fink for his stance that assessing risks posed by climate change is key to assessing investment risk. Environmental advocates meanwhile say he is not doing enough to fight the climate crisis, pointing to the firm’s oil and gas holdings.
Fink and the firm often respond by reminding each side that it is a fiduciary, meaning it puts clients’ interests before its own. “Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not ‘woke,'” Fink said in his letter to CEOs last year.
The corporate communications team has some 90 employees globally, up from 48 in 2019, a BlackRock spokesperson said. In recent years turnover on the team has been consistent, at or below roughly 10%, and is in-line or below BlackRock’s average turnover rate, the spokesperson said, adding that the team was impacted by the company’s layoffs in January.
Beades joined BlackRock in 1999 after graduating from college and rose through the ranks to become one of the most senior PR executives at the world’s largest asset manager, leading corporate communications for the Americas.
Badenhausen told employees in his January memo that the well-respected veteran PR executive David Wells would join the company as deputy head of global corporate communications from Prosek Partners, where he was a partner. Wells died last month, drawing an outpouring of tributes from colleagues across financial communications and the press.
Badenhausen’s team has added new employees in the past year, including the former global head of communications at crypto exchange Gemini. The average tenure of managing directors on the team is 10 years, a spokesperson said.
“We’re fortunate the BlackRock communications team includes some of the most talented professionals in the industry and that we have continued to attract top talent as the team has grown in recent years,” Badenhausen said in a statement to Insider. “I’m incredibly proud of the role our team has played in telling BlackRock’s story and continuing to grow BlackRock’s business.”
In addition to the eight employees who have exited the group and one employee who plans to depart, another former communications executive who was key to shaping BlackRock’s approach to sustainability left the firm last year.
Jonathan Posen, a veteran speechwriter who worked as former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s chief writer on the financial crisis and other economic matters, joined BlackRock’s communications group in 2013. For a time, Posen wrote Fink’s influential open letters and later took the role of leading strategy for sustainable investing.
BlackRock’s communications challenges
Like every major corporation, BlackRock’s communications team is made up of employees who shape executives’ remarks, maintain relationships with journalists, try to spin stories so they turn out more favorably for the company, and generally guide how the firm gets its message out to the public. The position BlackRock’s team is in is unique. The firm is the largest money manager and manages $8.6 trillion through its funds, with unparalleled sway on other companies’ policies.
New York City-based BlackRock helped popularize sustainable investing and the process of making investment decisions with environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, factors in mind. Every major asset management firm, from Vanguard and Fidelity to State Street Global Advisors, has similar ESG programs for themselves as corporations and as investors.
But because of Fink’s public persona and widely read letters on corporate purpose and investing, none of those firms have gathered the same level of attention that BlackRock has. “For the first time in my professional career, attacks are now personal,” Fink told Bloomberg in January. “They’re trying to demonize the issues.”
Last month Reuters reported that a BlackRock presentation during a financial industry conference was interrupted by unplanned questions shouted from the audience about the company’s responsibilities to exit fossil fuel investments. And activists and their children, part of the group Sunrise Kids, protested in front of Fink’s Westchester, New York home last spring, Gothamist reported last year.
The criticism reached new heights in 2022 as Republican state officials coordinated attacks on Fink and BlackRock and some pulled their investments.
“As Larry Fink stated to CEOs ‘[A]ccess to capital is not a right. It is a privilege.’ As Florida’s CFO I agree wholeheartedly, so we’ll be taking Larry up on his offer,” Jimmy Patronis, Florida’s finance chief, said in a statement last December. “There’s no lack of companies who will invest on our behalf, so the Florida Treasury will be taking its business elsewhere.”
Do you have a tip about BlackRock? Contact this reporter at rungarino@insider.com, rungarino@protonmail.com, or at (646) 768-4711 using a non-work phone.
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