The major test of 2026. The “Master of the Universe” demands the reform of capitalism before AI turns employees into “spectators”, including those in Romania

Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, the giant with assets of tens of trillions of dollars and stakes of hundreds of millions of lei in several top companies in Romania, warned in Davos that AI risks becoming the failure of capitalism if it does not turn people into “owners of growth, instead of spectators”, according to Fortune.com.

• BlackRock is the world's largest asset manager, managing a record $14 trillion in assets at the start of 2026 under Larry Fink, who has been at the helm since 1988.
• Often named by financial publications as one of the “Masters of the Universe” on Wall Street due to his colossal influence, Fink manages stakes in Romania valued at hundreds of millions of lei in pillars of the economy such as BRD, Banca Transilvania, OMV Petrom, Hidroelectrica or MedLife.

“Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, more wealth has been created than at any other time in human history, but in advanced economies, this wealth has reached a much smaller portion of the population than any healthy society can ultimately support,” said Larry Fink on January 20 at the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

In front of thousands of CEOs and world leaders, the BlackRock CEO warned that the enormous benefits of the wealth creation of the 1990s were not shared fairly. And the capitalist ideology driving the development and implementation of AI could come at the expense of most wage earners, he added.

“The initial gains go to model owners, data owners and infrastructure owners,” Fink said.

“The open question is: What will happen to everyone else if AI does for white-collar workers (non-professionals, office workers) what globalization has done for blue-collar workers (industrial workers)? We need to face this problem head-on today. This is not about the future. The future is now.”

Fink's vision: A capitalism in the service of all

Fink, who was named interim co-chair of the World Economic Forum in August 2025, replacing founder Klaus Schwab, has long advocated reshaping capitalism through investments focused on environmental protection and social responsibility.

In a 2022 letter to investors published a day before the Davos summit, Fink outlined a model of “stakeholder capitalism” in which a company's mandate is to serve not just shareholders but also employees, consumers and the public.

The current edition in Davos marked the debut of Larry Fink as the main leader of the Forum, being the first meeting held without founder Klaus Schwab, who withdrew following a major scandal. He was accused of siphoning more than a million dollars of the Forum's money on private trips, while also facing allegations of workplace misconduct and tampering with research reports.

In this context, the head of BlackRock emphasized that the Forum must regain its legitimacy through real concern for the well-being of citizens, not just for corporate profits. “Many of those most affected by what we're discussing here will never come to this conference,” Fink warned.

Although BlackRock announced in early 2025 that it would abandon many of the diversity, equity and inclusion goals it had created several years earlier, Fink again used his influence to urge leaders to transform their capitalist sensibilities, this time in terms of how they envision the future of AI, writes American business magazine Fortune.

The cost of the AI ​​boom

The explosion of the AI ​​sector in 2025 has generated record wealth for tech giants. A Morningstar analysis shows that a group of 34 stocks in this space, including Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft, rose 50.8% last year.

This rise has translated into colossal gains for the financial elites. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the net worth of the 50 richest Americans increased by an average of $10 billion. The numbers are staggering in the case of Google co-founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin increased their fortunes by more than 190 billion dollars together in the past year alone.

But the BlackRock CEO noted that these record profits were reserved almost exclusively for the financial elite, fueling a so-called “K-shaped economy.” In this scenario, while the rich benefit from technology, the other half of the population not only lags behind, but also bears the indirect costs of this progress.

Fink's view of exploding inequality in the post-Cold War era reflects a major shift in perspective: What was once a niche opinion has now become a globally recognized reality, Fortune writes.

In this sense, historian Andrew Bacevich compared the collapse of the Soviet system to the moment when the “speed limit” was removed from the engine of capitalism, letting it accelerate without control. This unbridled acceleration, which Bacevich has been criticizing since 2020, is precisely what has now prompted Fink to warn in Davos that the current economic model risks failing due to deep inequality

Owners or spectators?

Similarly, the AI ​​boom's risks to workers extend beyond those who have vested interests in the growth of the tech industry. Nobel laureate and “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton has previously warned that this explosion of wealth for the few will come at the expense of white-collar workers who will be replaced by technology.

“What will actually happen is that rich people will use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said in September. “This will create massive unemployment and a huge increase in profits. It will make a few people much richer and the majority poorer. It's not AI's fault, it's the capitalist system's fault.”

Some companies have already started cutting staff to boost profits, including enterprise software firm IgniteTech.

According to figures analyzed by Fortune, CEO Eric Vaughan has laid off nearly 80 percent of his staff by the start of 2023. Vaughan said the cuts came at an inflection point in the tech industry, where failure to effectively adopt AI could be fatal for a company. He has since rehired staff for all of those positions and would make the same choice today, he told US magazine.

In Fink's view, protecting white-collar jobs now depends on the ability of the global elite to come up with a concrete plan. This plan must directly address criticisms of a capitalism that has, until now, generated major benefits only for those at the top of the pyramid, leaving the rest of society vulnerable to automation

“Beyond abstractions about the jobs of tomorrow, the real test will be creating a credible plan for broad participation in these gains,” he said. “Capitalism can evolve to make more people owners of growth, instead of mere spectators watching it happen.”