By Tyler Durden

A week after an employee of the world’s largest asset management company, BlackRock, described how the company attempts to stay out of the media spotlight while buying politicians and profiting off of war (according to undercover footage obtained by the O’Keefe Media Group), we thought it worth a look at just what companies does the 34-year-old company have the most control of.

As a reminder, in footage secretly recorded by undercover journalists in New York, a BlackRock recruiter named Serge Varlay explains how the investment company is able to “run the world.”

“They [BlackRock] don’t want to be in the news. They don’t want people to talk about them. They don’t want to be anywhere on the radar,” Varlay said.

Varlay told a OMG journalist in the footage that BlackRock manages $20 trillion worldwide (it’s actually around $9 trillion). “It’s incomprehensible numbers,” he said.

“You can take this big f***ton of money and buy people, I work for a company called BlackRock… It’s not who is the president it’s who is controlling the wallet of the president.

You could buy your candidates. First, there is the senators these guys are f***in cheap. Got 10 grand you can buy a senator. I’ll give you 500k right now. It doesn’t matter who wins, they’re in my pocket.”

– Serge Varlay

Given this status, BlackRock’s equity portfolio may provide useful insights to investors. To learn more, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu and Rosey Eason visualized the firm’s top 25 equity holdings as of Q1 2023. At that time, these 25 positions were worth over $1 trillion, and they represented about 30% of BlackRock’s overall equity portfolio.

As expected, BlackRock’s top equity holdings include America’s most established tech companies: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

BlackRock also has large positions in Nvidia and Broadcom, which happen to be America’s two largest semiconductor companies. Given Nvidia’s incredible YTD performance (198% as of June 19th), this position has likely grown even bigger.

So much more on link:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/merck-microsoft-these-are-companies-blackrock-controls-most#google_vignette

1 Apple Information Technology $171
2 Microsoft Information Technology $155
3 Amazon Consumer Discretionary $63
4 Nvidia Information Technology $51
5 Google (Class A) Communications $44
6 Google (Class C) Communications $38
7 Tesla Consumer Discretionary $37
8 UnitedHealth Group Health Care $35
9 Meta Communications $32
10 Berkshire Hathaway (Class B) Finance $32
11 Johnson & Johnson Health Care $31
12 Exxon Mobil Energy $30
13 iShares Core S&P 500 ETF ETF $29
14 Visa Finance $28
15 JPMorgan Chase & Co Finance $25
16 Procter & Gamble Co Consumer Staples $24
17 Mastercard Finance $24
18 Home Depot Consumer Discretionary $23
19 Eli Lilly And Co Health Care $23
20 Merck & Co Health Care $22
21 AbbVie Health Care $22
22 Chevron Energy $22
23 PepsiCo Consumer Staples $20
24 Coca-Cola Co Consumer Staples $19
25 Broadcom Information Technology $19