If you're counting down the years until you hit 65 and can finally put your feet up, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink thinks you might be stuck in an outdated playbook. In his 2024 letter to investors, the head of the world's largest asset manager called out America's retirement system as something that hasn't caught up to modern realities.
"No one should have to work longer than they want to," Fink wrote. "But I do think it's a bit crazy that our anchor idea for the right retirement age — 65 years old — originates from the time of the Ottoman Empire."
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Think about that for a second. A number chosen more than a century ago, when life expectancy was far shorter, still dictates when most people assume they can stop working. But today, if you're married and both you and your spouse are over the age of 65, there's a coin flip's chance that one of you will live into your 90s. That's decades of life beyond the "traditional" retirement age — decades that need financing.
And that's exactly Fink's point. The system is straining under the weight of changing demographics. Back in 1952, the year Fink was born, many workers who paid into Social Security didn't live long enough to collect a single benefit check. Fast forward to today, and not only are more people reaching retirement, they're staying retired much longer. That longevity is a blessing, but it also breaks the math of programs designed for a very different era.
Fink doesn't just frame this as a government problem — he says it's a national one. More than half of BlackRock's assets under management are tied to retirement, and the company helps about 35 million Americans save for life after work, including managing pension funds for roughly half of U.S. public school teachers. From his vantage point, he sees the anxiety building across generations. Millennials and Gen Z, he points out, believe Boomers prioritized their own financial well-being at the expense of the future — and "in the case of retirement, they're right."
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Then there's the other irony he called out. "We focus a tremendous amount of energy on helping people live longer lives. But not even a fraction of that effort is spent helping people afford those extra years." In other words: medical breakthroughs like weight-loss drugs that also extend life are amazing — but they only deepen the retirement challenge if the financial system doesn't adapt.
That wasn't a one-off point. In a separate Bloomberg Television interview last year, Fink doubled down, saying, "I don't think the average citizen knows the extent of how much longer we're going to be able to live."
He cited advances in medicine that have extended life expectancy by "10, 15, 20 years longer than two generations ago" — a seismic demographic shift that hasn't been reflected in how we plan or pay for retirement. "We haven't changed our system of retirement or our system of Social Security," he added. "So the most important thing we need to do… is have a conversation."
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Fink doesn't claim to have a neat solution. Instead, he's calling for something on the scale of the 2008 financial crisis response or the government's push to secure America's semiconductor supply chain: a coordinated, high-level effort to modernize retirement. He points to the Netherlands as an example, where the retirement age is tied to life expectancy, but admits such a policy would be a heavy political lift in the U.S.
Still, he insists the conversation has to start now. Because when the Social Security Administration itself is projecting it won't be able to pay full benefits by 2034, pretending the old rules still work isn't just optimistic — it's reckless.
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