Merrill Lynch
ORG
Merrill Merrill Lynch
Mr. Fink, chief executive of BlackRock, the rapidly growing asset management company. Mr. Fink has ascended to a career and personal mountaintop he clinched an industry-rattling $9.8 billion merger with Merrill Lynch's asset management unit. While not necessarily an unheard-of notion, it was enough to attract the attention of two of Wall Street's most aggressive chief executives, John J. Mack of Morgan Stanley and E. Stanley O'Neal of Merrill Lynch, both of whom were looking for a fund company with assets that could draw in their institutional and retail clients. Mr. Fink chose Mr. O'Neal and Merrill Lynch. At Merrill, the firm's portfolio managers occupy a warren of small offices in the firm's labyrinthine Plainsboro, N.J., campus, many miles away, literally and philosophically, from the BlackRock mother ship.