Insider Finance - Business - Insider Today: BlackRock’s boys’ club

January 7, 2024 • 5 min read

with Matt Turner

Welcome back to our Sunday edition, a roundup of some of our top stories.

What's on deck

• Meet the biggest names in BlackRock’s boys’ club.
• That’s enough — it’s time to stop hating on baby boomers.
• Bill Ackman's celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman's dissertation is marred by plagiarism.
• The electric-vehicle boom was supposed to be inevitable. What went wrong?

But first: home headaches.

Getty

Dispatch

America needs more homes

The country is short anywhere between 1.5 million and 6.5 million homes, depending on which analysis you look at. That shortage has driven up rents and home prices, and helped make housing costs a key driver of discontent among younger Americans.

Against that backdrop, a wave of startups promising to help alleviate the housing crisis by mass producing homes have raised billions of dollars. The residential construction market is worth more than $500 billion each year, and capturing even a tiny slice of that offers outsized rewards.

Several of these startups have since run into difficulty. There was Katerra, which went bankrupt in 2021 after raising $2 billion. More recently, Veev, which said in 2022 it had raised $400 million, surprised employees when it told them just before Thanksgiving that it was closing. It later sold itself to homebuilding giant Lennar for a fraction of its unicorn valuation.

Tiny home startup Boxabl, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from crowdfunding, has also had its share of challenges and has drawn scrutiny from the SEC.

It turns out, building homes is hard. As anyone who has been involved with construction will tell you, there’s always something that goes wrong. As one industry veteran told my colleague Alex Nicoll, mass production simply puts all these inevitable problems under one roof.

Daniel Jurman for BI

This week's top reads

Quit hating on boomers

In the eyes of many American millennials and Gen Zers, baby boomers’ greed and economic failures are the root cause of the various financial challenges they now face. The feeling is that boomers had it easier, and they left the next generations worse off. 

But for all the flak the older generation gets, it’s not quite substantiated. Generally, boomers had it much worse than younger generations: They grew up in a poorer, less educated, and more unfair society. They’ve also left America a better place than how they found it.

Why it’s time to give boomers some credit.

Patrick McMullan/Steven Ferdman/Getty Images; Jenny Chang-Rodriguez/BI

Plagiarism problems

Bill Ackman railed against Harvard’s former president for plagiarizing, but his wife also plagiarised in her dissertation.

Neri Oxman, a former tenured professor at MIT and the wife of the billionaire hedge fund manager, plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.

Following BI's report, Oxman admitted to failing to properly credit sources in portions of her doctoral dissertation.

More on the plagiarism in Bill Ackman's celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman's dissertation.

Read more:

• Neri Oxman admits to plagiarizing in her doctoral dissertation after BI report
• Academic celebrity Neri Oxman plagiarized from Wikipedia, scholars, a textbook, and other sources without any attribution

NurPhoto/Getty, Tyler Le/BI

What happened to America's grand EV plan?

A few years ago, the shift to electric vehicles seemed inevitable. EV plants, battery-manufacturing facilities, and mining operations had expanded. By the end of 2022, more and more Americans were going electric. The transition felt unstoppable.

EV sales do keep ticking up. But the pace of adoption has slowed, and analysts suggest the country is no longer on track to hit the government's sales targets. Such a slump in the progression towards EV dominance begs the question: what gives?

More on the EV issues.

Michael M. Santiago/Getty, Rob Goldstein/Techonomy, Peter Rae/Australian Financial, Tyler Le/BI

Inside BlackRock’s boys’ club

Larry Fink, BlackRock's cofounder and chief executive, has said he's not planning to leave the firm "anytime soon." But the company is also prioritizing finding a successor for the 71-year-old. 

There's a small cohort of men who could take his place. In interviews with dozens of people close to BlackRock, Business Insider learned about each potential successor's style and trajectory — and who's most likely to take Fink's spot once it's time.

Meet the contenders for Fink's throne.

This week's quote

"We're not disappointed in our employees; we're disappointed in ourselves as managers and leaders.”

— Costco's current and former CEOs wrote in a memo after a Virginia warehouse unionized.

More of this week's top reads

• Search through the names in Jeffrey Epstein’s little black books.
• In California, homeownership is becoming more elusive for millennials.
• Pissed-off politicians, temper tantrums, and a $300,000 fine: An on-the-ground look at hedge fund billionaire David Tepper's hellacious tenure atop the Carolina Panthers.
• A tech employee rose through the ranks of companies like Google and Meta by choosing to “eat the frog.”
• A new survey found that Gen Z doesn't consider a $74,580 salary "middle class."
• Billionaires are beefing over DEI.
• A millennial travel nurse explains how he makes over $100,000 a year and avoids burnout.
• Five travel influencers share how they’re turning their passion into a lucrative business.