Matt Levine, Columnist

A Lot of People Wanted to Help BlackRock Invest

If you have a lot of money, people will want to talk to you, or your computers. Sometimes this is a problem.

January 9, 2014 at 5:19 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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One advantage of having a lot of money is that it makes it easier to make even more money. Money scales nicely. For instance, if you have $4.1 trillion, smart people will be happy to give you good advice about how to invest it. All they'll ask in return is that you pay them some of your money, but since you have so much of it this is not too big a burden.

Some of this advice comes from people whom you hire and pay salaries and bonuses -- sometimes bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars -- to work full-time on thinking about how to invest your money. But, financial services being what they are, some of these people work for brokerage firms and help lots of people invest their money, in exchange for "commissions" or "fees" or "trading profits" or whatever. These people take pride in providing exactly the same level of service to all of their fee-paying clients, no matter how big or how small.