Rick Rieder frequently describes himself as “maniacal.” And he’s not alone. BlackRock Inc.’s chief executive officer, Larry Fink, agrees.
The global chief investment officer for fixed income at BlackRock is unusually passionate for Wall Street. How else would you describe someone who won’t accept his doctor’s advice on minimum-required sleep? Who seems to relish spending one Saturday each month from sunrise to sunset doing nothing but market research?
As obsessive as Rieder is about investing and a handful of other topics, perhaps what’s more striking is how rigid he is about cutting things out of his life that don’t fire him up. He’ll talk your ear off about why he was an early investor in Tesla Inc. and drives one of its cars (Elon Musk “is a god to me”), and he’ll go to just about any concert with his family (including rapper Pitbull’s show this past New Year’s Eve). But he can’t fathom spending a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or catching a midday movie. No time for those things.
That leaves him with a short list of interests: education reform; sports; his alma mater, Emory University; his family; and his bond funds. “What I enjoy doing, I really enjoy doing,” he says. “I’ve given up on the rest of things that I’m kind of interested in.”
Rieder is zealous about education reform. One cold morning in December, he’s revving up a group of students in the gym of Vailsburg Middle School, a charter school in Newark, N.J. Vailsburg is one of more than a dozen charters in Newark run by North Star Academy, of which Rieder is chairman of the board. Exhorting the young students to seize opportunities, he tells them, “Life is not a dress rehearsal! Life is the big event!”
Then he yields to two surprise guests: Ken Daneyko, a New Jersey Devils hockey legend, followed by the team mascot: the NJ Devil.
Rieder also is a rabid Devils fan. Lately, one of his best connections to the franchise is his 24-year-old daughter, who does social media for the team—her desk is three seats away from that of the mascot and she helped arrange his appearance at the school. Another connection is his former boss at Lehman Brothers, Jeffrey Vanderbeek, who owned the team for about a decade before selling his controlling stake in 2013. Lehman, of course, collapsed in September 2008 in one of the central events of the global financial crisis.
The way Fink tells it, Rieder’s drive is what got him in the door at BlackRock in 2009 after 21 years at Lehman. “His particular strength is his headfirst approach to everything he does,” Fink says. “When Rick gets interested in something, either charter schools or conceptualizing what’s going on in the bond market, he does everything with an incredible passion.” Says Fink: “I tend to like passionate people—I’m pretty passionate myself. More than 50 percent of what attracted me to Rick in having him come to BlackRock was his personal being and his character.”
Spend some time with Rieder, and you start to see how his disparate interests circle back on each other and connect. Take his focus on education. He starts with his feeling that students in places such as Newark don’t have fair educational opportunities. “If we don’t give these kids a chance, particularly as the world moves to a service-oriented and technology-oriented economy, it’s really tough,” he says.
Services. Technology. Ding ding ding! That harkens back to Rieder’s (somewhat nerdy) first tweet, in September. In it, while he complained that Twitter cuts him off at four charts per post, one graph showed services inflation exceeding that for goods. Another highlighted the plunging cost of storing a gigabyte of data.