iShares is owned by BlackRock, Inc. , the world’s largest asset manager.

Who “owns” iShares in practice?

  • iShares is a brand and product line of exchange‑traded funds (ETFs) operated as a subsidiary/business unit of BlackRock.
  • BlackRock acquired iShares in 2009 when it bought Barclays Global Investors (BGI), which included the iShares ETF division.
  • The assets inside iShares ETFs (the stocks and bonds they hold) are owned by the fund investors (you, pension funds, institutions), not by BlackRock itself.

Who owns BlackRock (and thus iShares indirectly)?

BlackRock is a publicly traded company (ticker: BLK), so no single person or company “owns” iShares outright. Its largest shareholders are big institutional investors, for example:

  • The Vanguard Group – roughly about 9% of BlackRock’s shares.
  • BlackRock itself (via subsidiaries) – around 6–7% of its own stock.
  • Sovereign wealth funds such as Kuwait Investment Authority and Temasek (Singapore), each holding a few percent.

So the ownership chain looks like this:

  1. Investors buy units of iShares ETFs and own the fund assets economically.
  1. iShares ETFs are managed by BlackRock as the provider.
  1. BlackRock itself is owned by many shareholders on the stock market, mainly large institutions and some governments via sovereign funds.

In short: iShares is a BlackRock ETF brand, the fund assets belong to investors, and BlackRock’s ownership is widely spread among major institutional and sovereign investors.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.