Company's first since 2019.: BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and possibly the most high-profile of the so-called environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) investment strategy, is planning to cut roughly 500 of its approximately 20,000 employees Wednesday, Bloomberg reported, citing an internal memo. The cuts are the company’s first since 2019 as asset managers around the world struggled with plummeting markets in 2022, although the company remains roughly 5% larger than it was the start of 2022, according to Bloomberg.