“I’m not a nanny either,” Mr. Fink said on Thursday. “I’m not telling companies what their purpose should be. But I do believe it’s up to the company to identify what their purpose is.”

Earlier this year, he sent an open letter pressing public firms to consider not just their bottom lines, but also the broader community — a social responsibility manifesto forged through years of personal experience, public pressure and secret meetings.

Mr. Fink withdrew last month from the high-profile investment conference in Riyadh amid allegations that Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist, had been murdered and dismembered at a Saudi consulate in Turkey.

Other executives — including Mr. Dimon, Stephen A. Schwarzman of Blackstone and Dara Khosrowshahi of Uber — also dropped out of the event. Despite his refusal to attend what he called a “very public showcase” of the kingdom’s strengths, Mr. Fink said that BlackRock would continue to conduct business in Saudi Arabia, adding that he “never believed that decision would cost us all the business.”

But he stressed that his attention to social responsibility is not a passing fad.

“I certainly never did this to be in vogue,” he said. “We’re doing this because we’re being asked.”

— Tiffany Hsu

Steve Ballmer wants to provide a ‘10-K for government’

Steve Ballmer, the former chief executive of Microsoft, concluded his presentation on Thursday with the results of a poll he recently helped run: 61 percent of the people surveyed cared about using researched facts to help form their opinions on policy, beating the 54 percent who said their values shaped their opinions.

For Mr. Ballmer, that is central to a project he has been working on since he retired as chief executive of Microsoft in 2014 and has poured millions of dollars into: USAFacts, a nonpartisan database of federal, state and local government revenue and spending.