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With a string of acquisitions this year, BlackRock is setting itself up to do to private markets what it did to public markets years ago. But can history really repeat?

Back in 2009, in the shadow of the global financial crisis, BlackRock bought Barclays Global Investors for around $15 billion. Included in that business focused on index investing was iShares, the provider of exchange-traded funds. ETFs exploded into the massive asset class they are today, as foundations of both active and passive strategies, helping turn BlackRock into the world’s largest asset manager , now overseeing an incredible $11.5 trillion of clients’ money.

But this year, BlackRock has spent even more money on a different potential high-growth asset class: Private investments. Earlier this year it acquired Global Infrastructure Partners , or GIP, for $12.5 billion, and now HPS for $12 billion . It also bought private-assets data provider Preqin for $3.2 billion , for a total nearing $28 billion. Even measured in 2024 dollars, BGI would have cost just $22 billion.

At the time, some commentators wondered whether BlackRock overpaid for BGI. But with hindsight, it has been termed a “once-in-a-lifetime” kind of acquisition. At the end of 2009, iShares assets were around $500 billion, according to a BlackRock annual report at the time. Today, BlackRock manages more than $4 trillion of ETF assets.

The question then is whether these private market deals are going to someday look like bargains, too. From the get-go, the hurdle appears to be higher.

This time around, Wall Street isn’t emerging from a crisis. In fact, private assets are among its hottest businesses, so buying managers of them doesn’t come cheap. By buying BGI for about $15 billion, BlackRock roughly doubled its assets under management. But acquiring HPS for $12 billion will only increase BlackRock’s assets by around 1%.

At least part of the difference is about what can be earned managing those assets. So-called alternative assets such as private markets tend to garner far higher management fees than public ones—especially passive funds like many ETFs. Here is a simple way to illustrate: KKR, a private asset giant, is valued at $140 billion, just shy of BlackRock’s $162 billion. But KKR manages about 1/18th of the total assets.

BlackRock says it isn’t focused on the immediate earnings pickup of the deals. Chief Financial Officer Martin Small told investors this week: “We don’t do transactions around cost synergies, because that doesn’t generate value for clients. We do transactions around extending capabilities and being able to deliver more for them.” The all-stock HPS deal is expected to be “modestly” accretive to the relevant earnings-per-share measure in its first full year post-close.

Some of BlackRock’s upside will simply come from the growth of private markets. Insurance clients alone represent a $35 trillion to $40 trillion opportunity, according to BlackRock. Their liabilities, like annuities or life policies, match up well with many relatively illiquid private assets.

But then the price of private assets today may already reflect that potential. Perhaps more important to BlackRock isn’t just that private markets are growing, but how. Today, investors may be getting exposure a-la-carte, assembling a mix of different flavors of private assets from different providers, from stakes in startups, to cash flows from an airport, to direct loans made to midsize companies.

Part of what BlackRock could do when it bought BGI was to blend active and passive investing, with ETFs serving as a way to tailor exposures or portfolios without relying strictly on stock picking. Being able to add private markets to that mix, including in the form of an index, can help investors cover more of the total market, or to design a portfolio around a return target.

“Just as index has become the language of public markets, we envision we could bring the principles of indexing, even iShares, to the private markets,” BlackRock Chief Executive Larry Fink told analysts on a call in July, after the Preqin deal was announced. “We anticipate indexes and data will be important future drivers of the democratization of all alternatives, and this acquisition is the unlock.”

Investors looking to bet on the growth of private markets also need to consider how they will evolve. Judging by other asset classes, they will end up indexed and cheaper—and play right into BlackRock’s hands.

Write to Telis Demos at Telis.Demos@wsj.com