Elon Musk is no fan of the environmental, social and governance scores used to evaluate companies for inclusion in investment funds. Seeing his company booted from a major ESG index hasn’t exactly tempered his criticism.
Boy, was Mr. Musk mad. “Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance by S&P 500, while Tesla didn’t make the list!” he tweeted. “ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”That was just one of several missives and memes he’s fired off about the perceived snub in recent days. He has put himself in the middle of a lot of controversies lately and a common theme is his ire for the political left, and what he says is its hypocrisy.
The backlash against ESG is only gathering steam in finance and political realms. This, even as the world’s largest asset managers, the pinnacle of capitalism, demand better performance in all these areas from the companies they invest in. The sustainable investing world, which in past decades had been a small part of overall finance, now finds itself increasingly important and having to mount a defence.
Dropping Tesla from the index and including Exxon is a prime example. “ I understand that those companies are in different sectors, and that affects their ratings and weightings in the index, but that ranking just doesn’t pass the smell test for people. Criticism is warranted in that case,” he said.
I think Elon has bigger problems....
A lot of people don't want to live or work with a Chinese style social credit score system. So blatantly obvious its absurd to have to point these things out.
ESG is a pump and dump scam