In response to the announcement that his company had been dropped from an ESG index, Tesla CEO Elon Musk declared, “ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.” ESG stands for environmental social, and governance, but what it really stands for is subordinating financial markets to a narrow ideological conception of social responsibility. ESG is now shorthand for a progressive takeover of the economy.
Before it was called ESG, it was known as SRI (socially responsible investing). Is Musk right? Is ESG a scam? No, it’s worse than a scam. ESG is an ideological virus injecting toxic politics into every aspect of our financial markets. Scams just take your money, but coercive utopian philosophies try to take all of you. Or, as C.S. Lewis more artfully said it, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”
The announcement from S&P claimed that although Tesla conforms with ESG thinking because of its commitment to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy,” it noted two instances involving “racial discrimination.” But Tesla is a Fortune 500 company, and companies of that scale routinely have “claims” of all sorts of discrimination made against them. Such accusations are fairly routine. So why imbue the claims against Tesla with credibility and not similar…
