(LifeSiteNews) — Elon Musk has blasted ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) scores and called the concept “communism rebranded.”
“I’m very pro-environment,” Musk said in a live discussion with Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy on X, formerly known as Twitter. “But…we don’t … do some sort of bizarre, communism rebranded thing, which is like a lot of what ESG is, and [inflict it] upon corporate America without the knowledge of the actual shareholders, which is what’s going on.”
“And so I’m saying the public is being lied to by … BlackRock, Fidelity [Investments] … and you guys … need to tell your customers that you’re not making optimal decisions for shareholder value because that’s what’s going on,” he continued.
Musk stated that he believes that investment giants like BlackRock and Vanguard are “setting themselves up for the biggest class action lawsuit in the history of class action lawsuits by an order of magnitude” because they are “breaking the deal with their customers” since, by prioritizing ESG policies, they are “not maximizing shareholder value.”
READ: How BlackRock’s Larry Fink uses ESG and AI to control the world’s money
Musk has repeatedly criticized ESG scores in the past. In a May 2022 social media post, he called them a “scam” that “has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors” because Oil giant Exxon Mobil had one the highest ESG ratings while electric car manufacturing Tesla “didn’t make the list.”
Musk went so far as to call ESG the “devil” and said that “The S in ESG stands for Satanic.”
Ramaswamy, also an outspoken critic of ESG ratings, said in the conversation with Musk that “technocratic abbreviations like ESG” or “CBDC” (Central Bank Digital Currency) are being used to make the concepts sound boring and difficult for people to understand. He stressed that ESG is a “farce” forced on American corporations by asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard, and others, while these companies falsely claim that ESG policies provide “long-run value maximization.”
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Ramaswamy’s book Woke, Inc., Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam describes how so-called “Stakeholder capitalism” makes false promises “of a better, more diverse, environmentally-friendly world, but in reality this ideology championed by America’s business and political leaders robs us of our money, our voice, and our identity.”