(FiveNation.com)- Last Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk blasted Wall Street’s “phony social justice warriors” for removing Tesla from the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) index.
The S&P 500’s ESG index is part of a movement among global investors to highlight companies deemed environmentally and socially conscious.
In a tweet last week, Musk called the ESG index “a scam” that has “been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.” Musk called out the index for placing the oil company Exxon on the list while dropping his electric car company which is trying to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.
According to a blog post from the S&P 500, Tesla was removed from the index after complaints about racial discrimination claims from its California factory and due to its inadequate response to an investigation related to crashes linked to Tesla’s self-driving feature.
Earlier this month, Musk had criticized the ESG index on Twitter, claiming that it is “gaming” its grading system.
The ESG index, which was championed by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, places social and environmental values on the global market by scoring companies based on how compliant they are to some woke code of social justice.
In short, ESG is a social credit score system for corporations used to enforce compliance – something Larry Fink has previously admitted.
In a 2017 interview, Fink had defended the ESG index, explaining that “you have to force behaviors.”
S&P Down Jones ESG chief, Margaret Dorn, explained that while Tesla is playing a part in reducing the number of gas-powered vehicles on the road, “it has fallen behind its peers when examined through a wider ESG lens.
But Tesla wasn’t the only company to fall out of the ESG’s good graces. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson, and Mark Zuckerberg’s “Meta” all fell off the list as well.
