“A few of the factors contributing to its 2021 S&P DJI ESG Score were a decline in criteria level scores related to Tesla’s (lack of) low carbon strategy and codes of business conduct. In addition, a Media and Stakeholder Analysis, a process that seeks to identify a company’s current and potential future exposure to risks stemming from its involvement in a controversial incident, identified two separate events centered around claims of racial discrimination and poor working conditions at Tesla’s Fremont factory, as well as its handling of the NHTSA investigation after multiple deaths and injuries were linked to its autopilot vehicles. Both of these events had a negative impact on the company’s S&P DJI ESG Score at the criteria level, and subsequently its overall score. While Tesla may be playing its part in taking fuel-powered cars off the road, it has fallen behind its peers when examined through a wider ESG lens.”
Tesla and Musk have thus been subjected to the S in ESG—the “social” or “social justice” quotient. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” means the exclusion of the politically incorrect. This applies to corporations as much as it does to individuals. Musk has been deemed a deplorable, and thus his company doesn’t pass “social justice” muster.
As such, Musk has exposed the contradictions within the woke cartel’s measurement apparatus. Anything that can be used against a company or its owners will be used—when the target runs afoul of the woke arbiters, that is. That’s because ESG is an impressionistic, qualitative metric that subjects companies to the whims of a woke dictatorship.
I’m not suggesting that Musk is a free-market hero or a lowercase libertarian, but there’s little doubt that he’s become corporate enemy No. 1 for the state-backed woke cartel. The battle shaping up between Musk and the regime will prove to be an important one, if only because it pits the power of the latter against a high-visibility manufacturer and the reputed “richest man in the world.” What we'll learn is how powerful the woke cartel is and just how far it will go to infringe property rights and eradicate any remaining legitimate (consumer-based) market criteria—no matter how much its moves reek of hypocrisy or how obvious its vendetta.
In today’s political economy, satisfying shareholders and customers has become less important than ingratiation with the woke cartel and the government that supports it. Corporations’ fealty to wokeness, state dictates, and state narratives can be explained in terms of a fully politicized economy. Corporations seek to curry favor with the clique in power, and thus they’ve become organs of the Democratic Party and the federal government it now runs unilaterally.
