Elon Musk‘s cars don’t fume, but he sure does.
The Tesla chief blasted Wall Street’s “phony social justice warriors” Wednesday after his electric car company was kicked off a stock index for companies deemed environmentally and socially conscious.
The S&P 500 ESG index is part of the “environmental, social, and governance” movement among global investors. It dropped Tesla just as Musk, increasingly at odds with leftists, declared he intends to vote Republican going forward.
“ESG is a scam,” Musk tweeted. “It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”
Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500, while Tesla didn’t make the list!
ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 18, 2022
Musk noted that oil giant Exxon is lauded by the ESG crowd, while his own company claims to be reducing the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.
“Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500, while Tesla didn’t make the list!” Musk added.
The S&P wrote in a blog post the move was made because of complaints about working conditions at Tesla’s California factory and the company’s inadequate response to an investigation relating to crashes linked to its autopilot feature.
“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,” S&P Down Jones ESG chief Margaret Dorn wrote.
Also axed from the list were Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson and Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook.
Musk might have expected the demotion, after writing earlier this month that ESG grades are unfair.
“Stop the outrageous false ESG assessments, where Tesla gets a bad grade, but an oil company can get a good grade,” Musk tweeted. “Total gaming of the system!”
ESG, championed by investment giant BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink, seeks to impose woke social and environmental values on the global market by scoring companies based on how compliant they are.
“You have to force behaviors, and at BlackRock, we’re forcing behaviors,” Fink said in 2017.
"ESG is just a hate factory. It’s a factory for naming enemies, and we should not be allowing them to do that. When you think ESG, you should be thinking Chinese Communist Party."–Peter Thiel
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) April 7, 2022
Dorn offered hope to Musk that his company could get back into the good graces of the social justice index.
“So, while Tesla and others may not have been included in the index this year, the beauty of the annual rebalance is that they will once again have an opportunity to be reviewed for inclusion in years to come,” she wrote.