Dr. Mathew Maavak

ESG stands for the "environmental, social and governance" principles which dictate that certain aspects of a company's work must be taken into account when deciding whether to invest in it. An investment-worthy company must have a good score on things like climate change, sustainability, energy efficiency, diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as corruption and bribery prevention, among others.

Musk's outburst was sparked by the shockingly low ESG scores assigned to Tesla by S&P Global, a ratings and market intelligence heavyweight. Tesla earned 37 points (out of a possible 100, where anything above 70 is considered "good" and anything below 50 is deemed "poor") on its ESG scorecard while Philip Morris, the global tobacco giant, received a commendable score of 84. Similarly, as the Washington Free Beacon discovered, the London Stock Exchange gave British American Tobacco a score of 94.

Perhaps, lighting up 20.3 billion tobacco products daily worldwide does wonders for the environment and sustainability.

The ESG turnabout wasn't entirely unexpected. I had even published a recent analysis on how the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its factotums would ultimately take the fall for our crumbling liberal-globalist order. Musk is just one among a growing number of stalwarts to turn their backs on the global ESG train wreck. Insurance behemoth Lloyd's of London recently announced that it was exiting from the net-zero alliance for insurers, and it was the sixth such organisation to do so within a week. There are good reasons for this shift. For starters, hundreds of ESG managers were stung by the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, that had prioritized woke agendas over the security of its depositors.

The ESG agenda effectively forces firms to sacrifice business logic in favor of liberal lunacies marked by gender dysphoria, pseudo-diversity and climate militancy. As banks promoting this mania get bankrupted, one wonders how ESG initiatives are going to be funded down the line. Investment behemoths like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street (aka Big Capital) are leading the global ESG rollback. The trio manage assets worth $22 trillion worldwide, amounting to a quarter of the global GDP, and they can no longer pander to socialist pies-in-the-sky. Big Capital thrives on trillion-dollar profits, not trillions of social media soundbites and hissy-fits.