It is interesting to see this opinion so high up when it is abstracted, but as soon as you drop down to specifics in something like tech you get mountains of complaints about Google abandoning "don't be evil" or ad-tech companies in general being cancerous companies that harm society. If it were really all about the bottom line then these companies would be among the very best companies in the world. They make a shit load of money!
> It is interesting to see this opinion so high up when it is abstracted, but as soon as you drop down to specifics in something like tech you get mountains of complaints about Google abandoning "don't be evil" or ad-tech companies in general being cancerous companies that harm society. If it were really all about the bottom line then these companies would be among the very best companies in the world. They make a shit load of money!
I think the determining factor is: is the issue politically contentious or not?
A lot of the "evil" things Google, Facebook, or some random ad-tech company does are things that are commonly condemned by people across the political spectrum. All/most "ESG" criteria are politically contentious things that seem to strongly align with one political/ideological block [1].
[1] It should be noted that "politically contentious" thing may not be addressing a particular issue itself, but rather a particular proposed solution to that issue.
> Indeed, ESG has join the boogeymen CRT, woke and cancel culture of the right wing elite's puppet show.
Come on. Your comment is actually a fairly good example of a kind of bad faith political tactic that I see quite a bit of nowadays: presenting other-side disagreement as fake or manufactured, often as the bailey of a fallacious motte-and-bailey argument.
All of those things you list are actual points of political/ideological disagreement, and all political movements, left and right, typically feature "elite" efforts to surface and popularize issues like that. Doing that is pretty much the literal job description of activists, activist organizations, and opinion columnists.
You seem to have become mistaken - I am talking about a companies fiduciary duty to shareholder and maximizing long term shareholder value. You are talking about popular sentiment.
