The Politically Incorrect Have Won: Trump Is the Victory of the Bullies and the Death of ESG

It was around 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night during the pandemic. Like dozens of my classmates, I stared at the tiny squares that filled my computer screen, a mosaic of faces—some tired, others attentive—during a lecture for the Executive MBA in Economics and Management: Government Relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. On the other side of the screen, Valéria Café was teaching her course on social communication.

I, somewhat bored by the direction of the conversation after more than 20 years in journalism, yawned with my camera off when Valéria dropped a statement that perfectly summed up corporate communication in 2021: “We are in the era of the CEOs, and they talk about everything, all the time.”

Two decades in the profession gave me the right to feel outraged by such an excess. Who cares what Tim Cook thinks about lifting the ban on hunting humpback whales? Or whether Jeff Bezos believes cardio should be done before or after back exercises—aside from the idle Apple fans who camp outside stores for days to buy the iPhone 25, which is just like the iPhone 22, but with one more camera? At the end of the day, CEOs are not deities. Running companies that make phones, deliver pillows to your door in 48 hours, or launch rockets that occasionally send billionaires into space does not make them special people—let alone good ones, in the philosophical sense of the word.

Valéria Café’s statement was a two-headed dragon. On one side, it inflated the egos of billionaires who leveraged their corporate wealth to dictate rules in a world divided between vain opportunists and masochists desperate to share in the illusion of relevance. On the other, it underscored the woke trap that forced companies to adhere to a certain set of ethical and moral ideals—or risk being judged, canceled, and boycotted by the internet’s moral tribunal. All of this was wrapped up in the most celebrated acronym of the decade: ESG—Environmental, Social, and Governance.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, the arrangement seemed fair: the ultra-rich would continue their antics, draped in the robes of modern-day gurus, spouting opinions on everything. In exchange for enduring this endless stream of CEO chatter, society would get corporations that moderated their own inherent greed—at least when it came to social, environmental, and governance issues.

For a while, it worked. Chatty CEOs spewed their half-baked takes to their adoring followers. Companies, fearful of public backlash, abandoned their sacred right to have boards composed entirely of straight, middle-aged white men or to guzzle the equivalent of an Olympic-sized pool’s worth of water every minute to cool their AI servers.

But if there’s one thing that defines a billionaire, it’s greed. No one accumulates a billion of anything by being naive—every fortune is intentional. CEOs enjoyed the part where they became celebrities. They hated the part where they had to answer to society.

Then, everything changed when Donald Trump, despite his legal troubles, emerged as a serious contender to retake the presidency. The first to sense the shift was Elon Musk, the Tesla mogul turned Twitter’s executioner. The Trump-Musk alliance was so perfect that one wonders why it didn’t happen sooner: Trump opposes political correctness because it energizes his base. Musk opposes political correctness because it threatens his profits, his lifestyle, his worldview—and the Nazi-like hand gestures he occasionally makes absentmindedly.

The political bully joined forces with the corporate bully. The overwhelming victory of one validated the other, and soon, a parade of CEOs eager to break free from their “chains” followed suit. As if a few woke excesses were enough to justify dismantling the entire notion that corporations and executives have a responsibility to society, they decided to burn the foundation to the ground just to shake the walls. The goal, of course, is total demolition. Mark Zuckerberg is now fine with associating LGBTQ+ people with mental illness—after all, he calls that “freedom.”

ESG had its flaws. Over-the-top virtue signaling, rampant greenwashing, and performative diversity efforts often turned the woke world into a lake of hypocrisy. But between the execution and the idea, there was something worth saving. And now, it won’t be.

The CEOs surrounding Trump at his inauguration looked like a syndicate of villains. Musk and his ilk resemble pirates in the midst of looting—one final, desperate act before total collapse. As they raid the silverware, they seem to know there won’t be any more feasts.

After all, CEOs know everything.