Targeting ‘Woke’ Wall Street

ESG investing is the right’s new bogeyman—and Vivek Ramaswamy is banking on it

- Paula Dwyer and David Gillen

It was smiles all around as the familiar Wall Street ritual—the ringing of the closing bell—played out again at the New York Stock Exchange on Aug. 10. But this was no ordinary photo op.

As the bell clanged and cheers went up, the figure in the center, Vivek Ramaswamy, was visibly delighted. A wealthy biotech entrepreneur turned anti-“woke” evangelist, he’s at the vanguard of a new conservative movement—one that’s bringing America’s political divisions to the money-loving heart of Wall Street.

Its target: BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset management company. Forget #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and rainbow flags. To Ramaswamy and his pack, the business of corporate America is business. Period.

He and the others crowding onto the marble balcony had come to deliver a warning to the financial markets: American capitalism is being threatened by corporations embracing social causes. Ramaswamy and his supporters want to force chief executive officers to focus only on profits— and score a little for themselves, too.

Corporate America, like so much else, is being cleaved into red and blue. And Wall Street is getting tangled in the messy debate. ESG—investing with environmental, social, and governance principles— has become the right’s new bogeyman. Prominent Republicans are joining Ramaswamy in pushing back at what they call a liberal agenda, and they’re starting to influence who gets to handle huge sums of taxpayer money and where all that money is invested. Enter Ramaswamy, 37, author of the 2021 book Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social