Why does ‘Make the world a better place’ sound so outdated as a corporate mission?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Not so long ago, Mark Zuckerberg [seemed to want] the public to view him not just as an empire builder, but also as a world-saver. Meta Platforms’ CEO publicly committed parts of his vast fortune to causes like immigration reform and voter access.
He spoke out about combating poverty and hunger and stressed the importance of equality. In a flurry of announcements, Zuckerberg confirmed a change of heart. Now, he [appears to have] whittled his ambitions.
Getting rid of fact checkers and loosening the rules on what users can say on Meta’s platforms [will likely] heighten misinformation and abusive speech. He also ended Meta’s commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). This may be an extreme case, but across America Inc, the trend is pointing in the same direction: CEOs are spending much less time, energy and money trying to publicly position themselves as change agents.
In Silicon Valley, the make-the-world-a-better-place discourse of the early boom years has mostly disappeared. On Wall Street, big institutions from JPMorgan Chase to Goldman Sachs and BlackRock have abandoned one of the world’s biggest finance groups dedicated to battling climate change. Companies that put out statements about racial justice after the murder of George Floyd have rolled back DEI investments.
Some of the CEOs who stood up to Donald Trump’s Muslim-majority country travel ban and condemned the 6 January riots have made $1 million donations to his inauguration fund. You could argue that many of those initiatives were just corporate virtue signalling. But what’s clear is companies don’t feel much of a need to virtue signal anymore.
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