Not spoken publicly. Not on record. But present in every conversation where serious money is being deployed and someone slides a sustainability framework across the table and calls it strategy.
The ultra-wealthy did not build what they built by confusing performance with optics. And ESG, in its current form, has become almost entirely the latter.
What ESG Was Supposed to Be
The original idea was sound.
Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria as a lens for evaluating long-term business risk. Companies that pollute face regulatory exposure. Companies with poor governance fail at scale. Companies that ignore their social context eventually collide with it.
Used honestly, ESG was risk management with better language.
That version existed briefly. Then the institutions arrived.
What It Became
Rating agencies built ESG scoring systems. Asset managers built ESG funds. Consultancies built ESG practices. And somewhere in the construction of all that infrastructure, the original question — does this company actually operate responsibly? — got replaced by a different one.
Does this company score well?
The distance between those two questions is where the fraud lives.
Tesla — a company that manufactures batteries with cobalt mined under conditions that would not pass a basic human rights audit — spent years ranked higher on ESG indices than ExxonMobil, which had stronger governance frameworks and better labour records. ExxonMobil was eventually removed from a major ESG index entirely.
The market noticed. The serious money drew its conclusions.
The Greenwashing Industrial Complex
What followed was predictable.
Companies learned to optimise for the score, not the substance. Sustainability reports grew longer. Carbon offset purchases accelerated — offsets that independent auditors have repeatedly found to be fictitious, expired, or double-counted. Diversity metrics were managed on paper while cultures remained unchanged underneath.
The consultancies that designed the frameworks also sold the compliance services. The rating agencies that scored the companies also sold advisory to improve the scores. The conflict was architectural, not incidental.
For the ultra-wealthy — people whose family offices employ analysts whose sole function is to find exactly this kind of structural dishonesty in investment targets — the conclusion was not difficult to reach.
ESG, as institutionalised, is a product. Not a principle.
What Serious Capital Actually Does
The family offices and sovereign wealth vehicles that manage generational wealth are not ignoring sustainability.
They are ignoring the theatre of it.
The conversations happening at the level Hype Luxury operates in are not about ESG scores. They are about water rights in Central Asia. Transition risk in carbon-intensive portfolios. The 30-year infrastructure implications of coastal asset exposure. Governance structures that survive founding generations.
These are real questions with real financial consequences. They require real analysis — not a framework sold by the same banks that rated mortgage-backed securities AAA in 2007.
The super-rich don’t distrust sustainability. They distrust the intermediaries who monetised it.
The Honest Position
ESG will not disappear. The regulatory pressure embedding it into institutional capital allocation is real and growing.
But the families who have operated across centuries understand something the quarterly cycle cannot accommodate: legitimacy is earned through outcomes, not indices.
The planet needs fewer sustainability reports.
It needs more decisions that are actually hard to make — and made correctly anyway.
That is not an ESG metric.
It is judgment.
And judgment, as always, belongs to those willing to exercise it without an audience.
Real accountability does not require a rating. It requires a standard.
