‘Anti-woke’ fund to invest in capitalist companies that seek profit

‘We will tell oil companies to be excellent oil companies and coal companies to be excellent coal companies’

A US health and technology entrepreneur has raised $20m (£16.2m) to launch an “anti-woke” investment fund that will urge companies to focus on making money rather than championing political causes.

Vivek Ramaswamy, the author of Woke, Inc – who made his fortune investing in pharmaceutical companies – has won the backing of hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel to launch the new venture, which is called Strive.

Mr Ramaswamy said Strive will only invest in companies that focus on maximising profits and shun those that espouse political beliefs.

The 36-year-old called his approach “excellence capitalism”, saying companies should only be concerned with making money, and hit out at the creeping liberalism from what he dubbed the “ideological cartel” of Blackrock, Vanguard and other major money managers. Mr Ramaswamy told The Wall Street Journal: “We will tell oil companies to be excellent oil companies and coal companies to be excellent coal companies and solar companies to be excellent solar companies.”

Larry Fink, Blackrock’s chief executive, has hit back at accusations that the investment giant has become “woke”.

In January he said: “Stakeholder capitalism is not politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not ‘woke’. It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers and communities your company relies on to prosper.” It came after conservative groups criticised Blackrock, which manages more than $10trillion in assets, for its “woke posturing” to hide the funnelling of money to Chinese companies through its investment funds.

Mr Ramaswamy said he “naturally took the next step” to launch his own fund after the Manhattan Institute invited him and Mr Fink to debate stakeholder capitalism in 2020 and Mr Fink declined. He wrote on Twitter: “Now the market can decide for itself.”

Other fund managers have expressed concerns corporate giants are focusing on political issues over returns. In January, fund manager Terry Smith attacked Unilever for its “ludicrous” focus on sustainability, adding the company had “lost the plot” with efforts to “define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise”.

He said “the most obvious manifestation” of this was how Unilever-owned Ben & Jerry’s ice cream refused to supply the West Bank. In July last year, Ben & Jerry’s said it was inconsistent with its values to sell the product in the “Occupied Palestinian Territory”, sparking a backlash from the Israeli government.