The private equity backlash against ESG

(Financial Times) Call it Newton’s law of corporate ownership. As listed companies come under increasing investor pressure to act on everything from executive pay to carbon emissions, a reaction against those constraints seems to be fuelling a spate of buyouts by private equity firms. The first half of 2021 was a boom period for the…

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SEC panel approves diversity and inclusion measures

(Pensions & Investments) The SEC will consider ways to increase diversity and inclusion in the asset management industry, and whether disclosure and naming rules need to be updated for funds promoting themselves as sustainable, SEC Chairman Gary Gensler told an industry advisory committee.

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How Twitter hired tech’s biggest critics to build ethical AI

(Protocol) Machine learning engineer Ari Font was worried about the future of Twitter’s algorithms. It was mid-2020, and the leader of the team researching ethics and accountability for the company’s ML had just left Twitter. For Font, the future of the ethics research was unclear. Font was the manager of Twitter’s machine learning platforms teams…

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Does Tech Need a New Narrative?

(The New Yorker) In Silicon Valley, “disruption” is giving way to “building.” What will be built? In 2009, Marc Andreessen—a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and angel investor best known for cofounding Netscape, in 1994, at the age of twenty-two—announced that he would be starting a venture-capital firm. “I’m crossing over into the dark side,” he said,…

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