(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…

(Think Advisor) Vanguard has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Just Invest, a provider of tax-managed, tailored wealth management technology, including Kaleidoscope, which is a highly customizable, direct indexing offer.

(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.

(Politico) Less than a week into Lina Khan’s tenure as Federal Trade Commission chair, her chief of staff ordered the agency’s staff to cancel all public appearances, according to internal agency emails viewed by POLITICO.

(Reuters) Blackstone Group Inc said it will buy Sphera, a environmental, social and governance (ESG) software, data and consulting services provider, from private equity firm Genstar Capital in a $1.4 billion deal.

(WSJ) Exchange hopes to be signal to investors of which companies have sustainable practices.

(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…

(Financial Times) Microsoft and Alphabet have pushed back against calls to include disclosures on environmental, social and governance issues in key US regulatory filings, setting them on course for a tussle with major asset managers.

(TechCrunch) The Senate confirmed Big Tech critic and prominent antitrust scholar Lina Khan as FTC Commissioner Tuesday. In a strong and surprising signal that the tech industry is overdue for some intense regulatory scrutiny, Biden elevated the newly-confirmed Khan to chair the agency the same day.

(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,…