More Conservative CEOs Are Speaking out about Social Issues

A senior executive in a suit without a tie holds up his hands and says "Woke" — Source: Shutterstock

Published on: July 18, 2025 at 8:01 pm

Since the start of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, some CEOs and companies that once advocated for social or political issues have gotten quiet or even done an about-face. On the other hand, pro-MAGA CEOs have been speaking out about such issues more frequently.

Academy of Management Scholar Donald Hambrick of Pennsylvania State University, who cowrote an article in Academy of Management Review with coauthor Adam Wowak of the University of Notre Dame on this topic, noted that “When Elon Musk rails against DEI and rants about the ‘woke mind virus’ on X, that’s a form of activism—he’s speaking out publicly. Now, it turns out he’s doing other things as well, but that’s a form of highly public speech.

“He’s got a platform, and there’s been quite a lot of blowback—there’s been quite a swing in the pendulum, and it’ll be interesting to see whether it swings back in the other direction at all,” he said. “In the next two or three years, it might take some form of crisis.”

While Musk is the epitome of an outspoken chief executive, some CEOs are remaining quiet on social, political, and economic issues, hoping to avoid controversy.

“Right now, many CEOs are being super quiet and cautious, partly out of uncertainty about where the Trump regime is going to take us and understandable concerns about various forms of retaliation if they speak out,” Hambrick said. “It’ll be interesting to see what happens over the next two or three years.

“I don’t think CEO activism is a dinosaur—I don’t think it’s a dead phenomenon,” he said. “And it could come back in a more balanced way where there are more even-handed amounts of conservative activism and liberal activism by different CEOs.

“With or without the substance of action backing up CEOs’ activism, CSR policies are changing.”

BlackRock’s ESG messaging

The 2025 annual letter by Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager whose assets under management exceed $11.5 trillion, did not include the terms ESG, sustainability, climate change, stakeholder capitalism, or DEI, marking a significant departure from his earlier letters to shareholders that covered those themes. In the face of conservative backlash that got a lot of media coverage starting in 2023, Fink distanced himself from ESG, saying the term had become too politicized.

“They’ve dialed back; Larry Fink is not as assertive about ESG—he is no longer using the term ESG, and that whole camp is trying to move away from the [acronym] just because it is a loaded term,” Hambrick said.

“Even though the term ESG has fallen out of favor, I think that ESG, and especially the E part of ESG, is a bit more alive than, say, DEI is today,” he said. “I think that environmental part is still going on in corporate America, whereas DEI is quickly being dismantled.”

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A sample of Hambrick’s AOM research findings:

Author

Daniel Butcher

Daniel Butcher is a writer and the Managing Editor of AOM Today at the Academy of Management (AOM). Previously, he was a writer and the Finance Editor for Strategic Finance magazine and Management Accounting Quarterly, a scholarly journal, at the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA). Prior to that, he worked as a writer/editor at The Financial Times, including daily FT sister publications Ignites and FundFire, as well as Crain Communications’s InvestmentNews and Crain’s Wealth, eFinancialCareers, and Arizent’s Financial Planning, Re:Invent|Wealth, On Wall Street, Bank Investment Consultant, and Money Management Executive. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado Boulder and his master’s degree from New York University. You can reach him at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.

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