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New ‘anti-woke’ ETF makes Starbucks its first target

Published

1 year ago

December 5, 2024

New ‘anti-woke’ ETF makes Starbucks its first target

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A new fund aiming to punish “woke” companies will make Starbucks its first target, as politically motivated investors move to capitalise on Donald Trump’s election.

The actively managed fund, which Azoria Partners expects to launch early next year, will exclude S&P 500 companies that incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion considerations into their hiring processes.

The fund unveiled its Starbucks plan on Thursday at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

The event was due to be attended by Cathie Wood and Kevin Roberts, the ideologue behind the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s government, according to an invitation seen by the FT. Wood and Roberts did not respond to requests for comment.

“Americans, whether they voted for president Trump or not, do not want to invest in companies running woke science experiments,” said James Fishback, one of Azoria’s founders, in an interview, referring to hiring practices that factor in diversity. “We are representing shareholders here, and human capital hiring quotas — that hurts all shareholders.”

The coffee chain, with a market capitalisation of about $110bn, denied in a statement to the Financial Times that it had “targets or quotas at any stage of the hiring process”. The chain said that policies cited by Azoria — which included reaching racial and ethnic diversity of at least 30 per cent among corporate employees — were aspirations not quotas, and that they recently expired and were not reinstated.

The new fund is the latest attempt by Trump-supporting investors to push back against DEI and environmental, social and governance initiatives by big US companies — and to profit from the coming change in government in Washington.

Shares in Starbucks, which has around 40,000 coffee shops globally, have lagged behind the broader market this year but have risen since August on hopes that newly appointed chief executive Brian Niccol would turn its struggling business around.

The new “anti-woke” fund, created by Fishback and his Azoria co-founder Asaf Abramovich, has a list of about three dozen other companies it will exclude from the roster, unless they scrap their DEI policies.

Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation think-tank, and Wood, founder of Ark Investment Management, were both scheduled to address the event at Trump’s resort on Thursday.

Fishback’s fund does not manage any money yet, meaning the Starbucks campaign lacks the financial heft to influence the retailer’s decisions. Powerful activist fund Elliott Management recently built a large stake in the chain, helping to spur replacement of its CEO earlier this year.

Unlike an activist hedge fund, which buys stakes in companies to agitate for change, Azoria will push its agenda by excluding companies from their index and publicly claim DEI policies are hurting their stock price.

The strategy borrows from so-called environmental, social and governance funds, which excluded investments in polluting industries and were attacked by many conservatives.

Azoria’s new ETF is set to launch early next year under the ticker SPXM, which stands for S&P Meritocracy. In remarks at the Mar-a-Lago event, Fishback will claim the stocks of S&P 500 companies that factor diversity into hiring have underperformed their rivals.

Some research has contradicted that, including a McKinsey report last year that found companies in the top quartile of racial diversity were 39 per cent more likely to perform better than those in the bottom quartile.

Fishback, who previously worked at hedge fund Greenlight Capital and is mired in a legal dispute with its founder David Einhorn, is among Wall Street investors aiming to cash in on a conservative shift as Trump returns to the White House.

Other politically driven investors have punched far above their weight. The activist investor Engine No. 1 secured three board seats in 2021 at ExxonMobil by mounting a campaign against the oil major while only overseeing $240mn worth of assets.

Fishback argued hiring on ethnic and racial diversity grounds was a political act that would hurt shareholders.

He said: “Cut that crap out. Hire the best and brightest. Don’t apologise for it, make money, give it to shareholders, and do the right thing.”

Additional reporting by Gregory Meyer and Antoine Gara in New York

News

Top Drug Regulator Is Fired From the F.D.A.

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1 hour ago

May 16, 2026

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Top Drug Regulator Is Fired From the F.D.A.

Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.

She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.

Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.

But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”

“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”

As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.

She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.

The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.

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Supreme Court is death knell for Virginia’s Democratic-friendly congressional maps

Published

4 hours ago

May 16, 2026

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Supreme Court is death knell for Virginia’s Democratic-friendly congressional maps

The U.S. Supreme Court

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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.

The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.

Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”

Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.

Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.

The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.

And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.

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Explosion at Lumber Mill in Searsmont, Maine, Draws Large Emergency Response

Published

13 hours ago

May 15, 2026

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Explosion at Lumber Mill in Searsmont, Maine, Draws Large Emergency Response

An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.

The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.

Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”

“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.

Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.

The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”

Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.

Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.

“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.

Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.

“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.