The reality is ESG is just another gamed metric, if you want to do ethical investing that's probably not the best way.
Am in no way saying that a gas company should be included but the exclusion makes sense.
I think that's part of why people are disillusioned, because ESG lumps several incomparable verticals and quantitatively rank them.
A slightly flippant reading could be "How many kilo-tons of emitted CO2 is a 50/50 man to woman split in the workforce worth?" because that's pretty much how these are ranked.
It's not like they're all one thing.
> take precedence over the impact of the actual company
Either you think that social (and to a lesser extent governance) impact is impact or you don't and that will pretty much decide how you view ESGs. It's not as if Elon is ranting in a vacuum where those views don't manifest in real effects in the companies he owns and the wider political sphere. Regardless of how you feel about how S scores as they're currently measured and their worth as an ethical north star Musk companies don't get very many marks. And that's fine -- I think that's the point, it seems very purposeful. It seems that Elon only actually cared when that fact hurt his stock price, not on principle.
And I'm sure investing in 1789 Capital will skew the other direction and that's fine too. You won't hear me saying their indexes are illegitimate because they do what it says on the tin.