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Americans have grown accustomed to seeing business leaders trekking the well-trodden paths of the Northeast Corridor to meet alongside elected officials in Washington, D.C., to discuss geopolitics, policy and everything in between.
In 2017, top CEOs from across the country rallied to oppose North Carolina’s transgender bathroom law. In 2019, they declared the abortion ban “bad for business.”
Following the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, many big names in American business denounced the rioters and pledged to stop their political donations.
Recently, more than 1,000 companies have pledged to voluntarily reduce their operations in Russia as a protest against Moscow’s war against Ukraine.
Dick’s Sporting Goods stopped selling semi-automatic assault rifles in its stores and Citigroup imposed new restrictions on gun sales by business customers after the mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school in 2018.
A year later, after mass shootings at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and a nightclub in Dayton, Ohio, Walmart stopped selling handgun ammunition.
Business leaders have long spoken out on gun control: In 2019 and again last summer, nearly 150 major companies, including Lululemon, Lyft, Bain Capital, Bloomberg LP, Permanente Medical Group and Unilever, called gun violence a “public health crisis” and demanded that the U.S. Senate pass legislation to address it.
This is why the silence of big American business in the wake of the latest mass shooting at a Nashville school is so shocking. The United States has come to rely on the growing power of big business as its political defenders.
But Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a Yale professor and advocate of corporate social responsibility who has direct connections to top CEOs around the world, believes executives are clueless. Their past efforts haven’t done much to advance gun control legislation, and without more support, they don’t know what else to do right now, he said.
Before the Bell spoke with Sonnenfeld, who directs the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at the Yale School of Management, a nonprofit teaching and research institute focused on CEO leadership and corporate governance.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Before the Bell: CEOs have been silent on gun reform since the latest mass shooting at a Nashville school. Have you heard of any plans to speak out?
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld: Where are the others? Where is civil society as a whole? CEOs are just a group of people and it’s as if we look to them to be our saviors on every issue. They have taken up causes with courage and nobility, but they can’t just stand up for one cause after another as if there were no one else in society. The social change that happened in the 1960s was not primarily driven by CEOs. The social changes really happened when we saw interfaith activity of clergy coming together and going door to door to legislators. We saw campuses come alive and awaken. Where is all the student activism?
CEOs are still the most active, if less so than they were six months ago. They are not there as shareholder mercenaries to play the role of politicians and civic leaders. They are there to join that chorus, but they don’t want to be the only ones singing.
So this is what you hear from top CEOs? Are they tired of doing advocacy?
I just finished a conference call with CEOs on voting rights and this morning we had a forum on sustainability – CEOs are always the most active on those fronts. It’s the same with immigration reform. Even if a CEO worked 18 hours a day, 12 days a week, they still couldn’t address all the issues that need to be addressed.
The country’s CEOs are waiting for everyone to join them. They don’t need to repeat what they’ve already said. They jumped into the pool, where are the others?
So what do you think has led to this complacency among Americans and this increasing reliance on CEOs to defend our interests?
They have taken a very strong position and gone further than the general public. They are where the general public is in the polls, but not where the general public is in the street actions. So we are ready for others to do something. Let’s stop saying, “What do CEOs do?” Social capital is as valuable as financial capital. CEOs understand that deep down, they want social capital to be there. They want the public trust to be there, but they need the rest of civil society to join them. And that’s where their frustration lies.
Looks like CEOs are frustrated?
Yeah, they’re frustrated.
But don’t these CEOs hold the purse strings when it comes to donations to powerful politicians?
You might think so, but since the 2020 election, big business has been contributing much less to campaigns. Since the 2021 Capitol campaign, many companies have either adopted an official moratorium or given pennies to politicians. The popular notion on the street that CEOs control the campaign purse strings is completely false.
By Chris Isidore of CNN
Tesla reported a modest 4% increase in first-quarter sales compared with the final three months of last year, despite a series of price cuts on its least expensive vehicles and CEO Elon Musk’s comments that demand was strong at those lower prices.
The first quarter was also the fourth straight quarter in which Tesla produced more vehicles than it delivered to customers. That may be due in part to the ramping up of production at two new factories, one in Texas and one in Germany, that opened last spring, and the lag between that production increase and sales.
Tesla said there was an increase in the number of its most expensive models, the Model S and Model X, in transit to Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as the Asia-Pacific region.
But that means that over the past 12 months, Tesla has produced 78,000 more cars than it has sold, suggesting that rumors Tesla executives are pushing for strong demand may not be borne out by the numbers.
“Earlier this year, we did a price adjustment. After that, we generated a huge amount of demand, more than we can actually produce,” said Tom Zhu, Tesla’s executive director of global manufacturing and sales. “And as Elon said, as long as you have a valuable product at an affordable price, you don’t have to worry about demand.”
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