IN AUGUST 2022, a dozen or so businessmen crowded onto the balcony that looms above the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. As the clock neared 4 p.m., the group from Strive Asset Management waved, clapped, and flashed toothy smiles, waiting to ring the closing bell. They were a sea of navy suits.
They were celebrating the start of trading for their firm’s first financial product—an exchange-traded fund titled $DRLL. Stuffed full of companies like Exxon and Chevron, $DRLL (yes, “drill”) was a way for people to invest more in fossil fuels. Strive’s reasoning for such a product comes from a sort of free-market purism: The only goal of a business should be to earn the greatest returns possible—climate-fueled collapse be damned. “Strive is mandating US energy companies to produce more oil & gas without apologizing for it,” the firm declared on Instagram.
Strive aimed to change the way Wall Street does business. In recent years, top asset management firms from BlackRock to Vanguard have expanded what’s known as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investing—a way to screen investments not just for profit potential, but also for a company’s record on everything from climate change to workplace diversity. Strive’s goal, however, is the exact opposite: to undo what the fund’s leaders see as a growing culture of “wokeness” that has infected boardrooms across America.
Strive had emerged just three months earlier when its co-founders, ex-AnheuserBusch executive Anson Frericks and biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy—now a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination—raised $20 million from several investment
