Patagonia is Accelerating the End of Democracy

from the New York Times

Note: a followup to this story has been published here.

You’ve all heard it.

• Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard is “giving away” his company to a pair of trusts that will direct all the company’s future profits to climate change.
• Chouinard is characterizing himself as the “reluctant billionaire” supposedly turning capitalism on its head by redefining corporate responsibility
• Patagonia has (hilariously) changed its Twitter bio to “Earth is now our only shareholder.”

As a guy more familiar than I’d like to be with the way wealthy people — especially as they approach the end of the their lives — protect their private fortunes as they prepare to transfer them to their heirs… to see this action on the part of Chouinard lauded as a game-changer by critical minds that arguably ought to know better is baffling to me.

Here’s the reality of what’s going on here:

First, there’s nothing new about what Chouinard is doing. Barre Seid did the exact same thing with Tripp Lite, wrapping it into a 501(c)(4) that helped fund the conservative takeover of the Federal Judiciary that recently removed a big chunk of women’s reproductive rights.

Second, there’s the fact that the trusts are STILL controlled by the Chouinard family, vesting $100M/year of political influence into a handful of unelected, unaccountable oligarchs sitting in a smoke-filled room. You have no vote (except indirectly, by maybe buying Patagonia gear, like the U.S. military does), but the billionaire family gets to avoid a $700 million capital gains tax bill that would have resulted from a sale or traditional transfer.

The third and most important thing to think about isn’t the Chouinard family itself, but rather what this pattern they’re following implies about the fate of democracy. Extremely wealthy individuals, families, and corporations are taking an increasingly open stake in American politics and political speech — from Citizens United to SuperPACs to Tripp Lite to Musk’s attempted takeover of Twitter to, most recently, Patagonia.

We need to be very concerned about the normalization of extraordinarily wealthy entities, with no accountability to the public, using the…