EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM: The Planet Earth is now the company’s “only shareholder.”

16 September 2022

EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM: The Planet Earth is now the company’s “only shareholder.”

Intro: Patagonia was one of the earliest companies to become a b-Corp, submitting to certification as meeting certain environmental and social standards, and recently it changed its mission to state: “We’re in business to save our home planet.”

"Setting a new example in environmental corporate leadership, the billionaire owner of Patagonia is giving the entire company away to fight the Earth’s climate devastation, he announced on Wednesday.

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, who turned his passion for rock climbing into one of the world’s most successful sportswear brands, is giving the entire company to a uniquely structured trust and non-profit, designed to pump all of the company’s profits into saving the planet.

“As of now, Earth is our only shareholder,” the company announced. “ALL profits, in perpetuity, will go to our mission to ‘save our home planet’.”

✓ "... Some years he spent more than 200 nights sleeping outside, and claims not to have owned a tent until he was almost 40. In 1962 he was arrested for riding a freight train in Arizona and spent 18 days in jail on a charge of “wandering around aimlessly with no apparent means of support”.

...“As of now, Earth is our only shareholder,” the company announced. “ALL profits, in perpetuity, will go to our mission to ‘save our home planet’.”

Chouinard, 83, worked with his wife and two children as well as teams of company lawyers to create a structure that will allow Patagonia to continue to operate as a for-profit company whose proceeds will go to benefit environmental efforts.

“If we have any hope of a thriving planet – much less a thriving business – 50 years from now, it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have,” said Chouinard in a statement. “This is another way we’ve found to do our part.”

Yvon Chouinard is shown in his surfboard shaping room in Ventura, Calif.

‘I was in Forbes magazine listed as a billionaire, which really, really pissed me off,’ said Chouinard. Photograph: Victoria Sayer Pearson/AP

✓ Chouinard’s family donated 2% of all stock and all decision-making authority to a trust, which will oversee the company’s mission and values. The other 98% of the company’s stock will go to a non-profit called the Holdfast Collective, which “will use every dollar received to fight the environmental crisis, protect nature and biodiversity, and support thriving communities, as quickly as possible”, according to the statement.

Each year, the money Patagonia makes after reinvesting in the business will be distributed to the non-profit to help fight the environmental crisis.

The structure, the statement said, was designed to avoid selling the company or taking it public, which could have meant a change in its values. . ."

The publication of a magazine article in 2017 “really, really pissed off” Yvon Chouinard, the mountain climber turned reluctant businessman and founder of outdoor clothing company Patagonia.

In the article, Forbes crowned Chouinard as a billionaire and added him to its list of the world’s richest people. While many people daydream of achieving a nine-zero fortune, for Chouinard it was a sign he had failed in his life’s mission to make the world a better and fairer place.

The Forbes article set him on a journey to find a way of giving away Patagonia, the company he founded almost 50 years ago with a mission to help fellow climbers. This week he achieved that aim, announcing that he was giving away all of the shares in Patagonia to a trust that will use future profits to “help fight” the climate crisis.

“Earth is now our only shareholder,” Chouinard, 83, said in a message to staff and customers. “Instead of ‘going public’, you could say we’re ‘going purpose’. Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.” . . .