[3][4] It attracted attention with its campaign to replace four members of ExxonMobil's board of directors despite owning only 0.02% of the company's shares.
[1][5] The firm describes its investment approach as "active ownership", as it prefers to work with management instead of launching activist campaigns.
[3] Charles Penner, who previously worked at Jana Partners, an activist fund pushing Apple to work more on limiting children's smartphone usage,[13] and Jennifer Grancio, who co-founded BlackRock's iShares exchange traded funds business, were also members of the founding team.
[12][15] During the dot-com boom, he operated a coal mine in Illinois and built storage facilities for the oil and gas sector.
[12] James was a founder of Tipping Point Community, an anti-poverty organisation based in San Francisco.
[11] After this realization, he began reading up on the social value of business, with writings including those of Luigi Zingales and Michael Porter.
[12] His sons asked him how he squared environmentalism – he served on the board of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation – with his investments in energy companies.
1 bought a stake in ExxonMobil worth $40 million in December 2020,[16] which equated to about 0.02% of the oil company's shares.
[1] At that time, institutional investors were already becoming frustrated with the company lagging behind its competitors in preparing for the energy transition,[17] ExxonMobil also incurred a $22 billion loss that year.
[12] On December 7, 2020, James wrote an open letter to the board of directors, pointing out Exxon's poor return on capital employed (ROCE).
[16] Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Robert Eccles and Colin Mayer argue that Exxon's poor capital allocation stemmed from its decades of climate change denial.
[16] The letter asked for widespread reform and proposed an alternative slate of four independent directors, all with experience of the energy sector.
[16] Given its small stake in the company, the investment fund's strategy relied on convincing Exxon's large shareholders, the largest three being BlackRock, The Vanguard Group and State Street, to back its plans.
[18] It said that Exxon's focus on fossil fuels threatened future returns,[18] stating that the company faced "existential risks".
[26] The move was believed to provide further opportunity for negotiations over votes and was described by a former oil executive as "pretty desperate".
1 launched an exchange-traded fund focused on environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) with $100 million in assets from institutional investors.