Investors should ask a lot of questions before deciding to bet any portion of their future on a company. For the folks at Inspire Investing, one of those questions is apparently, “What would Christ invest in?” According to Business Insider, the Lord’s only son would draw the line at buying stock in SpaceX.
Inspire Investing, which engages in what it calls “biblically responsible investing,” told Business Insider that it won’t be buying up any shares of Elon Musk’s now publicly traded rocket, AI, and social media company because it fell short of the firm’s “moral audit.”
Now, there are a lot of ways in which one could imagine Musk flunking a morality test: perhaps it’s his deeply racist posts that teeter closer and closer to just flat-out endorsing white nationalism, or the toxic culture at just about every one of his companies, or even just his propensity for lying.
According to Business Insider, Inspire Investing’s CEO Robert Netzly cited Musk’s social platform X as the reason that Inspire simply can’t touch SpaceX. Specifically, he pointed to a report from the National Center on Sexual Exploitation that called out X for its sexually explicit content. The objection seems to stem from an incident earlier this year in which Grok, xAI’s chatbot that is active on X, was used to generate non-consensual sexual images of various people, including children.
“You can’t buy SpaceX without profiting from those activities,” Netzly told Business Insider. “As exciting as SpaceX might be as a rocket company, we have to ask deeper questions.”
That whole situation was obviously egregious, and likely the result of Musk himself pushing for the removal of safeguards surrounding his company’s AI tools. And while there was eventually an effort to restrict the use of Grok in a way that would cut down on the number of non-consensual sexual images generated using the tool, Musk repeatedly downplayed the whole situation, claiming that Grok was never used to generate CSAM and calling the backlash an attempt at “censorship.”
While it’s great that Inspire Investing does seem to have enough of a moral compass to steer it away from Musk, it apparently has no objection to pouring money into other extremely dubious firms like Palantir. “There is risk with a business like Palantir, for their surveillance technology, and for work that they do to be misused, greatly misused,” Netzly told Business Insider. “A business like that needs to be paid special attention to, but similar to a firearms manufacturer, we don’t hold the manufacturer guilty for customers who may misuse that firearm.”
That analogy doesn’t quite work, given that Palantir’s CEO is out here marketing his company as a mass surveillance tool that can be used for tracking down immigrants and cracking down on protesters. Imagine if gun manufacturers were basically bragging about how many people get killed by their products, and you’d be closer. Also, apparently, no points were deducted in the Inspire Investing audit for having your technology used to contribute to a genocide. Not sure how Christ would feel about that one.
