‘As of now, Earth is our only shareholder’
The billionaire owner of Patagonia is giving the entire company away to fight the Earth’s climate devastation, he announced this week.
Yvon Chouinard, who used his passion for rock climbing to set up one of the world’s most successful sportswear brands, is giving the entire company to a uniquely structured trust and nonprofit, 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’.”
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.”
🚨EXCLUSIVE: Yvon Chouinard, who founded the outdoor apparel maker Patagonia and became a reluctant billionaire with his unconventional spin on capitalism, has given away the company. All Patagonia’s profits will now be used to fight climate change.🧵https://t.co/22q91WK2Hz
— David Gelles (@dgelles) September 14, 2022
Chouinard’s family donated 2 per cent of all stock and all decision-making authority to a trust, which will oversee the company’s mission and values. The other 98 per cent of the company’s stock will go to a nonprofit 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 nonprofit 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.
“Instead of ‘going public’, you could say we’re ‘going purpose’,” said Chouinard. “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.”
The scarred landscape of the climate crisis is clear to see from today's extraordinary satellite image.https://t.co/KJtKnYGOoy pic.twitter.com/Oe63BIw5zJ
— James Cheshire (@spatialanalysis) August 10, 2022
Britain experienced one of the hottest summers on record this year, with temperatures surpassing 40 degrees.
Worrying satellite images showed how parts of the UK turned a desert-like yellow as drought hit.
Posting on Twitter, James Cheshire, professor of Geographic Information and Cartography at University College London, warned: “The scarred landscape of the climate crisis is clear to see from today’s extraordinary satellite image.”
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