Tariq Fancy

Tariq Fancy served as BlackRock's first Chief Investment Officer for Sustainable Investing from 2018 to 2019. After leaving, he published a widely-circulated essay titled "The Secret Diary of a 'Sustainable Investor'" arguing that ESG investing is largely a marketing exercise that allows corporations and investors to avoid meaningful climate action. He argued that sustainable investing creates the illusion of action while enabling business-as-usual. His critique sparked significant debate about ESG's real-world impact and helped fuel the backlash against ESG investing that emerged in 2022-2023. Fancy's insider perspective — having built the ESG infrastructure at the world's largest asset manager — gave his critique unusual credibility with both skeptics and advocates of sustainable investing. He subsequently focused on education technology through Rumie, a nonprofit platform providing learning to underserved populations, applying his concern about systemic problems to direct intervention rather than market-based solutions. His critique of ESG contributed to a broader reassessment of impact measurement standards and the gap between ESG marketing claims and measurable outcomes.