Elon Musk on Wednesday attacked ESG ratings, which measure a company’s environmental, social and corporate standards, pointing out that tobacco makers tend to get better ratings than Tesla, the electric car company he runs, Markets Insider reported.

“[Uite] why ESG is the devil,” he tweeted in response to an article by journalist Aaron Sibarium published in the Washington Free Beacon.

ESG (“Environment, Social, Governance”) standards are designed to assess the business practices of various companies on a variety of sustainability and ethical issues.

In recent years, they have attracted increasing attention as more investors turn to them to invest socially responsibly, not just based on the returns they believe the companies’ shares can bring.

But critics of the system charge that it actually encourages “greenwashing,” a form of marketing and public relations in which companies falsely promote the idea that they are environmentally friendly, or that the ratings do not reflect the companies’ true social contributions.

“From S&P Global to the London Stock Exchange, tobacco companies destroy Tesla in ESG rankings,” Aaron Sibarium also noted on his Twitter page.

“How can cigarettes, which kill over 8 million people a year, be considered a more ethical investment than electric cars?” he added rhetorically.

His article in the Washington Free Beacon noted that the latest ESG ratings published by financial firm S&P Global gave Tesla a score of 37, while tobacco giant Philip Morris scored 84 out of 100.

Is the letter “S” Tesla’s disadvantage in ESG ratings?

Tesla suffers on the social side in these rankings, with the Elon Musk-led automaker known for its staunch opposition to unionization and other labor issues.

Last May, Tesla was removed from the S&P 500 ESG index, a director of S&P Dow Jones Indices at the time believed the decision was due to issues related to allegations of racial discrimination, as well as accidents caused by Tesla’s Autopilot.

In April of this year, a federal jury in San Francisco ordered Tesla to pay about $3.2 million to a black former employee after finding that the electric car maker failed to prevent brutal racial harassment at the plant, its iconic assembly line in California.

The verdict was handed down after a week-long trial. The lawsuit was filed in 2017 by plaintiff Owen Diaz, who was awarded $137 million by another jury in 2021. He opted for a new trial on damages after a judge agreed with a jury that Tesla was liable, but significantly reduced the award to $15 million.

As for Musk’s opposition to the unionization of Tesla workers, it was also ridiculed by US President Joe Biden in comparison to Ford.

Asked last June about the South African billionaire’s comments about the state of the U.S. economy, Biden said that “while Elon Musk is talking about this, Ford is ramping up its investment. Ford is increasing its investment and creating new electric cars.”

“Six thousand new hires, and I would add unions. So, you know, good luck with his trip to the moon,” Joe Biden added, referring to SpaceX, the aerospace company run by Musk.