My name is Jessica Camila Geary and I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine.

I wrote a story about how Wall Street is trying to be part of the solution to the climate crisis.

Specifically, I wrote about a tiny investment firm called Engine Number One.

Part of what Engine Number One does is activist investing, meaning they take a stake in companies

and try to pressure management to change some of what they do.

The activist investors can also try to pressure for good.

For example, Charlie Penner, who is now at Engine Number One,

helped put plant-based burgers on the McDonald's menu and add parental controls on iPhones.

So in late 2020, Engine Number One decided to take on ExonMobile.

What they wanted to do was change the company's board of directors so that this oil company would start addressing climate change.

Historically, ExonMobile has been famously entransagent about their business model and they even funded a lot of opposition work to climate policy.

Now, you have to understand that less than a decade ago, Exon was one of the most powerful players on the American stock market.

They made more money than any other company in American history in 2008.

In 2013, they were the largest company in the world by market value.

And even though they lost billions of dollars last year, they're still worth hundreds of billions dollars.

They were said to be too big for activists and investors to go up against.

So here's my story, the little hedge fund taking down big oil, read by Emily Wu'seller.

This was recorded by Autumn.

Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic.

On the day the little investment firm, Engine No. 1, would learn the outcome of its proxy battle at ExonMobile, its office in San Francisco still didn't have furniture.

Almost everyone had been working at home since the firm was started in spring 2020.

So when the founder, Chris James, went into the office for a rare visit on May 26th this year.

...