Nike’s CEO has come to a startling conclusion about his company: It turns out that an athletic-wear corporation sells athletic wear, not politics.
In an employee memo reported this week, Elliott Hill admitted that the company had been spending most of 2026 putting “sport at the center of everything we do,” as the company’s share price drops and the brand loses market share.
The U.K. Daily Mail’s Sophia Baum asked the central question:
“Because if sport is now back at the center of Nike, investors could reasonably ask: what was at the center before?”
The question kind of answers itself. The company’s recent fortunes have followed the rise and fall of wokeness, with both sales and the company’s shares dropping precipitously.
It’s often difficult to know what product Nike is actually selling. While the company’s advertising and identity has always tracked left of center — it famously featured an HIV-positive runner in a commercial in the 1990s, along with Charles Barkley’s “I Am Not a Role Model” spots — those ads still featured athletes.
But a decade ago, Nike decided to throw its lot in with a former NFL player whose whole identity was not playing in the NFL, Colin Kaepernick. In fact, he became the face of the company, despite his real gig being activism. You don’t need sneakers to be an activist, and it helps if you can credibly claim to be anti-capitalist in that crowd.
How do you feel about Nike’s shift away from activism in marketing?
It’s a positive change
33% (4 votes)
It’s too late to fix
50% (6 votes)
I don’t care about their marketing
0% (0 votes)
I never liked their products
17% (2 votes)
It worked, for a while. However, Nike’s stock is down over 80 percent from its 2021 highs as of Wednesday morning, according to INDmoney, an investment blog. This means it was removed from the S&P 100, which also means some forced selling from index funds.
“The change says that Nike is no longer representative of America’s 100-company mega-cap tier,” the blog reported. “It does not say that the company has become uninvestable.”
Meanwhile, as the U.K. Telegraph noted, the company’s share of the footwear market worldwide has gone down from 29.2 percent in 2022 to 23.4 in 2025 percent.
What happened? Well, it wasn’t just the wokeness. There was the company’s weak sales in China against domestic brands there, along with a disastrous decision to pursue direct-to-consumer sales at home — which led to less shelf space in major stores.
Also, at its stock high, Nike was trading at roughly 50 times earnings at over $179. It now trades at roughly half that number, even as earnings more than halved. Investors simply don’t feel it’s worth that massive premium.
But make no mistake: The wokeness had something to do with it.
By distributing a memo explaining that a sports footwear company even needed to return to thinking about sports, even the CEO is admitting that the company had been behaving like it didn’t really care about the product it was selling. It showed.
“Lots of things definitely changed because of social media,” one Nike insider told the Telegraph, referring to the fact that it was unprepared for the backlash it would face for the Kaepernick campaign.
“The company backed those sentiments at that particular time, believing that what we’re trying to do was right. Hindsight’s a great thing. So if you ask those same guys if they would do it again, I don’t know if they’ll give a different answer.”
“Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” That was the slogan for the Kaepernick campaign, remember? Well, it turns out, that meant sacrificing an entire company’s market position. But at least they believed — or at least pretended to believe — in something amorphous and unthinking and woke.
This has to be a soul-crushing thing for everyone who truly believed in this suicide mission to destroy an entire company.
However, it’s also a sign that wokeness never really dies, it just morphs or gets abandoned temporarily while an organization tries to rebrand itself.
Whether it’s Nike or the Democrats or American universities, the makeup of the brand remains the same. It’s just gone underground a little bit.
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