'You need to clean up the mess your generation has left': Volkswagen’s guilty boomer gets real about sustainability, China—and his spam folder

d (Credit: courtesy of Volkswagen)

When a recruiter’s email about a job at Volkswagen showed up in Dirk Voeste’s email, he missed it at first. “Normally I don’t look at the spam folder,” he said. When he looked again, the pitch seemed implausible.

The message described a company with €80 billion in annual revenue that was looking for a chief sustainability officer. Volkswagen was far bigger than that—roughly €240 billion in annual sales, Voeste recalled—and he had not been looking to leave BASF, where he had spent 22 years in sustainability, agriculture and biotechnology.