Private companies have a responsibility to promote social change, billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones told CNBC on Friday.
"If we're going to have true social change, it's going to come through the private sector," he told "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer in an exclusive interview. "And, boy, now's the time we need it."
Jones, who founded the Robin Hood Foundation and is now the chairman of the non-profit research organization Just Capital, said he couldn't recall a more turbulent time when it comes to social issues.
"I don't think I've seen this kind of social tumult since I was a kid in the '60s and '70s," Jones said. "So we need to change things. How are you going to get social change? The biggest way is there's a $19 trillion private economy."
Four times the size of the public sector and 40 times the size of the philanthropic sector, the private sector should bear a greater burden to tackle wealth disparity and other "social fissures and ruptures," the billionaire said.
"You've got half the country left behind," he said. "The way that you change things is that you've got to first go to the American people, and that's what we did. We said, 'What is it that you want to see that defines corporate justness?'"
That question brought on the birth of Just Capital, which ranks companies based on qualities it defines as the priorities of U.S. consumers, including worker pay and treatment. The organization just rolled out an exchange-traded fund with the top 50 percent of companies in its rankings by industry, which, on average, earn 7 percent higher returns on equity than their less "just" counterparts in the Russell 1000 index, Jones told Cramer.
Even so, social discrepancies persist, and some of them threaten business as we know it, he said.
"Five years ago, it was apparent even then, I think, that capitalism needed to be modernized," Jones told Cramer. "I just saw this poll – 51 percent of millennials from 18 to 29 either don't believe or [are] opposed to capitalism."
"Your show's going to have a viewership of about 15 in about 10 or 15 years," he joked. "Now, we've got to change this."
Watch Paul Tudor Jones' full interview here:
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