What CNBC and American business television have said about Latter-day Saints, and where they go wrong

Start with the facts behind the scene, because they are better than the way they were told. Goldman had been in Utah for more than a decade by 2012. It took an industrial loan charter in the state in 2004 with a few hundred employees, had 650 by the time it signed a tax agreement with the state in 2009, and doubled the headcount over the following two years. The office by then housed quantitative engineers, accountants and analysts, not a back office, and the state's pitch to the bank, as Reuters reported in March 2012, was a young workforce in which most residents speak a second language. Governor Gary Herbert and Mayor Ralph Becker were at the announcement.

Nobody at Goldman said the word religion. Nobody had to. The reason most Utahns speak a second language is that a large share of the men have spent two years abroad as missionaries, and business reporters had been drawing that line since at least June 2010.

CNBC's piece ran on June 23, 2010 under the headline "Mormons Wield Influence in Business". I could not read it at cnbc.com, which refuses automated requests, so its content here comes from the outlets that cited it: the Deseret News, which named it in August 2011 alongside Businessweek as the business press's entry in the genre, and the Boston Globe column by James Carroll that the Deseret News was reporting on, which described the Church as the original organisation men and argued that a theology in which God organises matter rather than creating it from nothing had produced a talent for commerce.

The 2010 CNBC story set the template that Businessweek filled in a year later. Caroline Winter's June 9, 2011 article "God's MBAs" put the group at 2 percent of the population and listed the companies whose top jobs members had held: Marriott International, American Express, American Motors, Dell, Lufthansa, Fisher-Price, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Madison Square Garden and Stanley Black and Decker. It reported that Goldman had hired 31 BYU graduates in 2010, level with Wharton, and quoted Gary Cornia, dean of the Marriott School, saying the school had a reputation without claiming it beat everyone. Christian Post, reporting on the same wave in July 2011, added Eric Varvel of Credit Suisse, Stephen Covey, Kim Clark and Jon Huntsman Jr., and put the Church's own count of trained missionaries at about one million with more than 50,000 then serving.

The wave had a shape. It began with finance, moved to the campaign, and ended with the Church's money. Each entry below is verified from the page or from a contemporary report of it, and the last column gives the figure each piece hung its argument on.

Read the last column top to bottom and you can watch the subject change under the reporters' feet, from members who work in banks to a church that owns a mall.

The thing to understand about 2012 is that the business press was not covering a religion; it was covering a résumé, and the résumé belonged to Romney, whose entire pre-political career was the sort of thing CNBC exists to explain. He had taken a joint law and business degree at Harvard in 1975, graduating in the top 5 percent of the business school class, joined Bain and Company in 1977 and made vice president within a year, and in 1984 co-founded Bain Capital with $37 million and seven employees; the firm's first big win was a 1986 stake in Staples that returned nearly sevenfold, and by 1999 it had $4 billion under management and a record on leveraged buyouts that its own partners described as about even between successes and failures. In February 1999 he took over the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics and handed them back in 2002 with a $100 million surplus. Every one of those numbers was on television in 2012, and so was the fact that he had spent 30 months in France as a missionary and had served, unpaid, as president of the Boston Stake from 1986 to 1994 while running a private equity firm, a job Wikipedia records took 30 or more hours a week. Jon Huntsman Jr., the other candidate, gave the story a second data point: governor of Utah from 2005 to 2009, ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011, son of the founder of a chemicals company that acquired 36 businesses between 1986 and 2000 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005; he left the race on January 16, 2012 after finishing third in New Hampshire, where a political action committee had spent $914,000 on advertising in two months, $1.9 million of its $2.7 million coming from his father. Two candidates from one small faith, both with fortunes built in the plainest business-page ways, made a story that wrote itself, and the danger of a story that writes itself is that nobody checks the premise. So when Businessweek's July 2012 cover turned from the candidates to the Church's own balance sheet and Reuters followed with a $7 billion tithing estimate from sociologist Ryan Cragun, the audience heard those figures as one more chapter about Romney's money rather than as a separate subject, and spokesman Michael Purdy's statement that the Church is financed primarily by member tithing and keeps reserves for hard times on the same principle it teaches families was read as a campaign response. It was not. It was the beginning of the story the business press should have been telling all along, and it took a whistleblower complaint in December 2019 and a Wall Street Journal report of a $100 billion fund in February 2020 for anyone to tell it.

The sales-training thesis is the part that survives, because the people who confirm it have no stake in the Church. Matthew Prince of Cloudflare, speaking at a Fortune conference in Deer Valley in July 2023, said Utah's culture could be exclusionary and then called returned missionaries incredible salespeople, because they have spent two years selling "the hardest thing in the world to sell". Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight, whose company raised $310.5 million in its 2018 listing, told The Next Web in 2019 that the mission is an incubator for the skills his firm hires. Fortune's own numbers for the state at that conference were 123,000 tech workers, 7.2 percent of the workforce, ninth most tech-heavy in the country.

The recruiting facts are also right. The Marriott School says nearly 75 percent of its students are bilingual; BYU says 97 percent of its male graduates have served; the Provo training centre, opened in 1978, teaches about 55 languages and holds 3,700 people. Goldman's Salt Lake City office was, and is, a real and rational bet on that labour pool, and CNBC was right to notice it in 2010 before most of the press did.

Business television covered a résumé and called it a religion.

• The base rate. A 2 percent group should hold about ten Fortune 500 chief executive jobs; a Deseret News count in May 2012 found one, Nolan Archibald of Black and Decker. No business network ran that arithmetic.
• Member wealth and church wealth are different stories. Ensign Peak Advisors, incorporated in 1997, was reported at $100 billion in 2020 and settled with the SEC for $5 million on February 21, 2023; its listed stocks stood at $56.8 billion in May 2024. None of that money belongs to the executives the 2010 story was about.
• Utah is a tax story before it is a faith story. CNBC's own Top States ranking put Utah first in 2016 and sixteenth in 2026, praising a 4.55 percent corporate rate and low unemployment while failing the state on 513 childcare centres and a $7.25 minimum wage. The ranking moved; the religion did not.
• Most members are not in the sample. Pew's 2011 survey found 27 percent had served a mission at all, and the Church counts more members outside the United States than inside among its 17,887,212.
• The sales pipeline runs both ways. The same training that fills Goldman's office fills Utah's door-to-door alarm and pest control crews and at least 15 major multi-level marketing companies, which the coverage of 2010-2012 did not mention once.

CNBC's Top States scorecard is the fitting place to end, because it is the network's own instrument and it contradicts the network's own storyline. In July 2016 CNBC named Utah the best state for business on more than 60 measures, the only state to have finished in the top half of every category across the study's first ten years. Ten years later the same scorecard, now 138 metrics in ten categories, placed Utah sixteenth and gave its quality of life 95 points out of 290. Between those two dates the share of Utahns who belong to the Church fell to about half. If faith explained the first ranking, it should have explained the second.