 The goal of our study was to investigate whether environmental, social and governance, better known as ESG activities, were an important share price resilience factor during the COVID-19 crisis. The most important finding of our study is that firms with high ESG scores did not experience superior returns, either during the market crash in the first quarter of 2020 or during the full COVID year of 2020. We further found that firms with a large stock of innovative assets did experience superior returns, suggesting that innovative assets were the more important resilience factor. Whether doing good is also good for investors remains the topic of considerable debate. The results of our study suggest that it might be good to be skeptical about any short-term ESG-related performance claims, which is especially relevant in light of increasing investor and regulatory attention to ESG issues. While ESG issues are increasingly at the forefront of investor attention, little is known about ESG in private rather than public markets, which is what I'm going to study next.