Ex-Bud Light President: The Truth Behind the Brand’s Collapse

Budweiser was the undisputed king of American beers, until one controversial ad campaign erased $40 billion in market cap and thousands of jobs. How did this happen? Where did top-down frameworks like ESG and DEI originate? And how can we get corporate America back on mission?

This week we're joined by Anson Frericks, a former president at Anheuser-Busch and author of the new book: “Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America’s Favorite Beer." He recently founded Athletic Capital and co-founded Strive Asset Management with Vivek Ramaswamy.

After graduating from Yale and Harvard Business School, Anson quickly ascended the ranks at AB InBev, which acquired Anheuser-Busch in 2008. But he began to notice the beer brand straying from its all-American roots. The culture shifted dramatically after InBev moved sales and marketing from St. Louis to New York City, and Budweiser became emblematic of a decades-long battle over the purpose of a corporation dating back to Milton Friedman's shareholder primacy theory versus the World Economic Forum's embrace of stakeholder theory. Anson explains how the latter captured boardrooms across Europe, spread to America, and led to the proliferation of ESG and DEI within our largest financial institutions.

He details how BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard wield their outsized influence to force stakeholder theory on corporate America, and explains why, shortly before Bud Light's historic collapse, he left to launch Strive Asset Management as an alternative asset manager focused solely on maximizing returns for shareholders. Anson provides an important case study in what went wrong on Wall Street and in boardrooms across the country, and more importantly, how we can get back on track.

Purchase Anson's new book here

Joe Lonsdale is an American entrepreneur, investor & philanthropist. He has been a part of founding more than a dozen mission-driven companies, including Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, Affinity, Epirus, Resilience Bio, and 8VC.

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