Sam Amico
Billionaire Mark Cuban is all for companies promoting LGBTQ+ ideologies in their brands. That includes Bud Light and Target, who each have lost billions and received even more backlash for their decisions to do just that.
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“There is a reason almost all the top 10 market cap companies in the US can be considered ‘woke.’ It’s good business,” Cuban told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
“Most CEOs have enough experience to know to just wait out the news cycle until they go to the next one.”
Cuban owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and is the star of Shark Tank. He made these comments after it was pointed out that Anheuser-Busch, Bud Light’s parent company, has suffered a reported decrease of 23.9 percent in sales since adding transgender spokesperson Dylan Mulvaney. Generally, a 5 percent decrease is considered a reason for alarm. Overall, Bud Light has lost a whopping $27 billion in sales since adding Mulvaney, as we relayed here.
And not surprisingly, for the first time in 22 years, someone other than Bud Light leads the country in beer sales.
Meanwhile, things haven’t gone any better for Target, which has also lost billions since making the decision to prominently display LBGTQ+ and Pride Month products. The company has since moved those items to the back of the store.
No big deal, Cuban explained.
“First a dip in market cap is meaningless,” Cuban said. “You have to realize that there aren’t many individual owners of stocks — almost all ownership is via funds, and most trading is quantitative. So, it’s not like the drop is because tens of thousands of individual holders sold their stocks.”
This seems to be a pretty big assumption that any company can recover and is based on, as Cuban put it, a news cycle.
There is truth to that. But that is only if the current news cycle is quickly forgotten. In the world of business, revenue is everything. And at least Anheuser-Busch — if not Target, too — may have ruined the Bud Light name.
Not only are “anti-woke” customers upset, but so are members of the LBGTQ+ community — both with Bud Light, for what is viewed as the company not standing behind Mulvaney, and Target, which backed off its strong promotion of LBGTQ+ items.
So both companies seem to have ticked off both sides of the aisle.
“[Demand for Bud Light] has plummeted completely. No one wants it at their event anymore,” Catarina Tucker, the founder of Barnastics, told Fox News Digital. “There are a couple clients that have expressed to me their feelings behind it, and it’s no longer popular.”
Time will tell, though, if Cuban is making a valid point. In fairness to him, it’s too soon to say. But to come out and say at a time like this, when sales for “woke” companies have been killing their brands … well, it just sounds silly.
