Vivek Ramaswamy, a multimillionaire entrepreneur and candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination for president, told Newsmax on Tuesday night Anheuser-Busch is committing corporate suicide by tying its Bud Light brand, the most popular beer brand in the U.S., with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.
To celebrate Mulvaney's "365 Days of Girlhood," Anheuser-Busch sent Mulvaney custom-made cans featuring the influencer's face. Mulvaney, who has more than 10 million followers on TikTok, said in an Instagram video posted April 1 the cans were her "most prized possession," with the post featuring "#budlightpartner."
That came on the heels of a podcast interview on March 23 during which Alissa Heinerscheid, 39, vice president of marketing for Bud Light, said the beer brand had been "in decline for a really long time" and wanted to make it more inclusive by attracting more female and younger drinkers.
"This is a clear example of a company committing a form of corporate suicide, harming its own financial self-interest to indulge its executives' fancies," Ramaswamy, author of "Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam," told "Eric Bolling The Balance." "It's the lowest rung of woke capitalism, where they're not even advancing their own financial interests."
Since the Mulvaney controversy emerged, there have been multiple media reports that U.S. sales of Bud Light have plummeted.
Ramaswamy said he puts part of the blame on Environmental, Social and Governance investment strategies by fund managers like BlackRock, State Street, and The Vanguard Group for advancing such a woke agenda for corporations.
"They were for years advancing the racial agenda, then the gender equality agenda, now they're actually focused on perverting the gender equality agenda itself in the form of this new trans cult that has America in a chokehold," Ramaswamy said. "But the real answer is this doesn't advance that company's self-interest. It just empowers a small handful of people in charge."
Ramaswamy said there is a trend in corporate America where the company's largest shareholders are tying executive compensation to how well a company achieves ESG goals. The Vanguard Group, which is a staunch believer in ESG investing, is the fifth-largest shareholder of Anheuser-Busch stock, with more than 22 million shares, or 1.32%, according to MarketScreener.
"Many people in corporate America are lemmings," Ramaswamy said. "They don't think independently, so once many companies start doing it, that becomes a trend.
"It is a trend in corporate America today — it's just a fact — that executive compensation is increasingly tied not just to standard corporate goals, but also to goals that include these ESG factors."
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