I still remember the day I realized Anheuser-Busch InBev was no longer the company I thought it was.
I had crunched the numbers and believed the company could make millions of dollars if we agreed to distribute canned coffees made by Salt Lake City-based Black Rifle Coffee Company. I knew Black Rifle’s pro-military and pro-law-enforcement messaging could ruffle some progressive feathers — the company vowed to hire 10,000 veterans after Starbucks announced it would hire 10,000 refugees — but I also knew many of our drinkers shared those values and had grown fed up with the way Starbucks and other coffee companies seemed to cater to coastal, latte-loving elites.
The proposal was rejected. It was early 2022, two years after the George Floyd protests, and I was told that being associated with Black Rifle was too politically provocative, especially in progressive circles.
I should have seen it coming. Many corporations were flexing their credentials in the growing diversity, equity and inclusion movement. But for me, the incident was a particularly telling example of what was going wrong with Anheuser-Busch — and an early sign that too many American corporations had forgotten who their customers were.
To be clear, I believe that an employee base that has a diversity of thought — which is naturally associated with a diversity of ethnicities and backgrounds — is good for business. Different employees can better solve existing problems or identify new opportunities. But the massive corporate embrace of D.E.I. was always destined to fail, in large part because the movement was never well defined to begin with.
In 2019, I learned about the concept of D.E.I. at a meeting in Chicago from Frances Frei, a professor at Harvard Business School. I had no issue with what she described. Anheuser-Busch’s work force had become more diverse over the past decade, and I had watched employees of many backgrounds be given opportunities to grow based on their talents and contributions. If D.E.I. was about continuing this trajectory — being authentic to company culture and mission, listening and responding to customer needs and deploying logical processes — there was nothing to object to.
Unfortunately, the D.E.I. policies that followed at Anheuser-Busch were none of the above. In 2021 the company started using online dashboards that gave managers a breakdown of their employee base by demographic characteristics.
Then the company created annual performance targets linked to the company’s environmental, social and governance strategy, of which D.E.I. was one component, for thousands of employees. It was clear to me that if teams didn’t check the right boxes, managers could be punished. Promotions could be withheld. Bonuses could be lost. That year, senior executives, including me, attended weekly meetings to discuss D.E.I. initiatives. These meetings often distracted from more critical business matters, like the fact that the company risked losing employees as the Great Resignation set in. (Anheuser-Busch declined to comment for this article.)
Anheuser-Busch was hardly alone. At least 70 big companies — from Airbnb to G.E. — had set public targets for gender diversity hiring. Among the worst examples of efforts to accomplish D.E.I. goals was a diversity training course offered to Coca-Cola employees via a third-party platform that urged workers to “be less white,” which the presentation helpfully defined as being “less oppressive,” “less arrogant” and “less ignorant.” A course in Kentucky reportedly told nurses that “implicit bias kills,” that white privilege is a “covert” form of racism and that nurses may contribute to “modern-day lynchings in the workplace.”
I was already considering leaving Anheuser-Busch before the Black Rifle distribution idea was turned down. Once it was, I was certain it was time to go.
I accelerated efforts to start a fund with my high school friend Vivek Ramaswamy (who would become a Republican candidate for president). As many big asset managers were pushing D.E.I. onto the companies they were investing in, we decided to start a fund that would help its companies avoid the mistakes I’d seen at Anheuser-Busch. Raising money from Bill Ackman, Peter Thiel and others, we finalized our seed investment round at the end of February 2022, and I resigned from the company in March.
A year later, Anheuser-Busch became the poster child of what went wrong with the D.E.I. movement. In April 2023, the transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney promoted Bud Light on social media by dressing up like Audrey Hepburn and drinking from a can of the beer.
While it was a small sponsorship by Bud Light standards, it was still puzzling. Transgender rights were a political lightning rod in many states, especially red ones, where Anheuser-Busch enjoyed high market share. And while Bud Light was in decline at the time and needed new marketing strategies to regain customers, it became America’s biggest beer brand largely by keeping its marketing away from political controversies. It was enjoyed by Democrats and Republicans for precisely that reason.
But what about Black Rifle? That was a distribution deal — trucks that delivered Bud and Bud Light would also carry Black Rifle to retailers like Walmart and 7-Eleven. That is very different from a sponsorship, in which a brand chooses to publicly associate itself with something or someone to burnish itself. Many know that Pepsi sponsored Beyoncé's Super Bowl performance, but far fewer can probably identify which products its trucks deliver. Black Rifle’s sales have grown since I suggested that deal; loyal fans rewarded its authenticity and dedication to its mission. These days, its products are carried in Dr Pepper trucks.
The Mulvaney promotion generated enormous conservative ire. Commentators called for boycotts that hurt the company’s sales. Yet the company also caught flak from some on the left who felt the company should have been more vocal in its support of Ms. Mulvaney.
Bud Light couldn’t win. The sponsorship never should have happened. Ms. Mulvaney herself said, “For a company to hire a trans person and then not publicly stand by them is worse in my opinion than not hiring a trans person at all.”
I’m not saying that hiring a transgender influencer is wrong. The ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s, for example, is famously, proudly progressive. Its customers wouldn’t bat an eye at a Mulvaney sponsorship, and the company could have stood by Ms. Mulvaney if conservatives complained, strengthening both its mission and the L.G.B.T.Q. rights movement.
And that’s a good thing. I have no issue with companies having a progressive mission and authentically sticking to it. Capitalism allows, even incentivizes, companies to compete for customers with different tastes.
But the D.E.I. movement demanded that companies pursue the same progressive goals, regardless of their mission and culture. When Anheuser-Busch embraced D.E.I., the partnership felt inauthentic. And that’s why it backfired.
Since he took office, President Trump has wasted no time dismantling D.E.I. policies in the public and private sectors. Many companies, including Tractor Supply Company and Harley-Davidson, began rolling back D.E.I. policies before he was elected. Meta, Target, Goldman Sachs and others have followed suit, and hiring quotas, racial equity audits and exclusionary benefits programs seem to present stronger legal risks to companies still pursuing them.
You can see how performative many companies were in their imposition of D.E.I. policies simply by how quickly they have retreated from those policies. And their demise was well underway before the election. No one wanted to become the next Bud Light.
I believe Mr. Trump is off to a good start. But it is much easier for him to issue an executive order ending D.E.I. programs in government than it is to end them in the private sector. Much of that work will have to come from corporate America.
The principles that built great American companies are simple: Hire the best people, serve your customers well and let merit and financial results determine success. While expanding opportunity and making employees feel welcome are worthy goals, how D.E.I. policies were carried out often strayed from these foundational principles and might have even created other forms of discrimination.
Today companies have an opportunity to demonstrate how true inclusion works: by judging people as individuals, not as members of groups.
I believe Anheuser-Busch, like many companies, stands at a crossroads. It can struggle under a polarizing policy, or it can help lead American business back to the principles that made it great in the first place — principles that unite rather than divide, that reward results rather than identity.
Anson Frericks is a founder of Strive Asset Management and the author of “Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America’s Favorite Beer.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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