Shark Tank’s Mr. Wonderful gives woke companies free lesson in business
Luke Gentile
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Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary rejected co-star Mark Cuban’s suggestion that going woke is good for business Wednesday while giving companies like Target and Bud Light a free business lesson in the process.
“There is a reason almost all the top 10 market cap companies in the U.S. can be considered ‘woke.’ It’s good business,” Cuban said Sunday. “Most CEOs have enough experience to know to just wait out the news cycle until they go to the next one.”
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However, the numbers appear to disagree with Cuban.
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Bud Light and Target have suffered greatly for their appeal to woke culture.
Sales for the Anheuser-Busch-owned brand are down 24% from where they were last year, and Target has lost nearly $15 billion in market cap, according to a report.
“Mark is a little bit country on this issue. I’m a little bit Rock and Roll,” O’Leary told Fox & Friends.
Losing billions of dollars in market cap kills the pocketbooks of shareholders, and Bud Light’s loss of market share is unprecedented, according to O’Leary, who added that people should not be surprised that the two Shark Tank investors disagree.
“That’s not a new surprise between Mark and I,” he said. “We’re good friends, though.”
Business is all about the money, O’Leary said.
The pain of going woke and going broke provides a valuable lesson for boards of directors and CEOs, he said.
“When you’re Disney, or you’re a beer company, or you’re Target, you have customers of every kind. Republicans, Democrats, gender-specific or gender-neutral, It doesn’t matter. You want to sell everybody everything all of the time,” O’Leary said. “When you get involved in partisan issues, you basically lose 50% of your constituency.
That loss should be the last thing any corporation wants, the Canadian businessman said.
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“The role of a business, a corporation in America for the last 200 years, has been to serve customers, their employees, and their shareholders,” he said. “Their role is not to educate society on the social issue of the day. They’re learning that very quickly, and in the case of business, you can measure it by the second when they’re public by the stock price.”
“When you lose $9, $10, $11, $12 billion of market cap, you know that you’ve offended somebody, and that person is your customer. That’s bad business. Really bad business.”