No, Bud Light has not “lost $4 billion” because of its Dylan Mulvaney promotion: Those angry about the beer brand’s marketing partnership with the trans influencer have a new talking point that the deal has cost Bud Light to lose a certain amount of money in a short period of time. It’s not true.
Bud Light Drama
As we explored earlier this week, a large swath of the online right, extending even to a handful of elected officials and celebrities, is very angry that Bud Light has reached a social media sponsorship with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman who is a popular TikTok influencer.
Kid Rock was shown shooting at cases of the beer, while Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) declared that she had switched to Coors Light.
The idea, it seems to be, is to declare once again that brands who “go woke, go broke,” and to will such a result into existence.
Did Bud Light Get Hit Hard Economically?
A few days into this activism campaign/freakout, a talking point has emerged: Due to the efforts of those boycotting Bud Light, the brand and its parent company, InBev, have “lost $4 billion.”
“On March 31, Anheuser Busch had a $132.38 billion market cap,” the Twitter user known as DC Draino told his 730,000 followers on Monday. As of today, it’s now $128.4 billion. You know what that means? The Woke Bud Light campaign has already shaved off nearly **$4 BILLION** in company value. Don’t let Dems lie to you – Conservative Boycotts WORK.”
Various conservative sites, including National Pulse, and Slay News, have uncritically cited the $4 billion figure. As did the right’s leading anti-trans campaigner, Matt Walsh, stated that “the Dylan Mulvaney endorsement cost Anheuser Busch four billion dollars so far. That’s because we spoke out loudly and made them pay the price.”
Nope, Not $4,000,000,000
Alas, the endorsement did not cause Bud Light or InBev to lose $4 billion.
The claim is wrong for quite a few different reasons.
For one, measuring the minor day-to-day fluctuations of a company’s stock, and declaring that it “gained” or “lost” billions of dollars in a matter of days, isn’t a proper or telling way to look at the performance of a massive corporation, unless the loss was of some unusually large percentage of the company’s value.
If a company’s market capitalization is in the hundreds of billions, as InBev’s is, gaining or losing $4 billion represents merely a tiny sliver of its value.
If the company announced quarterly results and turned out to have lost billions of dollars in revenue, that would be significant. In 2018, Reuters reported that InBev had seen “more than $13 billion wiped off its market value,” after a quarterly report which included “a profit warning and weaker-than-expected third-quarter earnings growth sparked by reduced demand for its beer in Brazil and South Korea.”
Secondly, current moves in the company’s stock price aren’t necessarily due to whatever is going on with Dylan Mulvaney. InBev is a multinational corporation with dozens of brands in numerous countries. All kinds of things are more likely to affect its stock price, from overall market conditions to a natural disaster in another country than a culture war kerfuffle in the United States that most beer drinkers probably haven’t even heard about.
And perhaps most importantly, Draino’s numbers are wrong.
The company’s market cap, as of Wednesday, is $130.1 billion, as reported by Yahoo Finance. So of the $4 billion that InBev “lost” between March 31 and April 10, they’ve “made back” about half of it.
But that’s not the critical number. The company’s stock is close to its 52-week high, $67.09 a share. Its low was $44.51 a share. It was trading as low as $58.59 a share on March 15. InBev’s 52-week stock chart looks like this, which is nothing remotely resembling a company going “broke.”
“Anheuser-Busch Stock Charges to New Highs. Here’s the Trade,” TheStreet wrote on Monday, which is not the type of thing typically written in the financial press about a company that’s on the brink of insolvency.
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Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
