Kevin O’Leary dumps on Mark Cuban’s claims going woke is ‘good business’

Article content

Kevin O’Leary has hit out at Mark Cuban after his Shark Tank co-star suggested that companies are going woke because it makes good business sense.

Article content

“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 in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Article content

Cuban weighed in on the issue after both Bud Light and Target became mired in controversy when both companies were accused of pushing LGBTQ ideology.

“We had this debate on the set yesterday,” O’Leary said during an appearance on Fox News Wednesday. “The thing about business is when you lose $9 billion of market cap that goes right to the pocketbooks of shareholders. When you lose 26% share in a beer company that is completely unprecedented in the history of beer … I don’t agree. That’s not a surprise between Mark and I. We don’t agree on much.”

Article content

Article content

After Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in April, the company went into a free-fall with its sales dropping more than 25% from last year.

In the wake of the controversy, the Associated Press reported Wednesday that Bud Light had lost its status as America’s best-selling beer after a two-decade reign at the top.

Modelo Especial, a Mexican lager, surged past Bud Light in U.S. retail dollar sales in the month ending June 3, according to Nielsen data analyzed by Bump Williams Consulting.

Meanwhile, Target Corporation lost billions in market capitalization after it pushed “tuck-friendly” swimwear alongside the launch of a Pride-themed clothing line, including items aimed at children, last month.

This year, the U.S.-based retailer offered more than 2,000 products, including clothing, books, music and home furnishings as part of its Pride Collection, Reuters reported. The items included “gender fluid” mugs, “queer all year” calendars and books for children aged 2-8 titled “Bye Bye, Binary,” “Pride 1,2,3” and “I’m not a girl.”

Article content

“In business, it’s all about the money. An important lesson was learned by those board of directors and the CEOS,” O’Leary said. “Shareholders were not happy.”

Big businesses, O’Leary continued, have to be able to sell a wide array of products to as many consumers as they can, so being apolitical is paramount for continued success.

“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,” O’Leary said. “You want to sell everybody everything all of the time. When you get involved in partisan issues, you basically lose 50% of your constituency. Why you would do that when you’re a consumer goods or service company, everybody’s learning, makes absolutely no sense. The role of a business, a corporation in America for the last 200 years, has been to serve customers, their employees and their shareholders.

Article content

“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 nine, 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.”

But Cuban said the “dip” hitting Target and Bud Light was “meaningless,” telling the Post-Gazette that it was unlikely that individual stockholders were punishing the companies over the ensuing controversies.

“First a dip in market cap is meaningless,” the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks 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.”

Cuban also said that despite Bud Light and Target being drawn into a culture war that has cost them billions, they likely aren’t too worried about any long-term effects.

“Most CEOs have enough experience to know to just wait out the news cycle until they go to the next one,” he said.

[email protected]

Twitter: @markhdaniell

Article content