Last year, when Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, things didn’t turn out the way one would imagine. Conservatives boycotted the brand, and this included singers Kid Rock and Travis Tritt. The outcome of this? Parent company Anheuser-Busch lost $1.4 billion in sales. Sales of other Anheuser-Busch brands—Michelob Ultra, Busch Light, and Natural Light—also took a hit. And so, Wall Street analysts called the episode a ‘crisis’ and downgraded the company’s stock to ‘hold’.

As per reports, Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth showed remorse over the division the partnership with Mulvaney caused, but his statement didn’t directly refer to the collaboration. However, employees who worked on the collaboration were put on leave. When the firm tried to distance itself from the campaign, it also caused backlash from the LGBTQ+ community. What does Joe Rogan think about the incident?

He spoke about the whole issue in his new JRE episode with country singer Luke Bryan. “A lot of people had a personal crisis when there was that Bud Light boycott. There was a lot of people like, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ When Kid Rock shot that Bud Light.”

Joe Rogan was in splits when Luke Bryan chimed in, saying that Kid Rock was serving Bud Light at his bar, despite the boycott. “We drank some [Kid Rock and Rogan]. We drank some on the podcast we did together. He let it go after a while,” Rogan replied in episode #2216.

“Imagine being the CEO of Bud Light, and seeing that. You’re like, ‘Oh no! Kid Rock just shot our beer’. I mean, that alone probably must have cost them billions of dollars,” the podcaster speculated further.

Let us not forget that the musician, in his initial attempts to boycott the brand, purchased a couple of cases of the beer and fired at it with an assault rifle last year. But by December 2023, the singer and rapper forgave the brand. What could have led to this change of heart? We can only speculate, but by October, the brand got a deal worth more than $100 million to make Bud Light the exclusive beer sponsor of the UFC—the promotion that Kid Rock is a fan of. Bud Light was the primary beer sponsor of the UFC for almost a decade between 2008 and 2017 when the brand Modelo took over until 2023.

Interesting Fact: Kid Rock has been on The Joe Rogan Experience episode #2106.

Rock even gave an interview where he stated he never boycotted Bud Light as he continued to drink it in public and served it at his Nashville bar. The singer also shared that he and Donald Trump had a great conversation with Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth at a UFC event about the Mulvaney promotion. Things don’t stop here!

By December 2023, Kid Rock’s stance on Bud Light changed!

After the whole controversy, by December, Rock and Dana White chatted with Tucker Carlson about the brand and why it was good. “If you consider yourself a patriot, you should be drinking gallons of Bud Light,” Dana White opined as he felt it was more in line with American values.

Then, in a separate interview, Rock looked forward to ending the boycott against the brand by asking people to move on as the company “got the message.”

“Hopefully, other companies get it too, but you know, at the end of the day, I don’t think the punishment that they’ve been getting at this point fits the crime,” Rock said. “I would like to see people get us back on board and become bigger because that’s the America that I want to live in…They screwed up, they made a mistake. I’m over it.”

In fact, White and Rock looked to make beer apolitical, which confused a lot of people who had joined in on either side of the debate. But when Rock appeared on JRE in Feb 2024 (#2106), he shared his thoughts on the whole controversy. He stated that the Dylan Mulvaney partnership rubbed him the wrong way, but “it wasn’t like it was going to wreck my day.”

It just so happened that he became the face of the boycott unintentionally. In the end, though, Anheuser-Busch eventually recovered from the sharp descent in share price.