Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said this week that Bud Light’s parent company was not cooperating with a probe into its partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney earlier this year. The Texas Republican said that Anheuser-Busch was not handing over documents as part of Cruz’s investigation into whether the company was marketing alcohol to minors.
Cruz requested a number of files related to Bud Light’s marketing partnership with Mulvaney. He claimed that Anheuser-Busch was not compliant with the Beer Institute’s standards and that Mulvaney’s status as a social media figure meant that the company intended to cater its product to those under 21 years of age.
Cruz requested the documents three months ago and recently sent a new deadline for compliance of Aug. 29.
The senator said that the company’s potential cooperation “will bear significantly on my assessment of whether this is part of a broader problem across the Anheuser-Busch InBev product line and whether changes to federal law are necessary to prohibit Anheuser-Busch InBev from marketing beer to children.”
Both Cruz and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) seek to determine whether or not the beer company’s actions were intended to market to children. They also seek the demographic data of Dylan Mulvaney’s social media followers.
.@RedState: Ted Cruz Makes News Demands of Bud Light as the Beer Brand Circles the Drainhttps://t.co/Uf0gnVawD3
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) August 22, 2023
The news also comes as an heir to the Anheuser-Busch family, Billy Busch said that he would be open to purchasing Bud Light to revive its reputation.
Busch called it a “serious offer” and that he believed it was a “sad day” to see how Bud Light had lost consumer trust.
“I don’t see InBev making money on it right now,” Busch said. “It’s probably costing them money. So, maybe they’d really be able to give me a great price to buy it from them.”
Busch said that he would try to bring back the values of “pride, quality, honor,” saying that those are “what this country is basically based on.”
He said that the beer’s branding “was never built on pushing a political agenda down your throat.”
