At around 1 a.m. on June 13, John Randal Tyson, the slim and boyish 34-year-old scion of the Tyson Foods empire, tried to level with the Fayetteville, Ark., police officer who just pulled him over for suspected drunk driving. “Can I ask you a genuine preference?” Tyson says in a bodycam video, one hand to his chest, perhaps in an effort to convey sincerity. “Which is, like, if I get in trouble tonight, my life will be ruined.”
The statement is not a question or a preference, and it sounds like the hyperbolic ramblings of a guy who has had too many Miller Lites (which Tyson says he was drinking that night, according to the police report obtained by Fortune). But it’s easy to understand why, in that moment, he felt doomed.
At the time, Tyson was CFO and chief sustainability officer at Tyson Foods, a $21 billion company founded by his great-grandfather and headquartered in adjacent Springdale, Ark. And his arrest in June was the second time he’d been collared for an alcohol-related crime since becoming Tyson’s chief financial officer, and the youngest CFO in the Fortune 500, in 2022. In November of that year, just six weeks after he started the job, it was widely reported that Tyson was found sleeping in a stranger’s bed and charged with trespassing and public intoxication. (He eventually pleaded guilty and paid $440 in fines.) He was thought to be in line to become Tyson Foods’ CEO, but his two arrests in 19 months have now thrust his future at the meat processing giant into doubt.
“My life is over, man,” Tyson says in the video published online by an account called Arkansas Police Activity and labeled as University of Arkansas Police Department footage, as he awaits a breathalyzer test at the station. He tells the officer that he doesn’t hold the arrest against him: “It’s on me.” He eventually blows a .191, more than double the legal limit for blood alcohol content while driving, a detail that also matches the arrest report. “F**k!” he says, after signing a form to decline a second test.
He was able to keep his corporate job last time around, but this time Tyson Foods suspended the young executive that day and named Curt Calaway, an 18-year Tyson veteran, interim CFO, without indicating whether John Randal Tyson would return. They need a strong CFO on the job: Over the past two years, Tyson Foods has shuttered several meat-packing plants and laid off thousands of people. The cuts are part of a so-far successful bid to return to profitability in its chicken division and to offset losses in its beef business, its largest by revenue, as it deals with inflation. It has also recently begun to call itself a protein company—producing meat, but also frozen breakfast sandwiches, deli meats, and plant-based burgers, sausages, and nuggets under various labels. Two years ago it took a minority stake in Protix, an innovative Dutch firm making insect meal used in animal feed.
But John R. Tyson’s problematic behavior raises serious questions about leadership inside his family’s Fortune 100 company, which processes an estimated one-fifth of all chicken, pork, or beef consumed in the U.S. At a time when nepotism and corporate “nepo babies” are squarely in the cultural crosshairs, how did the family justify putting a 32-year-old into the CFO job; why did it keep him there after his first arrest; and what happens next?
Too few people will have a say in those answers. Tyson Foods has built a board of mostly independent directors, and its CEO, Donnie King, is a veteran employee, not a family member. However, the Tyson family owns 99.9% of Tyson Foods Class B shares, giving them the lion’s share of voting rights at the firm. That tips the balance of power to John H. Tyson, known locally as Johnny Tyson, the company’s 70-year-old chairman and John R. Tyson’s billionaire father.
Expectations for billionaires have changed, says a lifelong Fayetteville resident who has ties to the Tysons but asked to remain anonymous because of the family’s influence in the region. It used to be that people reliably looked the other way when local business titans misbehaved, because families like the Tysons pour so much money into the community, he says. But people expect accountability now, he continues, and “[t]hey’re not averting their eyes.”
Rise of the Tyson chicken dynasty comes with controversy
The signs that the Tysons have spent lavishly on the area are, in fact, everywhere. When you travel to the region, as I did in June, you can’t miss them.
Take Fayetteville, a picturesque college town where red-brick buildings in the historic downtown have been turned into indie coffee shops, vinyl record stores, and minimalist boutiques selling brightly hued macarons. On the University of Arkansas campus, where John Randal was pulled over in June, five buildings are named for deceased Tyson family members.
Off-campus, the university’s golf team’s home course is Blessings, a posh private club owned by Johnny, who also helped to convince his friend, revered basketball coach John Calipari, to lead the college’s Razorbacks team beginning next season. For this, an arena full of Razorbacks fans jumped to their feet applauding Tyson at a spring game. And at Herman’s Ribhouse, a humble but historic Fayetteville institution, the back right corner of the restaurant is entirely dedicated to the Tyson family, with photos and memorabilia lining dark wood paneling.
But Tyson—both the company and the family—has faced criticism and scrutiny. In the past few years alone, activists have blasted Tyson Foods for a myriad of shortcomings: mistreating plant workers, using aggressive tactics to control its livestock suppliers, dumping wastewater from its plants into waterways, and working with suppliers who abuse animals, and others who allegedly hire migrant children as cleaners.
Tyson has responded to reports maligning operations in its slaughterhouses. In 2021, a Tyson Foods company spokesperson said, "Our top priority will always be the health and safety of our people." The meat processor also told PBS that a negative report on its wastewater practices failed to state that the company complies with EPA regulations and is certified by the Water Alliance. About an undercover video showing the cruel treatment of animals at one of its suppliers, the company said, "We were disturbed by what we saw in the video," and stopped doing business with the farm in question. Tyson, which prohibits child labor, has also told the New York Times that it was not aware of child labor in its supply chain (Perdue, a competitor, faced the same allegations) and that it plans to increase the share of Tyson plants that use in-house cleaners.
Despite the company's official statements, Magaly Licolli, executive director of the activist group Venceremos and an organizer who works with Tyson plant employees to help them secure better conditions, says the family behaves “as if they own the state.”
Early in the pandemic, the company helped draft the executive order that exempted meat packers from public safety regulations meant to protect workers, according to a U.S. House COVID subcommittee report published in 2021. The report found that an estimated 59,000 employees at the five largest U.S. meat-packing companies fell ill with COVID, and 269 people died, including 151 people at Tyson plants alone. "This collaboration is crucial to ensuring the essential work of the U.S. food supply chain and our continued efforts to keep team members safe," a company spokesperson at the time told ProPublica.
In one of the most appalling pandemic-era corporate news stories, seven Tyson Foods managers at a plant in Waterloo, Iowa, were fired in 2020 for setting up a winner-takes-all wager pool in which managers and supervisors placed bets on how many line employees would contract the virus at work. Tyson Foods investigated and said in a statement, "The behaviors exhibited by these individuals do not represent the Tyson core values, which is why we took immediate and appropriate action to get to the truth."
Still, Licolli cites such instances as evidence of the family’s sense of entitlement. “They act like that in many ways,” she says.
And yet, for others, Tyson Foods is an almost quintessential example of an American success story.
Tyson Foods founder John William Tyson was a struggling farmer from Kansas when he moved his family to Springdale in 1931 looking for new opportunities, according to the official company origin tale. In the beginning, he trucked fruits and vegetables and live chickens from Arkansas to markets in Chicago, plowing his profits back into buying more chickens, and later, more trucks. In time, he came to focus on chicken alone, and added on a chicken feed business, then a hatchery. During World War II, the young company benefited from a U.S. government decision to leave chicken off the list of rationed goods.
Through a series of acquisitions in the 1970s and 1980s, John Williams’s son Don, the second-generation CEO, put the company on a path to become the largest U.S. meat-packing firm. Today, it runs more than 100 processing plants around the U.S. and operates in 140 countries. It employs roughly 140,000 people, the vast majority in the U.S. In northwest Arkansas, Tyson Foods is one-third of a trifecta of Fortune 500 companies and major employers: Walmart, Tyson Foods, and trucking giant J.B. Hunt; it’s the third largest employer in the state, according to a 2020 report by the Arkansas Economic Development Corporation. As a brand, Tyson is associated with store-bought frozen chicken nuggets (some in dinosaur shapes), but the conglomerate also supplies chicken, beef, and pork to schools, grocery stores, the military, restaurants, and fast-food chains, including McDonald's.
View this interactive chart on Fortune.com
Don Tyson, who died in 2011, was a larger-than-life character whose hedonism was legendary in Arkansas. In corporate photographs, Tyson often appears in company-issue factory uniforms, as if he might debone chickens between meetings, but he had a penchant for yachts he called “fishing boats,” the family acquaintance explains, and expensive tastes. He also had an exceptionally close and much-examined relationship with former President Bill Clinton, a former Arkansas governor.
In his book The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business, about Tyson Foods and the many devastating effects of consolidation in the meat industry, investigative journalist Chris Leonard describes Don as a married CEO who lived like an eligible bachelor until finally settling down and having a child with one of his girlfriends, all without ever divorcing his wife. Don was quite open about his young girlfriends around Fayetteville, said the family acquaintance.
But Don was also beloved at the company, where he regularly visited plant workers (by contrast, a local worker told me she had never seen Johnny or John Randal) and established a band of loyal followers among the company’s executive leaders. Unlike his son, he was the kind of person who could get angry and then get over it, says Leonard, calling Don “comfortable in his own skin.”
Don’s son Johnny Tyson is credited with further diversifying the company’s portfolio, and winning a bidding war for beef giant IBD with a $3 billion offer. That deal ultimately transformed the company, making it the world’s largest meat producer for a time.
But while Johnny is known today as a buttoned-down businessman and Christian conservative, fond of using some of his estimated $2.7 billion in net worth to support politicians like former governor Asa Hutchison, who signed a near-total abortion ban into law three years ago, longtime locals also remember his wayward youth. As a college student, he lost his faith in God, grew a ponytail, and began drinking and using drugs, he explained to the New York Times in 2001. His drug habit continued even after he started working at Tyson Foods after college. “From 1984, when he joined Tyson's board, to 1990, he was addicted to cocaine and alcohol. His friends knew it, his family knew it and, apparently, so did the company,” the Times reported. (“I have friends who snorted coke with him next to a copy of Winning Through Intimidation,” the family acquaintance told Fortune.)
Johnny stopped drinking in 1990, the year his son was born, and was thus able to stay at the firm—“otherwise they would have thrown me to the wolves,” he told the Times. Ten years later, he was named CEO, a position he held for six years. He has been chair since 1998, and has developed a reputation for being an extremely difficult, volatile, and explosive boss, three people who have worked with him in a professional capacity told me. Tyson Foods has appointed a new CEO four times since 2016, with one chief executive bailing within one year.
Tyson company succession
As the son of the chair, John Randal Tyson naturally attracted attention at the family-owned company, where some questioned whether he deserved the job of chief sustainability officer he was given in 2019 at age 29.
In the press release about his appointment, then-CEO Noel White said that his new hire had a “passion” for sustainability and that he had spent five years shadowing board meetings. The announcement touches on John Randal’s experience teaching at the University of Arkansas’s Sam M. Walton College of Business, where he led an honors class studying leadership through the eyes of classic novels like The Great Gatsby and Siddhartha, as he would explain in a To Dine For podcast two years later. But there is no mention in the release of any experience working in sustainability.
“My entire life and career, I have known that I want to be involved in some leadership way with Tyson,” Tyson also told the podcast, “but it was always hard, when I was younger, to know exactly what that was going to be.”
Tyson has an education that suits a future C-suite executive. He studied economics at Harvard University, graduating in 2012, then worked as a private equity and venture capital investor in investment banking at JPMorgan Chase in New York, where property records still list him as the resident of a $7 million condo in the West Village. In his late twenties, he studied at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he finished his MBA in 2018.
Near the end of 2021, John Randal became president of Tyson Ventures, the poultry company’s corporate venture arm that has backed a series of meat alternative companies like Beyond Meat or MycoTechnology, though it’s unclear how involved John Randal has been in the day-to-day. Three founders of startups that Tyson has backed either told Fortune that they worked with senior director Rahul Ray or understood that Ray oversaw most of the fund’s daily operations and investments. John Randal is still listed as Tyson Ventures’ president on the company’s website.
Three years into his sustainability job at Tyson, the company added the CFO title to his remit. His quick ascension to a critical job often seen as No. 2 in a corporate hierarchy raised eyebrows. Although a few famous publicly traded family-owned firms like News Corp. (owned by the Murdochs) or LVMH (owned by the Arnault family) have groomed family members for top jobs, it’s more common for companies to separate family power and wealth from the day-to-day operations of a firm. (See Walmart and Ford.)
Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, a former top Egon Zehnder consultant and now a guest lecturer at Harvard University, has studied succession planning for decades. He explains that the largest family-run firms are better at succession planning, possibly for the same reasons that they are more resilient: Their managers tend to think long-term and are deeply invested in, and motivated to protect, the family’s wealth and reputation. As such, the world’s most successful family firms look for internal leaders who have the passion and competence for the CEO role, regardless of their last names, Fernández-Aráoz has found. “There is always a presence of at least one but up to three key family members who are heavily involved. They don't need to be the CEO or even the chair,” he says. Instead, they hold roles that fit their talents and experience, while their presence and their values infuse the organization. “They are like the sun in the solar system that attracts the planets and keeps them in their orbits,” he says.
Growing up Tyson
Both John and his sister Olivia, who is two years his junior, had been invited to attend board meetings since they were 13 or 14, Johnny Tyson explained in an online interview with the hiring firm N2Growth in 2020. The senior Tyson felt it was important for the kids to be exposed to the board’s discussions and functions and to start developing confidence in their business instincts, he said. He wanted his children to “get comfortable with people and older people” because one day the heirs might be making big decisions. “Trying to tell a 50-year-old what to do is kind of intimidating,” he says.
(Johnny and his wife divorced when John Randal was a child. In the To Dine For podcast, John Randal says he remains close with his mother, Kimberly Tyson, who doesn’t work at the firm. “She cares about me as her son, and so having that kind of relationship with her is a super important part of my life.”)
But the elder Tyson also claims he had always given his children the freedom to reject a seat at the company table. Johnny says he told his children that they could work toward becoming CEO, or join the board, or, he said, “maybe you just want to go to the Bahamas and run a bar on a beach.”
“So, if you want to do that, you have no say in the company,” he continued. “You have no say at the board level. You'll just get part of your dividend, and it'll be sent to you, and you'll have a good life.”
Olivia, who has chosen to run her family firm’s philanthropic arm, the Tyson Family Foundation, and John Randal are certainly living a comfortable life, far removed from their great-grandfather’s humble chicken farm. The fourth-generation Tysons run in the same social circles as movie stars and fellow moneyed millennials, Fortune learned. John Randal has been seen around Fayetteville with actor Robert Downey Jr., and with the actress Emma Roberts, niece of film superstar Julia Roberts, and daughter of actor Eric Roberts. Earlier this month, in a story about Roberts' engagement to Cody John, the New York Post published a group photo of John Randal with Roberts and her new fiancé. John Randal was not identified in the image, which has since been removed, but the caption explained that mutual friends introduced Roberts and Cody John. Just days after John Randal’s DWI arrest, Olivia married Alexander Stoclet, a descendant of the financier Adolphe Stoclet, who commissioned Le Palais Stoclet in Brussels.
In fact, in the bodycam video, John Randal told the police officer who stopped him that he had been socializing with friends in town for his sister's wedding. “My sister’s getting married on Saturday. It’s like we’re going to blow up the whole situation,” John Randal said, sitting at the police station, holding his head in his hands.
A matter of optics
A DWI arrest is not an automatic firing offense for most employers, says Peter Rahbar, an employment lawyer who runs an eponymous firm in New York. But a conviction or guilty plea could be, especially for a C-suite staffer, he adds. “A lot of employees think that executives can get away with a lot of things, but the truth is that executives are held to several different standards for their conduct, and often are held to a higher level of scrutiny.”
Tyson Foods’ professed standards are also unambiguous. Its code of conduct states that Tyson employees “must not engage in conduct that may raise questions as to Tyson’s honesty, integrity or otherwise cause embarrassment to the company," according to the website. A Tyson plant worker of several years who asked to remain anonymous said of John Randal’s charges, “If the workers did that, we'd get fired.”
Leonard, the author, speculates that the Tysons wouldn’t worry much about how investors, employees, or anyone else would perceive a decision to put Tyson back in the CFO job, and that’s part of the reason that he has landed in trouble. “He has grown up as royalty, with his father having total control of one of the largest organizations in the U.S.,” he says. “He has not had a lot of opportunities to be held accountable.”
“I appreciate you saying that,” John Randal responds, “because the last couple of times I’ve been here I got no acknowledgement of that.”
—With reporting from Jessica Mathews
