Robby Starbuck opens many of his social media posts with some variation of the same idea: “Brace yourself.” In July, for instance, the 35-year-old conservative activist who has recently gained fame for demanding brands eliminate their DEI programs and change their “woke” workplace culture, opened a tweet with: “What you’re about to see may be the single craziest training video that I’ve ever seen.” It now has 1.7 million views.
That video was one of many blasting farm and lawn equipment-maker John Deere. It included a snippet of a company training video featuring a hypothetical employee who says she heard coworkers complaining about a trans woman colleague using the women’s bathroom. The question for trainees: Should the concerned employee report them for possible harassment? The correct answer: Yes. The video also explains why it’s wrong to out someone who is transgender or refer to someone’s assigned sex.
Starbuck, who superimposed a video of himself over the training video, his dark hair in his signature man-bun, called John Deere’s training tool absurd. “Does John Deere know who they sell farming equipment to?” he says, before directly addressing John May, CEO of John Deere: “What are you thinking, man?”
Over the past three and a half months, Starbuck has used similar tweets to single out six other large companies: Tractor Supply, Ford, Lowe’s, Harley Davidson, Molson Coors, and Brown-Forman, the holding company that owns Jack Daniels. Several pulled back their support for an index ranking companies’ support for LGBTQ+ employees and for events like Pride parades, while also dropping supplier diversity goals and changing the focus of their employee resource groups. Starbuck’s central argument is that companies he believes are frequented by conservative consumers should not be spending customers’ money on what he sees as left-wing causes, like LGBTQ+ Pride event sponsorships, gender-affirming health care, and DEI programs designed to diversify the workforce or suppliers. Starbuck feels the workplace should be “neutral,” as he recently told a Nashville talk radio show, and not a place to discuss “what kind of sex you like to have.”
“I'm asking [companies] to adopt neutrality and to have a fair environment where people can exist without having social issues or politics shoved down their throat,” he also told Fortune. “If it was about asking them to adopt my politics, I think that would be really not good,” he added.
Starbuck has become a minor celebrity following his successful campaigns against DEI practices at large companies. His influence is hard to deny. But some DEI advocates say his influence is less potent than it seems. Instead, they say the companies he has targeted weren’t very dedicated to inclusion in the first place, or already considering changes to their policies before he publicly named them. And they add that Starbuck still represents a minority view—the majority of companies are standing by their DEI programs despite the recent backlash.
From rock videos to right-wing activism
Starbuck doesn’t come from the world of C-suites and boardrooms; he hasn’t attended business school. Instead, he’s been behind a camera for most of his career.
He spent years in Hollywood making music videos, occasionally working with big acts like Snoop Dogg, Smashing Pumpkins, and Metric. He drove Lamborghinis and once worked with Natalie Portman, he said in an Instagram post last year. He also directed a video that plays before movies asking people to turn off their phones, according to the Wall Street Journal.
He grew up in Temecula, Calif., to parents who fled communist Cuba and says that hearing family stories about the country has informed his ideas about leftist forces in the U.S.
In his account of how he switched careers, Starbuck says he was a covert Republican in Hollywood. When Donald Trump was running in the presidential primary in 2015, Starbuck went public with his support, knowing that it would cost him clients in left-leaning Los Angeles. A few years later, he and his wife Landon Starbuck, a musician and right-wing activist, moved to a rural area outside Nashville, Tenn. They bought chickens and highland cows and began a new, post music-industry life; they are currently raising three children.
During the pandemic, Starbuck gained some notoriety for opposing COVID vaccines and mask mandates, as well as mounting a losing bid for Congress in 2022. His star rose among right-wing public figures. Elon Musk, X owner and Tesla CEO, tweeted Starbuck on dozens of occasions. But Starbuck’s anti-DEI campaigns seem to have fueled his mainstream prominence more than his posts about other topics.
“Getting divisive policies out of the workplace is broadly popular,” he told Fortune, “and even if you dispute that point, the segment of awakened conservative consumers who will use their wallet as a weapon is sizable enough that companies have to really examine if they’re willing to lose them.”
With the help of a small staff, Starbuck parcels out whatever he learns about a company’s DEI practices online, earning income from the $5 subscription fee he charges people seeking bonus content. Between various social media platforms, he has about a million followers.
He says he gives executives an opportunity to make changes and inform their employees before he goes public with his videos and tweets, and that his subsequent posts will either be tense and drawn out or a simple update, depending on how the company responds. As he sees it, “That's really the company's choice.”
Companies changing policies
Some companies seem to have softened their DEI programs after Starbuck named them in videos, including John Deere, Tractor Supply, and Harley Davidson.
For example, Deere said it would "stop sponsoring cultural and social awareness events” and “ensure the absence of socially-motivated messages” in its training materials. Tractor Supply declared it would “eliminate DEI roles and retire our current DEI goals,” and “stop sponsoring nonbusiness activities like pride festivals and voting campaigns,” among other steps. Harley Davidson announced similar measures and said it would no longer have supplier diversity goals, though it also said it had not had a DEI function since April. All three companies said their employee resource groups will now be focused on business topics.
In statements, the companies did not reference Starbuck by name but instead mentioned things like “negativity on social media,” as Harley Davidson did. John Deere and Harley Davidson did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment. Tractor Supply declined Fortune’s request for comment.
But other cases aren’t so clear. Ford said in its email to employees, which Starbuck obtained and the company has since verified, that it would not use quotas for minority dealerships and suppliers, and refocus its employee resource groups on business topics. In one of his videos, and in a statement to Fortune, Starbuck says that Ford made those changes because its executives saw Starbuck’s researchers poking around on Ford employees’ pages on LinkedIn. But in Ford’s statement to employees, it said the company had been discussing policy revisions over the past year in recognition that the “external and legal environment related to political and social issues continues to evolve.” In an email to Fortune a Ford spokesperson wrote: “The communication to our global employees speaks for itself.”
Lowe’s has publicly pushed back on Starbuck’s claim that he is responsible for shifts it made, including its decision to not sponsor parades and fairs unrelated to select causes: housing improvement, disaster relief, and skilled trades. A Lowes spokesperson said that Starbuck reached out to the company weeks after it “already announced changes that had long been in process,” according to CNN.
And at Molson Coors and Brown-Forman, both companies had announced changes internally before Starbuck publicly uttered the firms’ names. Still, Starbuck claimed credit for the news, saying that he had reached out privately to a Molson executive a week before Molson announced new rules and that Brown-Forman “must have been tipped off by us going through employee LinkedIn pages.” Among other measures, Molson said it would stop tying executive pay to “aspirational diversity goals,” drop diversity-themed training, refocus its charitable spending on causes related to its core business goals. Brown-Forman told employees it would eliminate “quantitative workforce and supplier diversity goals,” and “review training programs for consistency with an evolved strategy.” Lowes, Brown-Forman, and Molson Coors did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Starbuck wrote to Fortune in an email that he has shared evidence in his social media posts that his team had either reached out to the companies or had initiated investigations into them before they changed their stances. “If you think it’s a coincidence that they’re suddenly changing policy in the midst of the big wins we’re having… I think that sounds about as likely as a horse giving birth to a unicorn,” he wrote.
A mixed reaction from DEI advocates
Some people and organizations are taking steps against Starbuck’s activism.
As You Sow, a nonprofit that promotes corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy, has drafted a shareholder proposal about John Deere’s “ambiguous and inconsistent shift in policies and practices” regarding DEI, writing that dismantling key policies exposes the company to “financial, competitive, legal, and reputational risks.” And Brad Lander, who as New York Comptroller controls half a billion in pension funds and is a major investor in public companies, told Bloomberg Law that he is “regrouping” following Starbuck’s successes. He added companies backing away from inclusive policies should be “on notice” for shareholder proposals and shareholder lawsuits.
The Human Rights Campaign, a target of Starbuck because of its Corporate Equality Index, which measures and scores workplace commitments to the LGBTQ+ community at more than 1,400 companies, is now inviting the public to send letters to business leaders saying that Starbuck “is an extremist troll and dropping inclusivity initiatives is not okay.” HRC president Kelley Robinson has also publicly condemned the companies that have minimized their DEI work and cut ties with the group.
But other DEI proponents say they aren’t too concerned about Starbuck’s activism and reach, and that Starbuck’s individual influence is overblown. Alphonso David, CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum and a civil rights attorney, points out that corporate leaders had already been reevaluating their inclusion practices because of a backlash that began long before this summer, often in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action at colleges. Companies have been scaling back DEI—or talking about it less—for a range of reasons, whether to cut costs or to mitigate legal risks. “I think we should be careful not to assume that [Starbuck’s] efforts are actually directly responsible for these changes,” David says.
Starbuck, for his part, claimed he’s not bothered by people questioning his role in these events, especially DEI proponents who disagree with his mission anyway. “We don’t need external validation,” he said in a phone call.
Stephanie Creary, assistant professor of management and organizational behavior at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and leading scholar studying inclusion in the workplace, argues that companies that easily roll back their programs likely were never that interested in DEI or didn’t have the research and materials they needed to defend what they were doing.
With an eye on the DEI backlash that has taken shape in 2024, Creary, in May, launched a coalition of academics and business leaders to prepare companies for critics when they come knocking. “This opposition has given companies the motivation to spend time thinking through what they're trying to do,” she says. “Are we reaching our intended consequences? Are we creating unintended consequences?”
There’s also the fact that Starbuck seems to be working against popular opinion. Survey after survey shows that the majority of Americans and the majority of companies still believe in DEI programs. Just this month, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon reiterated his strong support for diversity and inclusion efforts at a conference for institutional investors, saying “It’s good for business; it’s morally right; we’re quite good at it; we’re successful.” And a recent survey by the research and social advocacy group Public Private Initiatives Institute found that even business leaders who support the Republican party see the value in DEI.
Still, Starbuck appears to be optimistic that he’ll be able to add more companies to his virtual trophy wall. He told Fortune that he had thousands of “whistleblowers,” sending him reports of DEI policies they abhor, and that he expects a company with a market cap over $100 billion to be the next company to unveil changes. Last week he tweeted, “Good news: Multiple companies flipping on DEI and wokeness this week. Stay tuned!”
[Sept. 19, 2024: Shortly after this story was published, Starbuck announced Caterpillar changed its DEI policies, saying it was because of his outreach to the company. Caterpillar verified that the memo Starbuck included in his video was authentic and declined to add further comment.]
