The Myth of the Good Billionaire
By 
Personally, I don’t care about Anchor Steam beer except as a historical artifact. But as such, I am happy that someone is trying to bring it back. Moreover, I am happy that Anchor was one of the only breweries with a union. But there’s a problem–the billionaire who is bringing back Anchor Steam has been awful silent about whether he will do with a unionized workforce.
Patrick Costello didn’t know Anchor Brewing Company had been bought until his phone started buzzing with questions from friends. Like the rest of Anchor Steam’s unionized workforce, Costello had lost his job in August 2023, when Sapporo USA, which had purchased the San Francisco brewery in 2017, announced plans to liquidate the business. It was a devastating blow to the city where Anchor Brewing had been brewing its signature steam beer for 127 years. But on May 31 of this year, billionaire Hamdi Ulukaya, who owns popular food brands Chobani and La Colombe, announced he had purchased the company and had plans to restart production. Costello is optimistic for the future. “Being just a single owner versus a corporation, I think is the best possible outcome,” he says.
It’s a profound statement, given that Costello is also the chair of the Anchor SF Cooperative, a group of former Anchor Brewing workers who were attempting to raise money to purchase the company and restart it as a worker-owned collective. The workforce, which had unionized under Sapporo’s ownership, had by the end of Sapporo’s tenure realized that the workers were really the ones running the show. Costello says for a while the packaging line didn’t have a packaging manager, and the workers were collectively working to get the product out. “I think the idea of the co-op was like, well, if we can run the floor by ourselves, what’s to stop us from trying to run the company ourselves?”
In a video published on May 31, seemingly filmed inside the Anchor brewery, Ulukaya, who has described himself as the “anti-CEO,” said he had been unfamiliar with Anchor Brewing until he came across an article about its closure. He felt compelled by its history as the oldest craft beer company in America, and inspired by the city of San Francisco in general. “It might be old, it might be given up on. But it is the crown jewel,” he said of the brewery. The San Francisco Chronicle reports Ulukaya’s family office purchased the company’s recipes, warehouses, and equipment for an undisclosed amount, though the Real Deal says its former plant went for $9.9 million, far below the $40 million Sapporo had listed it for.
Ulukaya has said he intends to bring back former Anchor Brewing workers to get the company up and running again. And national news outlets have framed this as a slightly feel-good story about the brewery’s sale. How nice that, in a city that seems to produce billionaires who are white supremacists or want to replace everything with AI, there’s one who wants to support a storied institution, and bring back a product so many people already love?
In a statement, Anchor Union, which is represented by the International Longshore & Warehouse Union, says that 30 out of 39 workers are committed to returning to work for the brewery if offered a job, and more are interested if Ulukaya gives them concrete plans on what business reopening would look like. “We were committed to doing our best for Anchor and we all took pride in our work and being part of a company that is so connected to San Francisco’s history,” said former worker Ryan Poulos. “I would come back to Anchor Brewing in a heartbeat.”
Ulukaya told the San Francisco Chronicle he had met with four former employees on an undisclosed date, and wants to get production up and running as soon as possible. But crucially, as of this writing, unionized workers have not heard from Ulukaya. “It’s great that he bought it, and that he’s on record saying that he wants to bring us back,” says Costello. “But no, we haven’t been reached out to yet. We’re trying every possible avenue to get this guy to actually come sit down and talk with us.” And the Chronicle reports that while Ulukaya still hasn’t spoken with the union, “he didn’t know whether the union that formed there shortly before the brewery closed will be part of the new operations.” (Ulukaya has not responded to Eater’s multiple attempts at contact.)
I suppose this crew doesn’t need to hear that all billionaires are inherently awful people. But maybe it does. In any case, plenty of Democrats cuddle up to billionaires. The environmental movement basically dropped its entire grassroots operations in order to get huge donations from billionaires and other of the rich and has done so for four decades now. The billionaire problem is a real one in American politics, and it’s not strictly the Koch and Adelson families. It’s also theoretically less horrible people who still have complete contempt for the institutions that made America as good as it has ever been (far less than great) and who think they are smarter than everyone else and thus should get to make decisions based on their wealth.