Good morning, it's Lila MacLellan filling in for Sheryl Estrada. In 2022, Tyson Foods arguably took a risk by appointing John Randal Tyson as the chief finance officer at his family’s $21 billion chicken and meat processing firm.
When he was given the vaunted title, Tyson was 32, making him the youngest CFO in the Fortune 500 at the time. But unlike a handful of other 30-something finance leaders at big public companies, Tyson had little formal business experience on his résumé. He was slotted into a CFO role that many consider to be second-in-command at the nearly 90-year-old company, where his father John H. Tyson has been chairman since 1998.
To be fair, John Randal Tyson had the right education for the job—he has an MBA from Stanford and an undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard University—and sources who spoke to me for a recent feature about the family say he is intelligent, competent, and well-liked. But when he became CFO, his career had included an unknown number of years when he worked in investment banking as a private equity and venture capital investor for JPMorgan Chase, between his school stints, and three years in the chief sustainability officer job at Tyson Foods. (He was one year out of Stanford when, in 2019, he got that C-suite title, which he also kept after becoming CFO.)
Tyson may have grown into the job in time—and he still could. Nepo babies in business often benefit from years of watching a parent manage relationships and leadership challenges. However, Tyson has had an unusual tenure thus far. In mid-June, he was suspended following a DWI charge. That arrest followed a more baffling incident that happened in 2022, just six weeks after Tyson’s CFO appointment, when he was found asleep in a stranger’s bed in Fayetteville, Ark., the town next to Springdale, Ark., where Tyson Foods is headquartered.
In that case, a college-aged woman returned home in the wee hours of a Sunday morning to find the young billionaire's scion under her duvet. Police bodycam footage from the incident later made celebrity gossip site TMZ , which called it a “wild arrest video.” In it, a disoriented Tyson in orange boxer shorts struggles to get back to sleep as officers try to coax him up.
Tyson was charged with trespassing and public intoxication, for which he eventually pleaded guilty and paid $440 in fines. (The house was a short walk from Fayetteville’s Dickson Street, its main bar district.) On his debut earnings call that fall, the young CFO apologized for his behavior and said it wouldn’t happen again. But the DWI arrest, for which he recently pleaded not guilty, wrecked his nearly two-year arrest-free streak. (In his college years, Tyson had also faced charges in Illinois for using a fake ID and possessing alcohol as a minor, according to public records.)
“[I]f I get in trouble tonight, my life will be ruined,” Tyson told the officer who made the recent traffic stop. The company suspended him later that day; Curt Calaway, a finance executive with 18 years at the Tyson, was named interim CFO. (He joined a positive earnings call this week.) The company still hasn’t revealed whether the young Tyson will be returning to the role. If he is brought back, the company will have to contend with the message that would send to other employees, both in the C-suite, at the corporate office, and in Tyson’s dozens of plants.
So what happens next?
Should you know anything about the Tyson family history, you might be inclined to believe that Tyson will return to the family multinational in some capacity at a future date, if not as CFO. As my story explains, Tyson’s father Johnny Tyson had issues with alcohol and, in his case, drugs, when he was a young adult and even after he started working at Tyson Foods, according to an interview he gave to the New York Times. (“I have friends who snorted coke with him next to a copy of Winning Through Intimidation,” a Fayetteville resident who had ties to the Tyson family told me.) And Johnny Tyson’s father, Don Tyson, who is credited with building the company into a meat giant in the U.S. and died in 2011, was also infamous for his luxurious tastes and indulgences.
In short, this is a strange, even screenplay-worthy saga, set at a time when billionaire family dynasties can’t always play by their own rules. For CFOs who spent years climbing the corporate ladder, it might also evoke a touch of schadenfreude.
Read my full story here.
Lila MacLellan
Lila.MacLellan@fortune.com
The following sections of CFO Daily were curated by Greg McKenna.
