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?
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.”
