The Ballad of Bang Energy
The Ballad of Bang Energy
A special Fingers miniseries on the most chaotic rise-and-fall tale the modern beverage business has yet seen
Editor’s note: The boozeletter’s regular programming is on a honeymoon hiatus. While I’m gone, I’ve created a special miniseries from my lightly edited contemporaneous coverage of Bang Energy’s incredible rise and fall earlier this decade for the reading pleasure of paying Friends and Fingers old and new. Please buy a subscription to read The Ballad of Bang Energy in its entirety, if you haven’t yet. We’ll return to regular programming in early October!—Dave.
Earlier this month, I published a Weekender item on longtime Fingers editorial fascination and bona fide swole grandpa Jack Owoc, the founder and former chief executive of Vital Pharmaceuticals and the once-ubiquitous frontman of Bang Energy, its flagship brand. Midway through 2024, our man Owoc is having a rough go:
[A]fter getting booted from Bang parent company VPX Pharmaceuticals during bankruptcy proceedings in 2022, losing access to his iconic @bangenergy.ceo bully pulpit, and watching his portfolio of “super creatine”-enabled energy drinks subsumed beneath the umbrella of his hated rival Monster Beverage Company, he was sued by his former firm’s liquidator over allegations of inflated profits and other fiduciary violations in Florida federal court. The suit has been working its way through the system, and last week, a judge on that bench ruled Owoc will have to face it. Prayers up for the beverage business’s Original King of Chaos, folks.
The chatter I got back from readers on this update sorted into two buckets:
“Man, I almost forgot about the whole Jack Owoc saga.”
“Wait, this Jack Owoc guy did what?”
It occurred to me at that point that Fingers has grown quite a bit since the halcyon, multi-billion-dollar days of Bang Energy’s maximal mayhem, which I covered in ill-advised levels of painstaking detail from 2021 through 2023. Neon Jack and his fetal-tissue-injecting, Instagram-bully-pulpiteering, slapdash-NFT-minting ways had begun to fade from the collective memory of longtime Friends of Fingers who watched it all unravel in real time. Newer Friends of Fingers remained tragically ignorant to that electrifying legacy entirely. Something had to be done.
Enter The Ballad of Bang Energy, a serialized miniseries of Fingers’ coverage on Owoc’s (and, to the extent that they were separate entities during this epoch, Bang Energy’s) remarkable rise and even-more remarkable collapse. As I alluded to above, Bang would eventually be acquired out of a liquidation stemming from the Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections it filed for in 2023. I didn’t have enough material to run 11 chapters of this miniseries, so instead I’m running seven—still a type of bankruptcy, and probably better for everybody’s sanity, including my own. The Owoc era may be over, but his memory shall live on in your inbox over the next two weeks, as each successive installation arrives.
Today, we begin our journey. Come with me to January 2021, reader, when Fingers first joined the Owoc-ular Spectacular at what would turn out to be the early tremors presaging its collapse just a couple years later. Back in time we go…
Chapter 1: I’m here for the Bang bang
Originally published January 2021
In late April 2020, Bang Energy, an energy-drink brand, signed an exclusive distribution deal with soft-drink giant PepsiCo. By late October 2020, the deal had gone seriously sideways.