The Four Horsemen of the Bang-pocalypse

Chapter 5 of the 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.

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Chapter 4: The Four Horsemen of the Bang-pocalypse

Originally published October 2022 | Read previous chapters at Fingers.email

As you may have heard, Bang Energy’s parent company VPX recently got whammed with nearly half a billion dollars worth of legal judgments and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company is also facing down a nine-figure fee for exiting its short-lived distribution deal with PepsiCo, a firm that Bang Poster-in-Chief Jack Owoc spent the final days of September trying to citizen’s-arrest on Instagram.

VPX says it needs Chapter 11 protections while it “transitions to [a] world class distribution network,” which seems like sound strategy until you remember it had a world-class distribution partner that Owoc decided to dump because line didn’t go up as fast as he wanted during the onboarding process earlier this year. Ah. Hmm. Anyway, after Bang bailed on Pepsi, the latter bought into Celsius, which is going gangbusters. And VPX is going Bang-rupt, hitting up existing creditors for another $100 million to keep the lights on while it restructures. Lesson in there somewhere.

But we’re not going to dwell on it, Fingers Fam, because we’ve really got to talk about the “new” “line” of non-fungible Bang Energy tokens Owoc recently announced on Instagram.