The troubled Tyson heir

The youngest Fortune 500 CFO was set up to run his family’s $21 billion chicken empire. His erratic behavior could change that.

-  Lila MacLellan with reporting from Jessica Mathews

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 had 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.