The man behind the red bulls

He was considered Austria's most successful entrepreneur of the post-war period - and one of the most controversial. With the energy drink Red Bull, he founded an entire beverage category, as a sponsor he made extreme sports more popular and drove the commercialization of football. In the last years of his life, an increased sense of political mission probably also brought him to invest in journalism. However, his conservative positions also put him at odds with parts of the target group of his core business. Now Dietrich Mateschitz is dead. The Red Bull founder died at the age of 78. The Fuschl-based company informed the employees in an email shortly before midnight on Saturday.

Unlike many others on the European billionaire lists, Mateschitz was not born with economic success. His parents were teachers, he himself studied economics for 20 semesters after dropping out of architecture and shipbuilding studies. He then worked in marketing at Unilever, Jacobs and Blendax, where he rose to become director of marketing. The position was decisive for his further life: On a business trip to Hong Kong in 1983, according to the founding legend, Mateschitz drank his first invigorating energy drink in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Two years later he agreed with the Thai entrepreneur Chaleo Yoovidhya on a license for the energy drink "Krating Daeng", which is already successful in Asia.

In Fuschl near Salzburg they founded a joint venture for the European market. The Austrian quit his job for this. A necessity for Mateschitz: "If you spend six months a year in hotels and are part of a large corporation, you feel the revolutionary in the depths of your heart, who is only conditionally adaptable. This feeling of independence and freedom haunted me then and still does today,” he said years later in an interview.

With its increased caffeine content and the addition of taurine, Red Bull has become a favorite drink of clubbers and athletes. The fact that Mateschitz Red Bull first had to be approved by the regulators as a new type of food contributed to the slightly daring reputation. This fueled the cleverly advertised vision of a drink that gives you wings. In this way, Red Bull established a new type of functional drink whose artificial taste underlines the effect. Today, global corporations such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have long since followed suit with their own brands.

At the same time, Mateschitz ushered in a new era of advertising. In a way that is now called content marketing. He expanded the classic sponsoring for this. There were first attempts to do this back in 1987, when he tried in vain to save an ice hockey club in Salzburg from bankruptcy when Red Bull was launched in Austria. The entry into car racing with the majority stake in the Swiss Formula 1 racing team "Sauber" was much more successful.

However, the push into extreme and fun sports must have attracted even more attention from the young target group. Red Bull used their Tyrolean origins to be part of the up-and-coming snowboarding sport. There was also sponsorship of surfers, mountain bikers and Ironman athletes.

Since the fun-loving 1990s, the brand has also been synonymous with a series of events where hobbyists board imaginatively constructed flying machines and tumble into a lake. This "Red Bull Flugtag" found its way to India and Chile.

Mateschitz' involvement in football is still controversial to this day - less in his hometown of Salzburg than in Germany. In 2009, Mateschitz took over the Saxon five-tier soccer club SSV Markranstädt with a plan: he was able to circumvent DFB conditions that are intended to circumvent the domination of established professional clubs by investors. With a lot of chutzpah, the entrepreneur renamed the club to RasenBallsport (RB) Leipzig – an allusion to Red Bull.

Mateschitz is therefore an attractive figure among many traditional football fans and in the Ultras scene. It remains to be seen whether the sponsorship will do the Red Bull brand more good than harm.

But one thing is clear: In this way, Mateschitz created his own content empire, extensively rolled out in his own magazine "Red Bulletin" and in video formats. Mateschitz saw his company more and more as a media brand. Initially, this was limited to conveying an adventure-oriented, hedonistic lifestyle.

As he got older, Mateschitz, like many self-made entrepreneurs of his generation, developed a political sense of mission – and thus came into conflict with parts of the young Red Bull target group.

In 2017, in a rare interview with the "Kleine Zeitung", which was supposed to be about 30 years of Red Bull, he was critical of the refugee policy of 2015. Too many people admitted were not real refugees. "If you were to make wrong decisions of this magnitude in a company, you would soon be broke," he said, and railed against politicians: "They manipulate, regulate, monitor, control." It almost went unnoticed that he was the future Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in the conversation (ÖVP) praised. The statements cost the Red Bull company contacts in the sports and art scene.

Mateschitz then expanded his media engagement. So he founded the research platform "Addendum", which was supposed to illuminate little-lit aspects journalistically. In fact, the platform published research on the asylum costs for the Austrian state, but also reports on the meat industry. Nevertheless, it remained of no great importance in terms of publication – and probably did not meet Mateschitz's expectations of disclosure. In 2020, three years after the start, he stopped the project again.

He showed more perseverance with his television station: in 2007 he bought the ailing station Salzburg TV and turned it into the private station Servus TV with a mixture of sports, entertainment and information. Servus TV should also gain in importance in Germany in the future. To this end, the broadcaster recently signed a news delivery contract with the news broadcaster WELT.

Little is known about Mateschitz's heirs, to whom his assets, estimated at over 20 billion euros, including the company with 13,600 employees and 7.8 billion euros in annual sales (as of 2021), fall. He has a son who was born in 1993 and who also studied business administration. After separating from his mother, Mateschitz repeatedly brought him up for discussion as a possible future Red Bull boss.

Mateschitz' last partner, Marion Feichtner, is an entrepreneur in the travel industry. However, he mostly kept his private life out of the public eye. He didn't even show himself during Felix Baumgartner's spectacular jump from a height of 39 kilometers, which the entrepreneur publicly sponsored with an estimated 50 million euros.