This New IPO Is a Steal on Paper… If You Can Ignore the Whole “Bribed 1,800 Politicians” Thing

The minute the weather warmed up, it felt like everyone I know shifted into full-on house hunting mode. And just like real estate, June is starting to look like the kickoff to IPO season… and one debut in particular is turning heads for all the wrong reasons. In fact, it’s so controversial, I wouldn’t be surprised if Joe Rogan and another guest sasquatch expert were breaking it down next week between elk jerky ads and UFO sightings.

The company I’m talking about is JBS. The biggest meatpacker in the world. The newly christened ticker on the NYSE. And quite possibly the only company to hit the New York Stock Exchange with a corruption record that looks too crazy to be real.

There’s a lot of meat to unpack here (pun intended) so let’s start with the numbers… Shares of JBS opened at $13.65, putting the company’s market cap near $30 billion… a full 50% above Tyson Foods. Last year, they raked in $77.2 billion in revenue and pocketed $2 billion in net income. They operate on six continents, process one in every five cows and chickens in the U.S., and own 80% of Pilgrim’s Pride, the chicken giant that made headlines after dropping $5 million on Trump’s 2025 inauguration.

Now let’s get to JBS’s corruption record. This IPO has been 15 years in the making… because back in 2017, Wesley and Joesley Batista, the billionaire brothers behind JBS, admitted to bribing over 1,800 politicians in Brazil. Their confessions sparked a stock market collapse so intense it’s now referred to as “Joesley Day.”

Now of course, they avoided major prison time by flipping on their political cronies, then quietly returned to the boardroom in 2024. Thanks to a dual-class share structure, they now control 85% of voting shares. (they gave themselves the CEO keys back and said, “Don’t worry, we’ve changed.”)

And that’s just the beginning. In 2020, their holding company J&F Investimentos pled guilty to U.S. bribery charges and paid a $256 million fine. The SEC also hit them with a $27 million settlement. So naturally, the next step was… going public in the U.S.

The scandals didn’t stop with bribery. JBS has been accused repeatedly of buying cattle from deforested Amazon land and failing to properly track supply chains. Environmental groups and a New York Attorney General lawsuit have accused the company of greenwashing its climate pledges. (Their “Net Zero by 2040” promise didn’t include deforestation-related emissions because those numbers were “still being improved.” That’s one way to do math.)

If you can look past the scandals and pretend the Amazon (not the Bezos one) isn’t being casually bulldozed in the background, JBS actually looks... cheap. Its EBITDA multiple sits around 5.1x, a noticeable discount compared to Tyson Foods at 7.7x and Hormel at 12.6x. For a company with this kind of global reach and scale, that kind of pricing doesn’t show up often.

They’re also going hard into value-added products… frozen meals, sausages, hot dogs, and other pre-packaged foods that carry better margins and aren’t as exposed to commodity price swings. They even made a run at acquiring Oscar Mayer not too long ago (I guess they still had room for one more wiener brand on the trophy shelf).

So is it worth buying? This is where things get messy. On one hand, JBS is a global monster with serious operating power. It’s profitable, it’s expanding into higher-margin segments, and it's trading at a valuation that looks downright attractive in a defensive market. But on the other hand, governance is a total circus. The founders are walking PR disasters. The ESG profile is basically a dare. If you’re running institutional capital with a sustainability screen, this thing might as well have a skull and crossbones on it.

That puts the ball squarely in your court. Are you the kind of person who can separate financials from ethics and make a cold, calculated bet on fundamentals? Or do you believe that if the same people who steered the ship into an iceberg are now back at the helm, maybe (just maybe) the route hasn’t actually changed? Buying JBS is a bit like scooping up a Ferrari for half off. Sure, the engine roars. But you might also find blood in the trunk and a wiretap in the glove box. It’s big. It’s profitable. But it’s one of the most controversial stocks on the market, and that’s saying something.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.