Final August, because the web piled on Cracker Barrel over its new “fashionable” brand, one thing even stranger was unfolding at Steak ’n Shake.
For one week, the chain’s X account didn’t attempt to promote a single burger. As a substitute, it attacked Cracker Barrel’s “destruction of shareholder worth,” alongside different monetary grievances. It offered $20 crimson MAGA-style hats bearing the phrases “Fireplace Cracker Barrel CEO,” and drew consideration to a billboard close to Cracker Barrel’s Nashville headquarters that Steak ’n Shake had secured, repeating the road.
Days later, Cracker Barrel admitted defeat. The brand reverted. The web moved on.
Steak ’n Shake didn’t. The account remained fixated for months—into 2026—hammering Cracker Barrel’s shrinking portion sizes, falling foot visitors, use of microwaves, alleged day-old biscuits, and 85% inventory drop.
In the meantime, these responding to the posts had been usually . . . crypto bros? Who had been cheering Bitcoin? What on earth was occurring? And why was Maxim journal, out of nowhere, getting concerned?
The reply to those questions, and a bunch you didn’t consider but, was Steak ’n Shake’s CEO, Sardar Biglari.
The 48-year-old rabble-rouser, arguably essentially the most infamous activist investor within the restaurant world, was making an attempt a brand new tactic. Prior to now, Biglari fought for management of companies through his holding firm or funding funds. In 2025, he conscripted his largest client model, Steak ’n Shake, to be the general public face of his battle to ship Cracker Barrel’s CEO packing.
It was simply considered one of a number of campaigns Biglari mounted throughout the trade over the previous 12 months. Others pressured the boards of Jack within the Field and El Pollo Loco to set off their so-called poison capsule, a takeover-deterrent plan that makes an organization too bitter for a hostile purchaser to swallow. (Jack within the Field, which has been tormented by almost 11 C-suite and board member departures since 2020, has thus far saved Biglari at bay. El Pollo Loco is claimed to be exploring non-public fairness buyout presents fairly than promote to him.)
Cracker Barrel first deployed a “poison capsule” in 2011 to cease Biglari from shopping for extra shares and has accomplished it once more 3 times since; waging protection in opposition to his campaigns has value shareholders $31 million, in response to the corporate.
Some chain eating places, equivalent to Chick-fil-A, In-N-Out, and Starbucks, have high-profile founders and burnished legacies that they uphold. Others, run by non-public fairness, bear no signal of their company leaders or founding missions. (“Roark Capital”? One in each 20 {dollars} spent eating out goes to considered one of its two dozen restaurant manufacturers, together with Subway, Dunkin’, Buffalo Wild Wings, and Sonic.)
However Biglari is neither: He makes use of his burger chain’s money to purchase stakes in rival restaurant corporations, then calls for they reply to him, as a competitor seated at their desk.
Not everyone seems to be a fan. “He’s thought-about to be very unusual by most professionals within the restaurant world,” says analyst John Gordon, founding father of Pacific Administration Consulting Group. Business veteran John Hamburger, president of the Franchise Instances Corp., provides, “Restaurant folks dismiss him as a result of he’s, you understand, upsetting the apple cart.”
As a monetary analyst told The New York Instances’s Kevin Roose in 2012, Wall Road is likewise “very skeptical of [Biglari]. . . . Even when he’s completely proper, it’s considerably annoying.”
Compounding the enigma surrounding Biglari is the truth that he speaks publicly simply every year, by way of the Biglari Holdings annual shareholder letter. (He declined to reply to an interview request for this text.)
Pulling from interviews over the previous month with folks in finance, the restaurant trade, and even D.C. politics, we’ve pieced collectively how this polarizing determine turned a drive—with the facility to oust CEOs and reshape what chains serve, how they’re run, and what they stand for—and the place he could flip his withering consideration subsequent.
Shopping for into the burger enterprise
Biglari has a knack for, as he sees it, taking a chisel to distressed corporations. “We Michelangelo’ed Steak ’n Shake,” he wrote in a single 12 months’s shareholder letter, explaining: “The sculpture is already full throughout the marble block, earlier than I begin my work.”
Biglari does know a factor or two about recent begins. In 1984, when he was 7, his household fled Iran, the place they had been persecuted after the 1979 revolution. They landed in San Antonio, the place his father had army contacts he’d made years earlier as a brigadier common within the Shah’s Imperial Armed Forces. His mother and father began a rug importing enterprise.
Biglari later cofounded an web service supplier, which was headquartered on the ground above the shop. Web America acquired it in 1999, simply earlier than the dot-com bubble burst. He began a hedge fund from the payout, requiring a minimal of $250,000 to affix—asking high-net-worth San Antonians to belief {that a} man in his twenties with one profitable exit may make them “massive sums of cash.”
The primary Steak ’n Shake had opened off Route 66 in Illinois through the Nice Melancholy. Founder Gus Belt offered premium “Steakburgers” for 12 cents from a transformed Shell service station—again when the common burger value a few nickel, and the common patty usually contained oatmeal or sawdust. Belt’s signature transfer was grinding high-grade cuts of sirloin and T-bone in entrance of consumers, below the banner “In sight, it have to be proper.”
The chain turned beloved throughout the Midwest for high quality components and a theatrical eating expertise: Prospects may watch the meat get ready from their tables, or have carhops ship burgers to their automobiles outdoors. Restaurateur Danny Meyer, raised in St. Louis, says he spent many weekends there as a young person, and his personal Shake Shack was partly an try to duplicate these “superior” parking zone experiences.
The chain retained these traits, roughly, till 2008, when Biglari maneuvered himself into the CEO function throughout a five-month-long coup—buying shares, profitable board seats, and forcing sitting members to resign.
On the time, Steak ’n Shake had posted 14 straight quarters of gross sales declines.
To make it right into a David-level opus, Biglari (who ceaselessly compares himself to an artiste) instituted a value-pricing technique that shrank the eight-page menu to a bifold, reversing the pattern nearly immediately and sparking seven years of same-store gross sales progress, an trade report on the time.
In 2012, The New York Instances declared Steak ’n Shake “again on strong floor,” and Forbes put Biglari alongside Larry Web page and Elon Musk on its list of strongest CEOs below 40. Retailer depend climbed 25%, reaching 626 items by 2018.
Dropping the Doughboys
By now, Biglari was in search of different marble blocks to chisel. By way of some monetary acrobatics in 2010, his hedge fund offered itself to Steak ’n Shake, which modified its identify to Biglari Holdings.
In a single day, a Midwestern burger chain turned a diversified holding firm with an in-house funding arm. He merged it with Western Sizzlin in the identical transfer and amassed stakes in Purple Robin and Sonic.
Then, in 2011 and 2012, he deployed $241 million from the rising coffers of Biglari Holdings to accumulate a 20% stake in Cracker Barrel.
By the mid-2010s, the market cap of Biglari Holdings had soared previous $500 million. It acquired the once-influential lad magazine Maxim, put in Biglari as editor-in-chief, and made the “Maxim ladies” available for Steak ’n Shake grand openings. To this meat-greased, underdressed empire, he added two insurance coverage corporations, a pair of oil ventures, and a luxurious hedge: Ferrari shares, immediately a $200 million stake—the corporate’s largest holding.
The construction echoes the portfolio constructed by Biglari’s idol, Warren Buffett, which counts Dairy Queen and Geico amongst its earliest acquisitions (although it’s uncertain Buffett would describe his personal assortment because the “equivalents of Renoirs, Cézannes, and Rembrandts” in his “financial museum”).
At this time, Biglari’s shareholders embody the 2 world’s largest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard, and Gamco Traders, the funding agency run by billionaire “Tremendous Mario” Gabelli.
However his antics had been making new enemies. From 2011 to 2014, Cracker Barrel shareholders rejected 4 proxy bids by Biglari in a row—first to accumulate board seats, then for outright management of the chain.
A distinguished governance advisory agency put the complete board of administrators of Biglari Holdings in its “Hall of Shame” over Biglari’s uncommon compensation construction, which it known as “as egregious as we have now ever seen” and “the kind of stuff that activists rail in opposition to” at different publicly traded corporations. (Most public CEOs take a wage, Warren Buffett included; Biglari was merely awarding himself a large reduce of the corporate’s annual enhance in worth.)
A small hedge fund, Groveland Capital, swooped in to attempt to administer a dose of his personal drugs. “Steak ’n Shake-up? Effort to Oust CEO Biglari within the Combine,” The Indianapolis Star reported. It failed, and in 2016 Biglari paid himself greater than $33 million in compensation.
“That’s greater than the CEOs of McDonald’s Corp. and Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. earned final 12 months. Mixed,” journalist Jonathan Maze observed in Nation’s Restaurant Information. Biglari created a Monaco workplace to work from, flying there in his new Gulfstream G550 jet, the identical sort Elon Musk makes use of.
It quickly turned clear, nevertheless, that worth pricing was a recession-era repair, and by 2020, with Individuals spending freely once more, it had stopped working. COVID-19 gave Biglari the quilt he wanted for an additional “radical” rebrand. He invested $50 million to replace Steak ’n Shake interiors, killed desk service, and changed cashiers with kiosks.
Nick Wiger and Mike Mitchell, hosts of the chain-restaurant-focused podcast Doughboys, look again on each the decreased menu and the kiosks as a “Pyrrhic victory.” Sure, prices had been reduce, however so had been “the hooks that loyal clients counted on since 1934.”
Once they first visited a Southern California location in 2015 for the present, the expertise so horrified them that dunking on Steak ’n Shake turned a decade-long working gag.
I requested them whether or not, of their skilled Steak ’n Shake opinion, they felt that issues had bottomed out—or whether or not worse was nonetheless doable. They responded in writing:
Wiger: It pisses me off that this strip mine capitalist has enshittified a beloved Midwest model and vampire-squid sucked out its magic in the hunt for revenue.
Mitchell: Steak ’n Shake is certainly getting worse, as is all the pieces else on the earth. We’ve got talked about this on Doughboys. However we used to root for native eating places, then we needed to begin rooting for smaller regional chains. And now we have now to root for big chain eating places to only not be as shitty and evil as they usually are.
Additionally, the final decade ought to have taught you that issues can at all times worsen. There’s no maxing out on terrible.
Wiger: As a society, we’re shitmaxxing.
Mitchell: I consider Steak ’n Shake can defy the chances and get even worse. Now, has Steak ’n Shake’s meals declined as a lot as different chain eating places? Most likely not ( you, Wendy’s), however I used to additionally get excited by the concept of going to Steak ’n Shake, and that doesn’t occur anymore.
By early 2021, stories surfaced that the chain was contemplating chapter to handle its climbing debt. From 2019 to 2025, it shuttered extra shops than Biglari had opened through the hottest years, dropping its depend by greater than 35% to 404 items. As Biglari was pressured to confess, the economics of Twentieth-century Steak ’n Shake merely “didn’t work within the fashionable period.”
Beef tallow, Bitcoin, and RFK Jr.
“We’ll by no means market ourselves away from our previous in an inexpensive effort to achieve the approval of pattern seekers,” read the submit on Steak ’n Shake’s X account final August, its first attacking Cracker Barrel for its newly slick, sanitized brand.
“That is what occurs when you have got a board that doesn’t respect their historic clients or their model,” it said in one other. “At Steak ’n Shake, we have now gone again to fundamentals,” it added earlier than concluding: “Our beef tallow fries are ready for you. Oh yeah, you can too now pay with Bitcoin.”
The bizarre ultimate line fairly undercut the argument, however Biglari appeared prepared to pay that worth. This was a brand new comeback try and his third rebrand of Steak ’n Shake, this time chiseling it right into a Trump-era chain that serves MAHA-friendly beef tallow fries and takes Bitcoin.
“Trumpism,” says the analyst Gordon, appealed “to clients in Republican states the place most of his eating places are situated and assured publicity.”
The rebrand had a satirical high quality. Within the Mike Choose film Idiocracy, sure authorities businesses are “dropped at you by Carl’s Jr.” Final spring, the Trump administration’s Division of Well being and Human Providers greeted workers with indicators promoting “Steakburgers and Beef Tallow Fries” accessible within the constructing’s essential cafeteria.
Steak ’n Shake had introduced its kitchens would swap to beef tallow on the good time: after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly declared that beef tallow was now the “MAHA manner” in late 2024, however earlier than Trump picked him as HHS secretary in early 2025.
As quickly as Kennedy’s nomination was confirmed, Steak ’n Shake started serving “RFK’d” fries. The stunt led to Sean Hannity interviewing Kennedy inside a Florida Steak ’n Shake, adopted by a parade of Trump-adjacent characters—Musk, Laura Loomer, Kari Lake, Vivek Ramaswamy—additionally declaring the greatness of the beef-tallow-slinging chain.
Steak ’n Shake’s web site quickly launched a brand new line of crimson hats with less-subtle MAGA-like phrases (“Make Americana Nice Once more,” “Make Frying Oil Tallow Once more”). The corporate put in Tesla Supercharger stations within the parking heaps, introduced that shops would begin flying “the tallest and largest American flag” allowed by native regulation, and served beef tallow fries at an El Salvador Bitcoin occasion that acquired President Nayib Bukele’s nod of approval.
It additionally posted a video made by Grok exhibiting Trump, Abraham Lincoln, and what is perhaps two George Washingtons flinging French fries from sleeves that, in AI’s illegible scribbles, seem to say “Berf Tilliw.” This week, it introduced Steak ’n Shake’s first-ever chief MAHA officer. For the function, it hired considered one of Kennedy’s HHS advisers.
But some aren’t shopping for the political flip. “His first political donation was in August of 2023,” one veteran Washington strategist informed me—$216 to Trump, adopted by a second donation the following 12 months: $241. “It is a newcomer to Republican politics.”
Cracker Barrel, over a barrel
Biglari attracts his share of detractors, says Hamburger, who has coated the restaurant trade for 30 years and was a publicly held restaurant chain’s CFO earlier than that. At first, Hamburger says, he was amongst that crew.
“However then I checked out him after the primary Cracker Barrel go-round, and I assumed, That’s fairly sensible,” he says. “That firm was managed poorly through the years. Actually, he’s declaring stuff that’s true—Jack within the Field and Cracker Barrel have been mismanaged.”
Cracker Barrel didn’t make any executives accessible for interviews for this story, however supplies it shared with Quick Firm present that Biglari discovered concerning the brand overhaul in 2024 throughout a gathering he’d requested with its new CEO, Julie Felss Masino. Cracker Barrel says that at this assembly, Biglari “didn’t specific issues” or provide concepts for how you can enhance the enterprise.
Steak ’n Shake COO Dan Edwards beforehand stated that his boss suggested Cracker Barrel to “give attention to the standard of the meals and repair,” not “waste time altering the model or its decor” as a result of that might upset clients.
The unfavorable public response to the emblem change looks like an “I informed you so.” However after the blowback final August, two analysis companies examined X posts that talked about Cracker Barrel within the hours after the brand new brand debuted.
One examine by PeakMetrics attributed 44% of posts made inside 24 hours to a swarm of employed bots it believes had been a part of a coordinated disinformation marketing campaign. About 70% of the messages contained an identical wording, it stated. The opposite agency, Cyabra, estimated that as many as 21% of the accounts themselves had been bots. Neither agency may establish who paid for them.
However Biglari didn’t want bots to get the higher of Cracker Barrel. Throughout the 2020 proxy contest—the fifth of seven Biglari had waged in opposition to then-CEO Sandra Cochran over 9 lengthy years—he lambasted her workforce for shedding greater than $100 million in lower than a 12 months on an untested “eatertainment” idea Cracker Barrel known as Punch Bowl Social. He dubbed it “the funding equal of Waterloo.”
Cochran responded that over the earlier decade Biglari Holdings inventory had returned a unfavorable 61% to buyers whereas Cracker Barrel’s was up 520% below her management. “We think about the deterioration of Steak ’n Shake, a model that after held a storied place in American restaurant historical past, to be a cautionary story,” she informed shareholders.
Unsaid was that Cracker Barrel had additionally made Biglari Holdings an absolute fortune—greater than $800 million over 15 years. In shareholder letters, Biglari has known as it the all-time-best funding Biglari Holdings has ever made, double what it has captured by actively working Steak ’n Shake.
And whereas the emblem controversy despatched Cracker Barrel shares tumbling to round $30—the corporate’s lowest degree in twenty years—Biglari had offered most of his stake earlier than it began. “I’ve a clear canvas on which to color and an almost limitless palette of colours from which to decide on” is one other of his artwork metaphors. His methodology, although, is to make use of “the paintbrush solely sparingly.”
