Bigger Biceps, Fatter Wallet

Thanks to fitness shakes and workout videos, Beachbody’s Carl Daikeler got a nice figure: a three-comma fortune.

Beachbody—a Santa Monica, California–based multilevelmarketing outfit that hawks exercise DVDs and weightloss shakes through more than 400,000 independent “coaches”—went public via a SPAC in June. The listing was a complicated affair that involved merging Beachbody with a Connecticut exercisebike maker called Myx Fitness and a blankcheck company with ties to former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal and former TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer. But the alchemy worked: Even after shares drifted 16% lower in the wake of the deal, Beachbody CEO and chairman Carl Daikeler is now worth $1.5 billion thanks to his 44% stake.

Daikeler, 57, who founded the company in 1998, credits Beachbody for his own six-pack abs: As a kid, he wasn’t much of a healthy eater (his favorite after-school snack was a stack of Oreos) or a fitness buff (he got cut from his high school basketball team on the first day). “What I learned was that solving my own problem—that I don’t like to work out and I eat like a secondgrader—was a scalable opportunity,” he told Forbes in 2018. He was also a naturalborn salesman who talked the dean of admissions at Ithaca College into admitting him after he was rejected by every school to which he applied. That skill led him to a string of other gigs—producing televised football halftime shows, pumping out fitness infomercials—before he settled on workout videos in the 1990s, striking gold with the hit P90X series.

The recent transacton is intended to help Beachbody push beyond videos and streaming and get it into better shape to compete against rivals like Peloton and iFIT (maker of the NordicTrack), both of whose CEOs—John Foley and Scott Watterson, respectively—also became billionaires in the last 12 months. It’s an uphill battle: Sales hit $864 million last year, compared to nearly $3 billion for Peloton and $1.5 billion for iFIT. Daikeler isn’t worried, tweeting in July when he launched Myx’s new fitness bike: “If you’re gonna do something, do it better.”