"All self-respecting captains go down with their ships," James Watt declared in his finance memoir Business for Punks in 2015.
But as the beer company he transformed from a garage start-up into a billion-pound behemoth foundered and slipped into administration last week, Watt was no longer at the helm of the good ship Brewdog.
He abandoned ship in 2024 after several years of bad press and financial losses. Co-founder Martin Dickie followed suit.
Their Brewdog dream was over. But having cashed out to the tune of £100m in 2017, they move on to their next ventures as wildly rich men.
Left to survey the wreckage are the hundreds of staff summarily culled in a brutal 11-minute Teams call from HQ and the 200,000 plus investors, or Equity Punks, who will likely see no return for the more than £100m they ploughed into the company.
