The hardest conversation Brendan Kennedy says he had about getting rich was not with a banker. It was with his in-laws.
By the autumn of 2018 he had good reason to have it. Tilray had floated on Nasdaq that July at US$17 a share, the first cannabis company to trade on a major American exchange. By September the stock touched US$214, and Bloomberg estimated his net worth at no less than US$2.4bn. Headlines called him the marijuana billionaire who does not smoke.
The merged company kept the Tilray name and the Nasdaq ticker, and it tried to widen out.
He came from a very different world. Kennedy is the sixth of seven children in a San Francisco family. He studied architecture at Berkeley, took a master's in engineering at the University of Washington, and later an MBA at Yale. He worked at SVB Analytics, an affiliate of Silicon Valley Bank, where he met Christian Groh. With Groh and Michael Blue he started Privateer Holdings, Seattle-based, after he experimented with cannabis and saw an industry waiting for a serious investor.
Tilray was the Canadian leg of that bet. It was created in 2013 under Privateer and became one of Canada's first licensed producers. In late 2014 it took money from Founders Fund, which was described as the cannabis industry's first institutional investment. In 2016 it ran a Health Canada-approved clinical trial, a first for a cannabis company.
What almost nobody saw coming was how fast the peak would pass. By August 2019 the stock was near US$29. Kennedy's pay fell from about US$32m in 2018 to US$3.5m in 2019, and by February 2021 his net worth was reported at US$238m. He stepped down as CEO in 2020, as Tilray merged with Canadian rival Aphria in December and Irwin Simon took over.
The merged company kept the Tilray name and the Nasdaq ticker, and it tried to widen out. It closed a large greenhouse in 2020. It bought into craft beer, and in 2023 it paid US$85m for eight Anheuser-Busch brands including Redhook and Widmer. It struggled with its brewing deals; some had been declining for years. In 2024 revenue was about US$789m, and the company posted a net loss of roughly US$222m.
The figures tell one part of the story. The other sits in what Kennedy said about money itself. Sudden wealth had changed the terms of his family, and even a cannabis billionaire had to explain it across a dinner table. For first-time founders the lesson is plain. A valuation can double in a summer and halve in a year, but the people who knew you before the number are the ones you will still have to face.