Best Buy

Quick Take

Best Buy's employee funded PAC sent more of its candidate money to Republicans than Democrats in the 2024 cycle, while the broader pool of giving tied to the company, which folds in individual employee donations, tilted the other way. In July 2024, Best Buy removed its specific diversity hiring goals from its annual sustainability report without a public announcement, placing it on the long list of large retailers that pulled back DEI language in 2024 and 2025. Yet unlike Walmart, Target, or Tractor Supply, Best Buy never made a public reversal under activist pressure and still keeps an Inclusion and Belonging page on its corporate site. The company spent about $1.36 million on federal lobbying in 2024. Founder Dick Schulze, still a major shareholder, has a long personal record of Republican giving that is separate from anything the company does today.

Where the Money Actually Goes

Best Buy's political money has to be read in two cuts, because the two most commonly cited numbers point in opposite directions and measure different things.

The first cut is Best Buy's employee funded PAC, formally the Best Buy Co., Inc. Employee Political Forum. Federal law bars it from using corporate money; it pools voluntary contributions from eligible employees and is directed by a board of Best Buy employees. According to OpenSecrets, the PAC gave $165,500 to federal candidates in the 2023 to 2024 cycle, with $95,000 (about 57 percent) going to Republicans and $67,000 (about 40 percent) to Democrats.[1] That is a clear lean toward Republican candidates, and it is the cleanest available signal of where the company's organized giving vehicle chose to direct money.

The second cut is broader. OpenSecrets also reports an organization-level total of $450,728 in contributions for the 2024 cycle, a figure that combines the PAC with donations from individuals who listed Best Buy as their employer.[2] Measured that way, across all federal candidates, the giving split about 57 percent to Democrats and 43 percent to Republicans, the reverse of the PAC-only number.[2] This is a common pattern: a company's PAC and its rank-and-file employees often give to different sides. The honest way to report it is to keep the two cuts separate. The employee funded PAC leaned Republican; the wider pool that adds in individual employee donations leaned Democratic.

On lobbying, Best Buy reported about $1.36 million in federal lobbying expenditures for 2024, according to OpenSecrets data drawn from Senate filings.[3] That is a routine corporate-government-affairs footprint for a retailer of its size, focused on the kinds of issues, trade, tariffs, payment regulation, and tax, that affect any national chain.

The Conservative Shareholder Campaign

In December 2023, a conservative think tank that owns Best Buy stock, the National Center for Public Policy Research, filed a shareholder proposal pressing the company over its donations to LGBTQ nonprofits. The group, through its Free Enterprise Institute, demanded Best Buy end partnerships with and contributions to eight named organizations, including the Trevor Project, GLAAD, GLSEN, SAGE, and It Gets Better, and threatened to bring the proposal to a vote at the June 2024 annual meeting if the company did not move.[6] The proposal's language was pointed: the group asked why Best Buy shareholders were funding what it called organizations that promote gender ideology to minors, framing the partnerships as unrelated to selling electronics.[6]

The episode became public in March 2024, when a Securities and Exchange Commission filing containing a months-long email exchange between the two sides was released and first reported by NBC News.[6] In that correspondence, Best Buy told the group it gives its employee resource groups some discretion over donations but would begin screening those gifts to ensure they do not support the causes the group had identified as objectionable.[7] After Best Buy made that offer, the National Center withdrew its proposal, Best Buy pulled the "no action" request it had filed with the SEC, and the agency confirmed the matter was moot, keeping the proposal off the June ballot.[6] The concession drew its own backlash from the other direction: New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, who oversees a state pension fund invested in Best Buy, wrote the company in May 2024 warning that screening the donations could be read as a departure from its stated commitment to the LGBTQ community.[8]

The DEI Goals That Disappeared

Best Buy spent the first half of the 2020s publicizing hard, numerical diversity goals, then removed them from its reporting in 2024. The goals were set in December 2020, when the company announced a five-year plan and committed, in its own words, to fill one out of three new non-hourly corporate positions with BIPOC employees and one out of three new non-hourly field roles with women by 2025.[4] The company tracked progress against those targets in its SEC filings: its fiscal 2023 annual report stated that Best Buy had filled 37 percent of new salaried corporate positions with BIPOC employees, against its stated goal of one in three, and 25 percent of new salaried field positions with women.[5]

In July 2024, Best Buy published its annual Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability report, and the measurable hiring goals were gone. The report replaced the specific numerical targets with broader language about belonging, engagement, retention, and representation, and dropped the hard numbers.[9] The change was not announced; it was first flagged months later by an outside analyst who compared the 2023 and 2024 reports side by side.[9] In January 2025, Best Buy updated its Inclusion and Belonging web page but left it standing. The company kept the program in place while removing the measurable targets that had been attached to it.[9]

Context matters here. Through late 2024 and into 2025, a long list of major companies, Walmart, Target, McDonald's, Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, and others, pulled back diversity programs, many of them after public campaigns by conservative activist Robby Starbuck.[10] Some of those companies made explicit, announced reversals. Best Buy's move was quieter and more limited: it stripped the measurable goals from its reporting but did not issue a statement renouncing DEI, did not take down its inclusion page, and was not the target of a high-profile activist campaign the way Walmart and Tractor Supply were.[10] In short, Best Buy removed the metrics without announcing a reversal, a narrower step than the public rollbacks at several peers.

Where Best Buy Has Not Moved

The flip side of the DEI retreat is what Best Buy left in place. As of early 2025 the company still maintained its public Inclusion and Belonging page and a chief inclusion and diversity officer role.[9] Best Buy has historically tied a slice of executive bonus compensation to social-impact and culture-of-belonging goals; its own proxy disclosures noted that in one recent year a portion of executive bonuses was linked to sustainability, social impact, and culture-of-belonging measures.[11] None of this tells a reader which way the company leans politically, but it does establish that Best Buy did not follow the most aggressive corporate rollbacks all the way to a clean break.

What the Company Sells

Best Buy is a consumer electronics retailer. Its business is organized into a Domestic segment covering the U.S. and a smaller International segment covering Canada, and it groups its products into computing and mobile phones, consumer electronics, appliances, entertainment, and services.[12] Computing and mobile phones make up the single largest share of domestic revenue.[12] The Geek Squad in-home and in-store tech-support service and a paid membership program are part of how the company tries to hold customers against online competition. For most shoppers, Best Buy is the last national big-box chain primarily dedicated to electronics after the collapse of competitors like Circuit City.

The Numbers Behind the Business

Best Buy is a public company, and its SEC filings give a precise picture of its size. For the fiscal year ending February 1, 2025, Best Buy reported revenue of $41.5 billion, down about 4.4 percent from the prior year, and net earnings of $927 million, with diluted earnings per share of $4.28.[12] Net earnings fell from $1.24 billion the year before, a decline the company attributed in part to a goodwill impairment in its Best Buy Health unit and to softer sales across several merchandise categories.[12] The company had been through nine straight quarters of declining comparable sales heading into a 2025 restructuring that included layoffs in parts of its Geek Squad and home-theater operations.[13]

Chief executive Corie Barry, who has led the company since 2019, received total compensation of $16,150,300 in fiscal 2025 according to Best Buy's proxy statement. The same filing reported a median employee compensation of $31,141, putting the CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio at roughly 518 to 1.[11] About 8 percent of Barry's targeted pay was base salary, with the rest tied to bonuses and stock performance.[11]

The Founder's Politics, and Why They Are Separate

Best Buy was founded in 1966 in St. Paul, Minnesota, by Richard "Dick" Schulze, who opened it as a single hi-fi store called Sound of Music and rebranded it Best Buy after a 1981 tornado-damaged-inventory sale.[14] Schulze stepped down as CEO in 2002 and as chairman in 2012, and he later became chairman emeritus, but he remains one of the company's largest individual shareholders.[14]

Schulze has a long personal record of Republican and conservative giving that predates and sits apart from the company's current operations. Reporting in 2018 documented that Schulze and former Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson had each given well over a quarter-million dollars to conservative PACs and Republican candidates over the years, and that a venture-capital firm tied to Schulze had contributed to a conservative advocacy group.[15] This is the politics of an individual founder and former executive, not a current corporate position, and it should be read that way. Schulze in recent years has been far more visible as a philanthropist, having pledged to give away $1 billion in his lifetime through the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation, which funds healthcare and education in Minnesota and Florida.[16]

Where to Find Them

Best Buy operates roughly 1,000 retail stores across the United States and Canada and sells directly to consumers both in those stores and through its website at bestbuy.com.[12] Its corporate headquarters is in Richfield, Minnesota.

Footnotes

[1] OpenSecrets, "Best Buy: Candidate Recipients, 2024 Cycle," accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/best-buy/C00405076/candidate-recipients/2024

[2] OpenSecrets, "Best Buy: Organization Summary," accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/best-buy/summary?id=D000024328

[3] OpenSecrets, "Best Buy: Lobbying Profile, 2024," accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary?cycle=2024&id=D000024328

[4] Best Buy Co., Inc., "Best Buy Commits More Than $44 Million to Diversity, Inclusion and Community Efforts," press release, December 9, 2020. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201209005211/en/Best-Buy-Commits-More-Than-%2444-Million-to-Diversity-Inclusion-and-Community-Efforts

[5] Best Buy Co., Inc., SEC 10-K Filing for Fiscal Year Ended January 28, 2023, filed March 2023. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000764478/000076447823000006/bby-20230128x10k.htm

[6] Tat Bellamy-Walker, NBC News, "Best Buy offers to screen LGBTQ nonprofit donations after conservative pressure, filing shows," March 29, 2024. https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/best-buy-offers-screen-lgbtq-nonprofit-donations-conservative-pressure-rcna145603

[7] NewsNation, "Best Buy pressured by shareholder to screen LGBTQ donations: Report," April 4, 2024. https://www.newsnationnow.com/lgbtq/best-buy-screen-lgbtq-donations-report/

[8] CNBC, "Top New York official asks Best Buy about its commitment to LGBTQ groups after conservative pressure," May 2, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/02/top-new-york-official-asks-best-buy-about-its-commitment-to-lgbtq-groups-after-conservative-pressure.html

[9] Henry O'Loughlin, Buildremote, "Best Buy Quietly Dropped DEI Goals From Its 2024 Report," February 9, 2025. https://buildremote.co/dei/best-buy/

[10] NPR, "Walmart is the latest company to roll back DEI policies," November 27, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/27/nx-s1-5206586/walmart-is-the-latest-company-to-roll-back-dei-policies

[11] Best Buy Co., Inc., SEC DEF 14A Proxy Statement for Fiscal 2025, filed May 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000764478/000114036125016935/ny20041064x771_def14a.htm

[12] Best Buy Co., Inc., SEC 10-K Filing for Fiscal Year Ended February 1, 2025, filed March 2025. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000764478/000076447825000007/bby-20250201x10k.htm

[13] Patrick Kennedy, Star Tribune, "Best Buy CEO Corie Barry's pay down more than 10% to $9.2M," May 2, 2025. https://www.startribune.com/best-buy-corie-barry-pay-executive-compensation-decrease/601343471

[14] Star Tribune, "Billionaire founder of Best Buy gives historic donations to Florida, Minnesota hospitals," September 16, 2023. https://www.startribune.com/best-buy-billionaire-founder-richard-schulze-philanthropy-foundation-record-donations-hospitals/600305186

[15] Star Tribune, "Former Best Buy CEO gave money to group involved in anti-Muslim media campaign," 2018. https://www.startribune.com/former-best-buy-ceo-gave-money-to-group-involved-in-anti-muslim-media-campaign/478981463

[16] Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation, "Our Founder," accessed June 13, 2026. https://www.schulzefamilyfoundation.org/about-us/our-founder/