Howard Schultz: From Starbucks to White House, who is the CEO 'seriously considering' running for president?

Former Starbucks CEO and Chairman Howard Schultz said he is “seriously considering” vying for the White House in the upcoming 2020 presidential election as a “centrist Independent,” but stopped short of making an official announcement.

“We’re living at a most fragile time,” Mr Schultz said in an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes aired on Sunday. “Not only the fact that this President is not qualified to be the president, but the fact that both parties are consistently not doing what’s necessary on behalf of the American people and are engaged every single day in revenge politics.”

Mr Schultz’s piqued interest has concerned—and even angered—some Democrats that an independent bid for the White House could help President Donald Trump get re-elected in the 2020 election by siphoning off votes from the Democratic nominee. He knows it too.

“I’m putting myself in a position that I know is going to create hate, anger, disenfranchisement from friends, from Democrats,” he added.

“I’m concerned about one thing: Doing everything I can to help families who have been left behind, and to restore dignity and honor back in the Oval Office.”

The 65-year-old coffee magnate would be an outlier among the list of potential presidential candidates in 2020: He has never run for public office before, is running third-party in a two-party system, and has almost no name recognition. However, what Mr Schultz does have is money, and a lot of it too—$3.3bn.

If he decides to throw his hat in the ring, Mr Schultz will be joining a long—and still growing—list of presidential candidates who have announced, or are seeking, their bids to the White House. California Sen. Kamala Harris, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, former Maryland Rep. John Delaney, and former secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro all have officially announced their candidates, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York have formed exploratory committees.

Here is everything you need to know about the Starbucks CEO running for president

Born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, Mr Schultz grew up poor. He lived with his family in housing projects in the Canarsie neighbourhood. His father, Fred Schultz, was a high school drop-out, an ex-Army trooper, and worked as a truck driver to support the family. The elder Schultz never earned more than $20,000 from his blue-collar jobs, and with three children, he was never able to afford to buy a home.

Mr Schultz became the first person in his family to earn a college degree when he attended Northern Michigan University with a full scholarship playing football. Soon after graduating, he worked at the Xerox Corporation as a salesman, and quickly got promoted to full sales representative before jumping ship in 1979 as a general manager at a Swedish drip-coffee manufacturer. In 1981, Mr Schultz was introduced to Starbucks Coffee Company while monitoring their orders, and after expressing his admiration for their coffee knowledge and his interest in working for the, he joined the company as director of marketing.

The former Starbucks CEO made headlines in the past for his outright criticism of Mr Trump and other Republican politicos. Two days after Mr Trump announced his ban on refugees from several Muslim-majority countries, Mr Schultz announced that his Seattle-based coffee company would be hiring 10,000 refugees. Then in February 2017, the coffee magnate said the president created “chaos” that hurt the American economy in comments to employees. While appearing at a business conference in November 2017, Mr Schultz criticised the Republican tax plan before Congress passed it the following month.

In April 2018, Starbucks made headlines when the police who ended up arresting two black men waiting inside one of their stores in Philadelphia. The incident, captured on video, sparked outrage and calls for boycotts. Mr Schultz said he was “ashamed” and “embarrassed” about the arrests, and said the incident proves racial bias was common and that “many people in America are not prepared to talk about race.”

In an unprecedented move for the company, then-Chairman Schultz and CEO Kevin Johnson announced that Starbucks will be closing 8,000 of its US stores for an afternoon to teach a training workshop about racial bias in cooperation with the NAACP and other progressive organisation.

“Racial bias does exist. Unconscious bias exists,”Mr Schultz told CNN’s Poppy Harlow. “We need to have the conversation. We need to start.”

In the 2016 presidential election, the self-described “lifelong Democrat” endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. He donated $10,800 to her joint fundraising committee with the Democratic Party, CNBC reported. In 2016, he also donated $1,250 to Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, and $5,000 to VoteVets, a progressive political action committee led by veterans critical of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

He also donated to non-partisan groups. In 2018, he donated $50,000 to the With Honor Fund, a cross-partisan political action committee dedicated to elected veterans into public office.

The billionaire businessman believes “the greatest threat domestically to the country is this $21tn debt hanging over the cloud of America and future generations.”

He also has been on the record criticising tax cuts to the one per cent. “Corporate America did not need a tax cut to 21 percent when we could have done so much more for the people of the country,” Mr Schultz said, referring to the GOP tax cut bill in 2017. “Forty-five percent of the people in America don’t have $500 in the bank for a crisis.”

But the coffee magnate has also lambasted Democrats for “veering too far left,” citing that “medicare-for-all” healthcare plan—one supported by the likes of Democrat Senator Bernie Sanders—would be impossible to pay for.

Mr Schultz takes a far less draconian approach to immigration than the president. He has called the need for border security, but calls for more compassion and fact-checking on the statistics hurled around when discussing immigration policy.

“I don’t think we’ve got a very humane [immigration] policy. I think we need border security. But there’s a lot of nontruths,” he told CNBC. “As an example, two-thirds of the undocumented people were talking about are not people that have crossed a border. They’re here because their visa has expired.”

He is also a big advocate for gun control. “Seventy percent of the American people want the kind of policy legislation that takes the guns of war out of the American peoples’ neighborhoods.”

As it is tradition, the president taunted Mr Schultz on Twitter following reports that the businessman is considering vying for the Oval Office in 2020.

”Howard Schultz doesn’t have the ‘guts’ to run for President! Watched him on @60Minutes last night and I agree with him that he is not the ‘smartest person.’ Besides, America already has that! I only hope that Starbucks is still paying me their rent in Trump Tower!”

In his 60 Minutes interview, Mr Schultz has some choice words for his critics, including Democrats, that are bothered with his interest in running as an independent in 2020.

“I want to see the American people win. I want to see America win,” he said. “I don’t care if you’re a Democrat, Independent, Libertarian, Republican. Bring me your ideas. And I will be an independent person who will embrace those ideas because I am not, in any way, in bed with a party.”