Meet the angriest weed CEO in California
Elliot Lewis spent the evening hours of Nov 2 doing what he does best: posting a tightly cropped video of his face to Instagram while haranguing his latest enemy.
This time, his foe was the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents more cannabis workers than any other union in either California or the entire country.
“Maybe I shouldn’t just say some sh—t, high as f—ck,” Lewis warned his viewers, posting under the handle @catalyst_ceo. Then he continued on: “ ... What’s happening to the cannabis workers that are under the UFCW f—cking control, and their little f—cking fairy dust, you’re getting played,” Lewis said.
The next day, a grinning Lewis was working the floor of his newest Catalyst cannabis store in Daly City, the 25th outpost of his growing Catalyst empire. When SFGATE arrived, he was posing for videos with the store’s first customer as he repeated in his gravelly voice his catchphrase, “Weed for the people.” (It is also conveniently tattooed across his forearm.)
Such is the dichotomy of California’s angriest weed CEO. On one side, Lewis is an irate social media personality who wears a hat that says “F-CK ’EM,” credits pro wrestling as his biggest inspiration and mixes expletives with conspiracy theories in posts to his thousands of adoring followers. On the other side, he is a massively successful business owner who has quickly built one of the largest cannabis retail empires in California.
‘Worst of the industry’
Lewis’ furious style has made him a polarizing star inside California’s legal cannabis market. He opened his first Catalyst store in Long Beach in 2020, and barely three years later he’s grown the company to 25 Catalyst-branded locations with over 500 employees in total, making it one of the largest retail cannabis chains in the state.
But since the first Catalyst store opened, Lewis has engaged in a campaign of filing dozens of lawsuits (in his words, he’s “sued a sh—tload of cities”) and attacking a long list of companies and organizations that he sees as hurting the cannabis industry. His courtroom fights are usually accompanied by profanity-laced publicity campaigns on social media and real life, like when he called a local politician in Redondo Beach a “douchey monotone idiot” and funded a recall campaign against him for opposing Catalyst’s attempt to open a retail store.
At first, Lewis and UFCW were allies in their work to expand California’s legal market and bring more benefits to cannabis workers. In 2021, Lewis said he was “proud to have an alliance” with the union. But the relationship soured: In his Nov. 2 rant, Lewis claimed the union was taking dues from workers but then not advocating for workers or for the industry at the state level, and claimed the union won’t publicly call for lowering California’s controversially high cannabis tax rate.
Jim Araby, a vice president of UFCW Local 5, the Bay Area-based outpost of the national union, called the attacks “totally false” and said the union has already called for lowering the cannabis tax rate. He said that work has included improving working conditions at Catalyst’s stores and shared documents with SFGATE that showed UFCW has negotiated better pay and benefits at other companies and won hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wages for cannabis workers.
“I think Elliot is confused about the role of the union, because the role of the union is to represent workers, not the company,” Araby said.
Other California industry leaders take their criticism even further. Jonatan Cvetko, executive director of the trade group the United Cannabis Business Association, didn’t mince words when SFGATE asked him about Lewis.
“If it could be personified of what the worst of the industry is, then it’s Elliot Lewis,” Cvetko said.
