Last spring, the billionaire Michael Arougheti had two light beers in hand and a good reason to celebrate — he had just become the co-owner of the Baltimore Orioles.
Arougheti, the CEO of investment manager Ares, was in Pickles Pub, a popular bar for fans near the team’s iconic stadium, offering to buy everyone a beer.
The short video of a joyous Arougheti in Pickles was played Tuesday to the amusement of his fellow panelists, Todd Boehly and Michael Milken, at the latter’s namesake global conference. Milken, a big healthcare donor whom George Washington University’s public health school is named after, had one critique.
“We’re going to try and give you more healthy things to hold up,” Milken said.
After spending three days traipsing around the ritzy Beverly Hills hotel where the conference is held, it was pretty obvious what that drink would be: Saratoga Spring Water.
The glass blue bottles — a 24-pack of 12-ounce bottles costs more than $40 on Amazon — were omnipresent during the conference, with tables laden with them around every corner. Panelists, including Boehly and Arougheti, sipped them onstage. Hotel employees clearing trash cans in common areas sometimes needed backup to get the glass-filled utility trash bags out of their containers.
Bradley Saacks
The brand, which is a part of the beverage conglomerate Primo Brands, went viral earlier this year thanks to the influencer Ashton Hall, whose morning routine supposedly includes dunking his face into a bowl filled with several bottles of the distilled spring water. The company’s chief marketing officer previously told Business Insider that Hall’s use of its product wasn’t an ad but that it was enjoying the attention nonetheless.
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Hall’s TikToks didn’t come up during the conference, but the conglomerate’s CEO, Robbert Rietbroek, spoke on a panel at Milken. The CNBC anchor Sara Eisen introduced him by saying that “we’re all drinking his waters.”
“Our mission is to hydrate a healthy America,” Rietbroek said, sitting next to a small side table with several of his “beautiful blue bottles” on it. He added that the decrease in alcohol consumption had given Saratoga a boost.
“We’re seeing an expansion of bottled water through the first quarter of this year,” he said, despite economic worries.
He said consumers were on the hunt “for alternate drinks,” but at Milken, they were the house pour.
