Bob Iger, just over one year after returning as Disney‘s CEO following the company’s board firing of previous chief Bob Chapek, said publicly that he was dismayed at the Mouse House’s performance under Chapek’s tenure.
Iger, who had selected Chapek, formerly head of Disney’s parks division, to succeed him in February 2020, made the comments Wednesday at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in New York.
“I was disappointed in what I was seeing in the transition period and while I was out,” he said, per the Times. “I worked hard at distancing myself from it.”
He said Disney’s current CEO succession planning process “is robust right now” and added that he will “definitely” exit as chief executive when his recently extended contract is up at the end of 2026.
Since returning to Disney, Iger said he has been “fixing a lot of problems that the company has had, and dealing with a lot of challenges.” Some of those “were brought on by decisions that were made by my predecessor,” he said, while others “are just basically the result of a tremendous amount of disruption in the world and in our business.”
At the DealBook Summit, Iger also was asked about Disney’s decision to pull ad spending from X (formerly Twitter) after X owner Elon Musk agreed with a user on the platform who had asserted that Jewish people “have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them” — seemingly a reference to “replacement theory,” the notion that Jewish people are attempting to replace white populations with nonwhite immigrants. Musk responded, “You have said the actual truth.”
“I have a lot of respect for Elon and what he has accomplished,” Iger said. However, given “the position [Musk] took, in quite a public manner,” Disney concluded that its association with Musk and X/Twitter was “not necessarily a positive one for us.”
Iger disputed reports that Disney was looking to sell its linear TV businesses, although he said the company was “constantly evaluating” their worth to the company. His remarks at the DealBook Summit came a day after he addressed Disney staffers at a town hall meeting and said the company is trying to “migrate [the linear TV] businesses onto the new [streaming] business model.” Iger said Dana Walden, co-chair of Disney Entertainment, and ESPN chief Jimmy Pitaro “have been looking really hard at their businesses to make them more efficient, which we’ve done, and I believe that is obviously imperative to the future health of the business.”
Iger was Disney CEO from 2005-20 and returned as interim chief executive after the ouster of Chapek in November 2022. In one of his first moves in returning as CEO, Iger dismantled the Chapek-instituted Disney Media & Entertainment Distribution (DMED) division, which had put oversight of content distribution and monetization under a separate group from its production units. In a memo to employees at the time, Iger wrote that the restructuring“puts more decision-making back in the hands of our creative teams and rationalizes costs.”
Earlier this year, Iger had said at an investor conference that Disney overall had a “disconnect” between what it was spending on content and how it was monetizing that — and that the company needs to become “more judicious” about content investments as production costs have skyrocketed.
Iger instituted a cost-cutting plan at Disney, which included the elimination of more than 8,000 jobs this year, as the company sought to reduce $5.5 billion in spending.
At the Disney town hall Tuesday, Iger, speaking at New York’s New Amsterdam Theatre, said, “I knew that there were myriad challenges that I would face coming back. I won’t say that it was easy, but I’ve never second guessed the decision to come back, and being back still feels great.”
