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Chapter 1: Who is Disney's new CEO and what does it mean for the company?
Disney has their new CEO. Is this time different? Motley Fool Money starts now. Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Travis Hoey. I'm joined today by Lou Whiteman and Rachel Warren. The Bob Iger era is officially coming to a close on March 18th, Lou, after Josh DeMauro was chosen to be the next CEO. Dana Walden, who was in the running to be CEO, is going to be promoted to chief creative officer.
They both got big contracts along with that. Let's start with Iger. How are we going to look back on his tenure over the last 20 or so years at Disney?
Yeah, the two tenures, which is what's funny about it. He's had an incredible career, let's just say that first. The most recent tenure, he turned streaming around. Streaming was a $2 billion-plus loser back in 2022. It's now a profitable business, $1 billion in profits. I think he gets a lot of credit for that. Part of that is just maturation, so I don't know how much credit.
Here's the thing, though, the stock price really liked his first tenure more than the second. The stock has done nothing. How much of that is him and how much of it is, again, the maturing business and the market's losing faith in that core television business? I don't know how much credit to give him for his accomplishments or how much fault to give him for his failures with the stock market.
I will say this, he was a steady hand at the ship.
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Chapter 2: What is Bob Iger's legacy at Disney?
The question now is, will he become Howard Schultz? Will he actually go away? Will he come back again? There's even rumors he's going to run for president, which again would, I guess, get him off of Disney's case for a while. We can talk about what this means for Disney afterwards, but we really need for him to either walk away or stay involved.
Or just stay on for life.
Yeah. And the worst scenario is a repeat of last time where he kind of didn't need it either. And that didn't work out well.
What is different this time is they apparently had over 100 people on their radar for this job. I think that's always interesting because there was really only two or three who seemed to be seriously in the running. But his tenure is going to end about nine months early from the contracted end at the end of 2026. And there's a story there, right? I don't know what it is. Yeah.
There must be a story. Well, and he's also, he's going to be an advisor, but not have a real role coming into the office, which he did have when JPEG took over going into the pandemic. So yeah, it seems like there's definitely a story. There always is in these, you know, palace intrigue things, but it does seem a little bit different this time.
Like Disney knows they have to kind of kick him out the door.
One thing on those 100 candidates, Balderdash, there's no way they had 100 candidates. I mean, what's its expression in football?
They wrote a list with 100 people on it.
Right, right. If you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterback. If I took that seriously, that they really had 100 people interview, that means they had no clue what they wanted. I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt to the board that maybe they had a list of 100 people, but they didn't really consider 100 people there. To me, that would be more scary than positive.
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Chapter 3: How will Josh D'Amaro's leadership differ from Bob Iger's?
They opened about 132 new restaurants in Q4 alone. They're looking to open up to 370 new locations in 2026. A few things that I think we should note kind of looking at this space, I mean, Chipotle is dealing with issues that some of its rivals are as well. You know, Sweet Green, Kava are a few that come to mind. We're seeing kind of a shift in how consumers are approaching restaurant spending.
We're seeing some of these sit-down chains. Think of, you know, Darden Restaurants. They own Olive Garden, Texas Roadhouse are gaining market share. I think consumers are becoming increasingly picky about where they're going to put their money to work. And sometimes they're prioritizing those sit-down experiences.
At the same time, McDonald's has been actually holding pretty steady in terms of their growth. Taco Bell has been a standout performer within Yum! Brands. Starbucks is even showing some improvements. So systematic challenges in the industry at large.
Chipotle, I think, is dealing with more broader industry headwinds than company-specific issues, but I would not expect this to resolve in the next few quarters.
Lou, one of the things I'm looking at with restaurant stocks is how many times have they mentioned GLP-1s? In Chipotle's call, they mentioned it twice, and it was actually in relation to their new protein bowl, bowl of chicken, for $3.80. Yeah, they invented the nugget. Yeah, it's the new version of the nugget. Slightly healthier than a nugget, maybe.
But it is interesting that that seemed to be their answer not only to GLP-1s, but also people spending less, saying, hey, if you just want to spend $4 on some chicken, come here.
Yeah. It's a weird time, because Rachel's right. Some of this does seem to be just maybe stress on the consumer. I think it kind of makes sense that if the consumer is stressed, they still do...
planned night outs or special occasion and you still on the fly, but that middle ground where you could go home and cook or to save a little money, but you know, you may just get carry out or something that that fast casual is what's suffering. I do wonder though, I mean, that implies it's short term. I do wonder if some of this is, is we're just so saturated. We've talked about this before.
This category didn't exist when I was growing up. It is from scratch and it has been nothing but growth. Maybe we've reached the natural limit to this market and we have a lot of competitors here. Maybe this speaks to a longer-term problem. What I do know, fourth straight quarter of traffic declines.
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