Disney Has Its CEO
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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.
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.
Rachel, we're going to look back on this Eiger tenure, especially the last decade, positively.
I think so. And I agree with Lou. I think you have to look at both tenures together. I mean, you think of that first one right from 05 to 2020. I mean, there was really a series of very transformative acquisitions that formed the company we know today. You think of the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm. You know, this really built that modern Disney content engine that we know. I mean, Iger grew Disney's market cap from about $56 billion to more than $230 billion during that initial run. And then you look in these last few years, you know, he returned in late 2022 to replace Bob Chapek. Really, that second stint has been focused on stabilizing the company. He implements about $5.5 billion in cost cuts, really working to achieve streaming profitability, a lot of challenges that the company has faced during that time, including the Hollywood labor strikes.
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