Bob Iger needs all the chums he can get, given what’s on his plate as CEO of the increasingly unstable House of Mouse.
Consider: Activist investors are swirling, his stock price has cratered, and consumers are shunning Disney movies.
He’s still mired in a battle with the Florida governor who took away Disney’s self-governance perk referred to as Reedy Creek due to its overt progressivism.
All that, yet Iger decided he needed to select an absurd fight with Elon Musk.
Iger recently went public together with his decision to tug ads from Musk’s X (formerly referred to as Twitter) social media platform, joining others within the progressive CEO class attacking someone the left hates as much as Donald Trump.
The overarching goal of the progressive movement, in the event you haven’t noticed, is destroying the platform Musk is attempting to remake from the lefty protected space it had been for much too long to a free-speech mecca.
No more silencing of conservative voices, no more taking orders from the lefties within the Biden administration.
With that, Musk, despite being the world’s richest man, had a giant “X” on his back.
Recently, Musk himself made it larger when he clumsily endorsed a crude tweet that suggested something vile and antisemitic: that Jews were behind a theory to interchange white people.
The trolls insist Jewish individuals are getting their just rewards with the outpouring of antisemitic hatred on the streets following the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis near Gaza.
Then got here a report from the Soros-backed lefties at Media Matters that said X places noxious content from neo-Nazi users next to ads of major corporations like Disney, resulting in an ad boycott and money drain that threatens X’s existence.
Iger, ultimately week’s Latest York Times DealBook conference, looked as if it would relish X’s demise.
He took the lead in publicly upbraiding Musk, and squeezing the corporate’s ad-revenue base even further.
“By him taking the position that he took in quite a public manner,” Iger said, “we just felt that the association with that position and Elon Musk and X was not necessarily a positive one for us. And we decided we’d pull our promoting.”
Musk’s X posting was dumb (he said as much at the identical conference) but a fairer reading doesn’t put him anywhere near the antisemitism being displayed by elements of the Democratic Party who’re all but celebrating the Oct. 7 massacre — and not using a peep from the Disney boss.
As for Media Matters’ “investigation,” it’s about as solid as Disney’s shaky stock price; Musk’s programmers say the left-wing provocateurs manufactured the situation they accused X of fomenting. Musk and his lawyers at the moment are suing for defamation.
The larger issue for Disney’s shareholders is whether or not Iger understands what battles he needs to select.
Iger, after all, was the longtime CEO of Disney, a legend in media and entertainment before stepping down as chief executive in 2020 (he remained as chairman until 2021) and giving the corporate over to his chosen successor, Bob Chapek.
Iger was lauded for his deal-making, stock-price performance — and for his progressive social activism virtue-signaled from his C-suite that was cheered by the liberal cultural establishment.
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Lefties in charge
As my book on corporate wokeism — the forthcoming “Go Woke, Go Broke” — demonstrates, Chapek was ultimately forced out by the corporate’s left-wing corporate infrastructure partially because he initially sought to vary the culture Iger had left him.
No surprise that when Chapek got the ax in late 2022, the board of Disney brought Iger back and he picked up where he left off. Except it wasn’t that easy.
His deal-making wasn’t that great; it saddled Disney with a number of debt at a time when consumers weren’t rushing to look at its woke movies or pay all that much money for a visit to woke Disney World.
Shares of Disney are down nearly 20% over the past five years, and aren’t recovering.
In a recent filing to investors, the corporate disclosed that its progressive stances are taking a piece out of its bottom line because “consumer perception of our position on matters of public interest, including our efforts to attain our environmental and social goals, often differ widely and present risks to our repute and types.”
Musk’s response to Iger’s virtue-signaling also made a whole lot of news since it was each priceless and typical Musk.
“If someone’s going to attempt to blackmail me with promoting, blackmail me with money,” he responded also in the course of the Dealbook conference, “go f–k yourself. Go. F–k. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it’s . . . Hey, Bob, in the event you’re here within the audience. That’s how I feel.”
I’m told Musk’s people at X are feverishly seeking to change its business model, moving the platform away from paid ads by big, woke corporations like Disney.
It won’t be easy and it’s a piece in progress to monetize X’s reach with small businesses, and even with a payment service along the lines of PayPal (Musk was considered one of its founders).
Iger, meanwhile, needs to be worrying about Disney’s woke and increasingly unprofitable business model.
He’s got larger issues to cope with than picking fights with Elon Musk.
