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It was “a mistake” to tell CNBC in an interview last year that linear TV assets “may not be core” to the company, Disney CEO Bob Iger said in a new podcast interview.
“I wasn’t wrong about my observation, but it wasn’t necessary for me to utter those words publicly, because it caused an incredible amount of anxiety,” Iger said during an interview on Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa. “I should have been more sensitive to how those words would be not just interpreted, but how they would be felt by people who are really important to me, who are even Disney legends.”
Iger explained his thought process in approaching the July 2023 appearance on CNBC, which came as the company was in the midst of major cost cuts, reorganizing and strategic planning. “I was intent on communicating to Wall Street an open-mindedness in general about our business in the future, and I wanted them to know – this was after I came back to Disney – that my head was not in the sand,” he said, echoing reflections he shared last fall at the New York Times DealBook conference. Aiming to show he was “a realist” and “not in denial,” Iger recalled, he decided to say that “everything’s on the table. … That was a mistake, it turns out.”
The podcast interview was largely a synergistic and lifestyle-oriented chat, conducted at ABC’s New York headquarters, where Ripa shoots the daily morning talk show Live with Kelly and Mark. The conversation ranged across topics like Iger’s favorite cheese (mozzarella), artists on his personal music playlist (country singer Zach Bryan is one) and whether his physical appearance at age 73 is in any way “medically induced,” in Ripa’s words. (“No medically induced” procedures, Iger replied, apart from two hips and a knee replaced. “A lot of it is genes and a lot of it is taking care of myself.”) Iger also revisited well-trod turf like his brief consideration of a presidential run in the 2020 race and the state of the current succession process, which he called “a huge priority.”
Along the way, though, the episode did yield a few business-y nuggets.
Asked to take stock of his achievements during his two tenures as CEO, the first from 2005 to 2020 and the current one starting in 2022, Iger noted the $73 billion acquisition of most of 21st Century Fox. While some critics in the industry and on Wall Street have assailed the steep price of the deal, which recently figured into activist investor Nelson Peltz’s proxy battle with Iger, the CEO pointed to the Emmy nominations.
Shogun and The Bear, which contributed a large chunk of the company’s overall tally of 183 Emmy nominations, “both came to us from FX, and FX came with the acquisition,” Iger said. “So I was thinking about it. You take that acquisition away and I don’t know what it would have brought our Emmy count down to in terms of nominations.”
Ripa asked Iger if he grew restless in 2020 and 2021 after leaving his CEO post (though his official ties to the company did not elapse until the end of ’21 and he was back in the corner office by November of the following year).
“It’s been exaggerated by many that I was bored,” he said. “I was not bored at all. I loved the fact that I did not have a to-do list that was a mile long, that I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night feeling that I was late for my next meeting, which often happened, or that I was missing a plane, that I could read the paper and not keep looking at my watch in the morning because I had to get someplace.”
During his time away, Iger continued, “I had enough stimulation” but at the same time “I really didn’t have anything to feel stressed about. And that was quite a luxurious feeling.”
Iger’s contract runs through the end of 2026. The succession committee of Disney’s board is considering candidates including internal execs Jimmy Pitaro, who heads ESPN; Josh D’Amaro, who oversees theme parks; and Dana Walden and Alan Bergman, Co-Chairmen of Disney Entertainment.
