Bob Iger, who stepped down from his second stint as Disney CEO in March, gave an exit interview to Financial Times wherein he revealed that he tried to amass the James Bond franchise for Disney amid a spending spree that included the acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel and “Star Wars.” Pixar was precedence primary for Iger, and the studio “felt unstoppable” when it acquired Pixar in Could 2006 for $7.4 billion.
“It was like the clouds lifted and the sun started to shine again,” Iger mentioned. “We put together a list of acquisition targets. Marvel was one, ‘Star Wars’ was another, James Bond was one. We had a list and I figured let’s just tick them off and buy them all.”
James Bond is the franchise that bought away (Amazon is its present proprietor). Different firms did, too. Iger told FT that he was shut to purchasing Twitter from proprietor Jack Dorsey “at a very attractive price.” The plan was to show Twitter into a world distribution platform for Disney, however Iger admitted he bought chilly toes on the morning of the deal and anxious it will be “a horrible distraction.” Elon Musk ended up shopping for Twitter and reworking it into X.
Disney additionally flirted with an Apple merger. Iger first revealed in his 2019 memoir that he believed the 2 firms would’ve mixed or “at least discussed the possibility” of merging “very seriously” if Steve Jobs “were still alive.” However now Iger revealed that “some conversations” did truly happen between Apple and Disney a couple of merger that Iger thinks would have been “truly transformational and equal.”
“We talked about it internally, and we had some conversations with Apple about it, but it never went anywhere,” Iger mentioned. Apple didn’t present that a lot curiosity.”
Iger stepped down as Disney CEO in March and was succeeded by Josh D’Amaro. Information broke in April that Iger had taken a job as an adviser to venture-capital agency Thrive Capital. The New York-based firm was based in 2009 by Josh Kushner, the youthful brother of Jared Kushner, who’s Donald Trump’s son-in-law. In September 2022, Iger joined Thrive Capital as a enterprise companion.
