Susan Arnold FIRED as Chairman of the Board at Disney
Oh, she’s been fired in a much nicer way than Bob Chapek was. But make no mistake she has been shitcanned. This is not a retirement.
All of the Hollywood trade rags wrote basically the same article which tells you right there that Disney public affairs wrote it.
The articles all say that Susan reached the maximum governance limit of fifteen years as a member of Disney’s board and therefore had to step down.
Really? How long was Bob Iger on the board? Pretty sure it was a lot longer than 15 years.
Apparently there is only ONE piece from Reuters when she was installed as COB that mentioned she would be facing a governance limit. This is the kind of propaganda you need to read carefully. This one little line indicating that this was always going to happen, ‘it’s no big deal at all so don’t think about it,’ was the point of the whole article.
There have been absolutely no articles anywhere. At all. Speculating on who her replacement would be. None.
If no one believed for a second that her term limit couldn’t be waived, there would have been a ton of speculation in the business press. There would also have been several auditions by various pretenders to her throne in the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. Again, there were none.
Susan Arnold was the one that invited Chapek to the board’s private retreat where his contract was renewed early for three years. Arnold was also the one that displaced Iger as CEO when he “retired” eleven months ago. Leaving little doubt in anyone’s mind that she was the one that orchestrated Iger’s fall from power in February of 2020.
The new Chairman of the Board is Mark Parker whose other title is Executive Chairman of Nike.
Woke as all hell Colin Kaepernick loving, Betsy Ross Flag hating, China fellating, child enslaving NIKE!
Nike is exceptionally cozy with Beijing. Hell Nike has a China First policy. Chapek had been steering the company away from China after they refused to show several major Disney movies. There were strong indications that Iger was thinking about selling off the Disney Parks in China. Iger on the other hand will be desperate to reaffirm the fraternal bonds of comradely progressive socialist brotherhood with the Han government. Mark Parker is going to be doing everything possible to bring the Disney China special relationship back from the dead.
If Iger has a prayer of hanging on to his job as CEO, (and you know he has no intention of following through on that two-year time limit), he has to do a few things.
One, get all Disney movies back in Chinese theaters.
Two, get the reeducation camp that is attached to the parking lot of Hong Kong Disneyland shut the hell down and moved somewhere else. It is killing Hong Kong Disney because no one wants to park anywhere near it. Customers will leave the place entirely before parking within listening distance of the camp for obvious reasons.
Three, get Shanghai Disneyland back opened. Keeping it shut down is costing Disney god only knows how much money. Plus, it’s Iger’s baby. It’s his pride and joy. More importantly, so far as Iger is concerned it’s his legacy. It’s the only one where all of the “blue-sky” design work made it to the park undiluted by budget constraints because China was footing the bill. It’s the park the Disney brothers didn’t build.
Parker and Iger are going to be in lock-step marching on Beijing. Expect Disney announcements to become more pro-China than Xin-Hua News.
When Chapek was rocketed out of the company I was expecting his puppet master to follow shortly, and she has.
However, something else I was expecting for a while had finally been triggered by her sudden firing. A proxy fight. Former Trump supporter Nelson Peltz is pointing out the freaking obvious, Bob Iger is the one that steamed Disney full speed ahead onto the rocks. And Iger’s solution is to fire up the boilers and just push on over the rocks. Double down on what has damaged the company is the only solution he can follow, he’s drastically over-committed.
Peltz wants on the board, and he wants Iger out in two years as promised, this time for good. If Disney stock stays below $100 a share or worse if it goes back down into the eighties, there is going to be a big change on the Disney BOD. Bob Iger will be fighting this tooth and nail.
Developing with possible updates later.
