Space Daddy to Aquire Disney?
No, he isn’t but I’m required to cover this.
At the premiere of Lola, a film with a title so unimaginative it’s up there with For Love or Money. Elon Musk was going out of this way to ham it up on the red carpet. He was wearing the bomber jacket he had on for the New York Times Book Thingy. The one where he told Iger to commit self-procreation. Yeah, that jacket.
He was clowning it up on the red carpet deliberately making himself noticed. He had a picture taken with his arm wrapped around Nelson Peltz’s shoulders and for a kicker said, “I’m just hanging out here with friends.” Then added after an apparent moment’s thought, “Just thinking of companies to buy,” and threw a big wink to the camera crew.
I suspect the suspended ad revenue from the film industry has hurt X.com. Enough so that it’s worth Musk’s time to publicly crack his knuckles and give Bob Iger a cold stare from across the bar.
However, a threat from Elon Musk is not an idle threat. The message to Bob Iger was clear. Start running ads on Twitter again or I’m going to make serious trouble for you. This is coming only a few days before the February earnings call.
In the past three weeks, Disney has gone from $90 per share to almost $100. Most of this is due to aggressive buying. Granted, I don’t know for certain who is doing the buying. I don’t think it’s Musk but I didn’t think he was serious about buying Twitter either until he made his offer. Once the offer was made I knew was going to buy it even after everyone went into mourning because he had “withdrawn” the tender offer. I knew he was still buying Twitter he just wanted a better price.
Elon Musk’s personal wealth is currently greater than the market value of the Disney Company but that’s hardly a guarantee he wants to buy it. Disney’s stock is undervalued at the moment for the simple reason that it’s losing money everywhere but ESPN and Hulu. But Disney’s institutional problems are easily the worst in Hollywood. This is not the situation where Eisner came into a company that was packed with talent and just needed direction and leadership. Disney has no talent left. The Equity Stasi has smashed the key talent links.
While Musk has shown an interest in Hollywood in the past it was mostly just to bang movie starlets. That said, I’m not entirely certain what his long-range plans for X.com are. Granted the guy does have nerd cred, I mean he made Amber Heard dress up like Mercy. He loved The Last of Us, Loki, and the Bad Batch. So, he has nerd cred if no taste. Fine.
It is possible he has some desire to rehabilitate Star Wars and Marvel. Although those brands sure as hell aren’t worth the huge amount of capital outlay that buying Disney would require. That said, ESPN and Hulu… Well they wouldn’t be worth the amount of money required to buy Disney and the mountain of debt that also comes with the company. But perhaps if you load up Disney Studios, Pixar, Fox, and Parks and Experiences with most of that debt then spin them off, then maybe. Better sell them to be sure but I’m not sure who would want to buy.
Although, that strategy does get you around the problem of firing all the Woklings at Disney. Firing the useless mouths to feed at Twitter was easy because useless mouths were all they were. The useless mouths at Disney are politically connected to the Democratic party. Since 2016 when Bob got bitten by the White House bug, he started hiring a lot of people who were either relatives of the politically connected or like Ton Newton’s replacement, Tinisha Agramonte politically connected themselves. Tinisha had a senior job with the Biden administration at Commerce before being picked up by Disney to be the new DEI shogun.
Firing these people will bring a LOT of government heat courtesy of the Donkey Party. But dumping them into a subsidiary and then kicking it to the curb is quite a bit easier politically.
All that said, no I don’t think Elon is going to make a tender offer on Disney. Buying Twitter was easy, the company was going out of business anyway and was pretty happy to have found a rube willing to buy them out. Disney’s owners will fight acquisition tooth and nail. Or at least 30% of them will and that’s enough.
However, he does bring something to the table that Nelson Peltz doesn’t. Peltz was making an argument for getting himself on the board on the basis of spreadsheets. These admittedly are bad but the thing to remember about Disney is that it’s not Ford or Bud Light. People still care a lot about the house that Uncle Walt built. It’s been built into American culture for a century. Generations of families have been born, grown up, lived, and died as Disney fans. What Elon Musk brings to the party is the one thing that Peltz lacked. Showmanship.
When Roy Disney went to war with Michael Eisner, he didn’t trot out a bunch of spreadsheets he launched the Save Disney campaign (SaveDisney.net).* Iger is still bitter as hell about it even if it did land him in the CEO’s suite. I’ve noticed a recent change in Peltz, this is no longer just a board room campaign, he’s now appealing much more to stockholder sentimentality. The whole, “generations have grown up with Mom holding one hand and Mickey Mouse the other” kind of thing.
He switched to that tack about the time he started hanging out with Elon Musk. We will see where this course leads.
Developing.
UPDATE: Holy crap I barely finished the article. Iger is fighting back already, bringing in Professor Ludwig Von Drake to help educate investors on how to vote. Indicating to me strongly that Iger is worried enough that for once he cares about what the Mom and Pop investors have to say instead of just the institutional stockholders.
Also, he appears to have learned something from Roy Disney after all.
This isn’t just cringe. It’s butthole cringe.
*snicker* They should have kept better track of those domains.
