Has Bob Iger Lost His Fastball?
Oh, yeah. Without question.
The Bob Iger from twenty years ago would never have made the mistakes he made this November.
Iger has enough problems without inviting more to the party.
Something to remember about Bob is that his first big dream was to be an anchorman to rival Walter Cronkite. When he gave up his dream of being an anchorman he switched to a business track in ABC News’s Wide World of Sports. TV journalists are convinced that they know everything about politics, much more so than actual politicians. And they usually act either by influence or omission to their preferred political party’s benefit.
The Left isn’t happy about losing its complete control of Twitter. They want it to go back to the way it was before Space Daddy took it private.
It’s not the free speech platform we’d like it to be, but it’s better than it was. And that drives people like Bob Iger crazy. Iger is used to being the most powerful man in Hollywood. He’s the biggest fish in that pond. Except that somewhere around 2017 he started thinking he was the biggest fish in ANY pond.
When all the rest of the media companies cut off advertising to Twitter. It gave Iger an excuse to do the same thing. Fine so far as that goes but in his arrogance he decided to go after Musk at the New York Times Dealbook Summit.
There was a lot more interest in the Dealbook Summit this year after Bankman-Fried’s disastrous interview last year. So there were more eyeballs on it than usual. Iger publically goading Musk was a terrible idea. Granted, having all the entertainment venues suspend advertisements will hurt twitter in the short term, and it probably would be enough to scare a publicly traded corporation into compliance.
However Twitter is a privately held company, there is no board of directors to breathe down Musk’s neck and he knows perfectly well he’s got the third most influential social media company on the planet under his direct control.
The media companies are going to come back because they have to come back and he knows it.
The silly part is that if Bob Iger had thought about it for a second he’d have known it too, but he didn’t. He got a public bitch-slap from a man who can throw $5 billion at Nelson Peltz and say, “Would you destroy him for me, please?”
Even fifteen years ago, Bob Iger would have been able to assess his relative power accurately. The media is puffing its chest indignantly but the truth is Iger got taken down a couple of pegs in public when he most needs to look strong for the shareholder meeting in April.
He’s lost his fastball.
