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The template only earns its keep if you actually put two cases next to each other.

This is the reason every teardown answers the same questions in the same order. Put a luxury house beside a console platform and the differences stop being vibes — one is refusing sales to protect a price, the other is selling below cost to collect a toll, and both are defending a moat.

Case ACase B

Media · NYSE: DIS

Disney

A century-old entertainment company that makes stories in one division and charges admission to them in another, and whose profit now comes overwhelmingly from the second.

Technology · NASDAQ: AMZN

Amazon

Runs a near-breakeven retail operation at enormous scale, and earns essentially all of its profit from renting out the two things that operation forced it to build — computing capacity and shelf placement.

The thesis in one line

Walt Disney drew the business model on one sheet of paper in 1957. Every acquisition since has been an attempt to buy more things to put on the drawing.

The store is not the business. The store is the customer acquisition cost for the businesses.

Verdict

Watch it

Own it

Moat

Wide

Brand · Scale economics · Switching costs

Wide

Scale economics · Network effects · Process power · Switching costs

Porter's five forces

Competitive rivalry

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Buyer power

Supplier power

Competitive rivalry

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Buyer power

Supplier power

Headline figures

Revenue: ≈ $91.4B
Experiences operating income: ≈ $9.3B
Streaming operating income: ≈ $143M
Price paid for Pixar: $7.4B

Net sales: $638B
AWS share of operating income: ~58%
Retail operating margin: ~5.4%
Third-party share of units: ~60%

Unit economics

One streaming subscriber, per month, FY2024 segment averages — illustrative

In FY2024 a streaming subscriber earned Disney about seven cents a month. A park guest earns it twenty-seven cents on every dollar spent. The stories cost the same to make either way; the difference is that a park charges admission to the story and a streaming service charges rent on a library everyone else is also building.

One $50 third-party item sold through Amazon

Amazon captures roughly 38% of the sale price and carries none of the inventory risk. The seller took the risk, paid for the warehouse, and then paid again to be found in a search of Amazon's own catalogue.

What would change her mind

If Experiences operating income falls for two consecutive years while the $60 billion is being spent — meaning Epic Universe is taking share or the guest has finally balked at the price — the profit engine is not what I think it is and the whole valuation rests on streaming. In the other direction, if streaming reaches a double-digit margin with content spending still falling, the Fox deal will have been paid for after all, and Disney is worth a Netflix multiple on a business Netflix cannot copy.

If AWS revenue growth falls below 15% for two consecutive quarters while segment operating margin also declines, the cloud business is being commoditised rather than merely contested, and the capex is being spent defending share rather than buying growth. That combination — decelerating growth and compressing margin at the same time — breaks the thesis outright. A single weak quarter on either measure alone does not.

1 mechanism in common

platform flywheel