Bob Iger

Iger started as a weatherman at an ABC affiliate in 1974 and rose through the network to run it, arrived at Disney when it bought ABC in 1996, and became chief executive in October 2005 after a decade of Michael Eisner's feuds — with Roy E. Disney, with Jeffrey Katzenberg, and above all with Steve Jobs, whose Pixar had made every Disney animated hit of the previous ten years and whose contract was about to end. Iger's first act was to say, at his first board meeting, that animation was the company's problem and Pixar was its solution. Three months later he paid $7.4 billion in stock for it, made Jobs the largest Disney shareholder, and put Pixar's John Lasseter and Ed Catmull in charge of Disney's own animation studio. Marvel followed in 2009 for $4 billion and Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4 billion. Those three deals are the best acquisition record in consumer business, and they are his.

His second decade is harder to grade. The $71 billion purchase of most of 21st Century Fox in 2019 bought Hulu and a film library and a great deal of linear television that has declined ever since; the debt is still there. Disney+ launched in November 2019 and was run for subscribers rather than profit, losing more than $11 billion over four years. He handed the company to Bob Chapek in February 2020, stayed on as executive chairman, and by most accounts undermined his successor before the board removed Chapek in November 2022 and brought Iger back. His return contract, meant to be two years, became four; he had said he was leaving on at least four previous occasions, and the joke that he could not was repeated inside the company.

The second term was a correction of the first. He cut ≈ $7.5 billion of cost, took streaming to its first profit in 2024, admitted in public that Marvel and Star Wars had been overproduced, won a proxy fight against Nelson Peltz in 2024, and committed $60 billion to the parks over a decade. He also fixed the thing he had got wrong last time: in early 2026 the board named a successor from inside the company after a search that ran for most of his term, and Iger's own contract ends in 2026. Whether the second handover works is the open question, and the honest reading of Iger is that he is both the best acquirer Disney has had and the man responsible for its worst succession.