Walt Disney

Walt Disney arrived in Los Angeles in 1923, twenty-one and freshly bankrupt in Kansas City, and persuaded his older brother Roy to go into business making cartoons. Roy ran the money for the next forty-eight years. The founding lesson came in 1928, when Disney went to New York to renegotiate with his distributor, Charles Mintz, and discovered that Mintz owned the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and had hired away most of his animators. He came home with nothing and, with Ub Iwerks — who drew the character Disney is credited with — produced a mouse. From then on Disney owned what it made, and the company's whole history is a consequence of that rule.

The pattern he then established was to bet the studio, repeatedly, on things the industry said would fail: sound in 1928, colour in 1932, a feature-length cartoon in 1937 that cost several times its budget and was called Disney's Folly until it grossed eight million dollars, and in 1955 a theme park that no bank would fund and that he paid for by selling a television series to ABC. The 1957 drawing that maps the studio at the centre with arrows to television, music, merchandise, publishing and Disneyland is the clearest single description of a business model any founder has produced, and it was drawn as a strategy, not an afterthought — he had sold the merchandising rights to Mickey in the early 1930s and understood that the characters earned more outside the cinema than in it.

The contested parts are real and should not be smoothed. The 1941 animators' strike embittered him permanently; he blamed communists for it and in 1947 testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming former employees. He took credit for work that was Iwerks's and others', and the company's own history has tended to help. Allegations of antisemitism have followed his name for decades; the most careful biographies find little evidence of personal prejudice but a man who moved comfortably in circles where it was common. And in 1953 he set up a private company, later Retlaw, that owned the rights to his own name and licensed it back to the studio he ran, which the shareholders sued over. He died in December 1966, before Walt Disney World opened, and Roy came out of retirement to finish it.