🔰"Bob Iger is the Problem" - Glenn Beck On Why Disney's Failing and Losing Money

Bob Iger's pay doubled in 2023, as Disney laid off 7,000 employees, released box office bombs back to back to back. Bob Iger saw his compensation more than double last year as the once great studio continues to struggle financially and creatively. Bob Iger earned $31.6 million in total comp for the fiscal year that ended in September up from $15 million in 2022. His 2023 pay included a salary of $865,000, stock awards of $16.1 million, and $10 million in stock options awards, $2.1 million in performance-based compensation, $2.48 million in other pay. Iger's pay increase came as Disney experienced another bad year. Company laid off 7,000 employees worldwide and is planning an additional $2 billion in cuts. Disney's streaming services have lost billions of dollars as the company splurges on content that is having a difficult time connecting with the audience. Tom, you hear a story like this, how do you process this, Tom? I process it this way. First of all, this is an inflammatory headline story. Oh, you can't believe it, you can't believe it. The only thing that we have to remember on this is Bob Iger was desperately sought to come back and this is an employment contract that has these things in it on how they're going to pay him. What part of it was performance-based? Of the $31.6 million, $2.1 million? That's a lot of money, but $2.1 million is performance-based. I'd be willing to bet that everything that we've seen here, we know the base salary is in there and we know where the stock awards are. Basically, this was, I think, in the contract that he signed when they said, Bob, please come back, we need you for 36 months, man. It's not based on what he did this year, or is it just the comp said, your second, you're going to make XYZ amount of money? That's exactly right, 2.1 in performance-based compensation. How do we know that wasn't supposed to be 20.1? The reason it's only 2.1 is because there was the bombs and the problems. See that rat that's dead? That's Disney right there. That's an analogy of what Disney is right there. The mouse is dead. But isn't it? The mouse is dead. What a crazy... That's that there. But you know what I love about that entire story? How much money did Disney lose in the last, what did it say, 200 and how much? Because what? They're having a problem with their content because the people that you're talking about, us against them, we're not buying that crap. I have to tell you, I don't know anything really about the law, but if I were a shareholder, I would want a class action suit against Bob Iger because Bob is the reason it started. You hire... When I was, again, when I was at ABC, your name tags, this is again brought 2008, your name tag had the rainbow on it. Everybody's? Everybody's. Okay. Had a rainbow on it. And that was just to support LGBTQ. Okay, fine, fine. But to me, that said, the company is ideological and it will protect its own ideology. A news company should not have ideology other than the pursuit of truth. Let the chips fall where they may. Disney, it's very hard to run a creative company and not have people that live different lifestyles. That's fine. But you cannot build your company and have the people that have a different lifestyle than your audience telling, we're going to tell our story. No, you are here to tell the story that our audiences want to hear. The number one, that was the number one brand, maybe of all time. And their brand was, your children are safe with us. And they flushed that down the toilet without any regard for the fact that it took them almost a hundred years to build that brand. How is that not something actionable for people who had shares in the country? They just took it and turned it off. And quite honestly, I think the only thing you can do to fix it. I think it's so beyond fixing is you have to fire everything. You have to shut the whole thing down and turn it back on with new ownership that actually understands, because I don't know how you save that now. I want to show you something. I want to show you some numbers here, Tom. Check this out. Rob, can you pull up what I just sent to you real quick? So this is Disney's valuation in the last, whatever, 20 years, right? And so when you look at the Disney stock, it's important to know this, and it's important to know a timeline on whatever job responsibility, when he retired, when he returned. So check this out. This is Disney's valuation. Go up to the bottom where it shows year by year by year. Go a little lower, Rob. Go a little lower. Yeah, right there. Okay. Zoom in a little bit if you can. Okay. So 2024 valuation is what? $170 billion. 2023? $165 billion. 2022? $158 billion. It dropped 43%, 44% from 2021 at 281 down to $158 billion. And 2020, it's $328 billion. Jeez. 2019? $257 billion. 2018? $164 billion. And then you have $162 billion. So from 2015 to today, 10 years, the stock is flat. 2015 to today, the stock is flat. Now, these are important events to know. Do you know what day Disney Plus came out when it blew up? Disney. It was Disney Plus came out November 12, 2019. Look what happens to the stock. Wow. 60% is up. Look at 2020. What happens in 2020? COVID. Every streaming company blows up. Zoom valuation goes skyrocketing. Net, everybody is blown up with streaming in 2020 because everybody was locked in. They're watching homes. Now watch this. Bob Iger, when does he retire? He retires December 2021, which is a phenomenal time to retire. You've done a great job. He retires. Bob Shapek is doing what he's doing. When does he return? December of 2020. He returns November 20th of 2020. So look at from November 20th, 2020. It's what? $158 billion. The company has not changed anything. But what has he done? He's fired 7,000 people, which means OpEx has gone lower. Now, when did he become the CEO and the chairman of the company? October of 2005. Can you go down to October of 2005? So when he came in, $47 billion. As the CEO, he took it from $47 billion in 2005. 20 years later, it's worth what? $170 billion. He's probably the biggest dealmaker in the business we've seen. He has a lot of victories. But, one, him coming back is the same thing when a guy that's got a great career comes back and ruins his numbers and it looks pretty bad and the averages drop and all this other stuff. But also, at the same time, with Disney, the problem is the following. Glenn, when they make a movie or a catalog of movies, they produced that thing 3 years ago, 4 years ago, which means you have to sit there and know, if today we have a great idea for a movie that we're changing our philosophy, the market's not going to know about it for 3 to 5 years. So turning around those types of things takes a long time. They're not taking it on. They can't. Their entire employee roster now is full of radicals. You can't just say, oh, you know, I know you said we're going to change your kids. Yeah. But we don't want you to do that. You're still staying in your office and you can keep your team. How many of those 7,000 people getting fired do you think are on the left? Well, I think almost everybody at Disney is on the left. You're right, though. Like 98% they give money to the Democrats, 97%, 98%. Maybe I'm off by a couple percent. But, okay, so most of them are. How much of that firing do you think, Tom, is just decreasing OPEX versus how much of that firing is like, look, guys, we've got to go back to who loves Disney, who knows who the customer is. No. You don't think that's the focus? No. You think it's just decreasing OPEX? Bob Iger is the problem. He is the problem. Period. I mean, a lot of people around Hollywood agree with that. So to answer your question, Pat, I think this was a CFO firing. You know, this is basically not firing the CFO. This is like they are looking to take costs out of the business. Now, I think it was a legitimate thing. They're saying cost here, cost here, cost there. But I don't think it's a cleansing. I think it's just where can we squeeze and remove costs from the business. It's not where can we correct ideology. Where is this an opportunity to shift the ideology or shift the business? It's just how do we squeeze costs out of the business. The rest of Hollywood has been mocking Disney for the last two years, if you look carefully. You look at what people say. Now, there's Bob and his circle and everything. But the Hollywood reporter has been questioning the results at Disney. There's a lot of people that are rational about the business that have been questioning this. Shoot, South Park did an incredible episode on Kathleen Kennedy. And she spent the next four weeks trying to get that pulled with every muscle in her. I haven't seen it. What's it about? Oh, South Park destroyed. They make it look like that Kathleen Kennedy is in the process of owning Bob Iger. And she's taking and remaking every Disney film to remove any of the original tenants and to insert all of the. So all the. Can we show it? Everyone, everyone. But everyone in South Park has become a lesbian, you know, gay, black, handicapped, woke. And, you know, Hartman becomes a black woman, gay black woman. Yeah, I mean, it's really, really pointed. And when did this come out this year? Yeah, three months ago. Yeah, I haven't. That's the South Park kids that have now been replaced by them. And anyway, and the episode culminates in Bob Iger's office where a cowering Bob Iger is listening to Kathleen Kennedy lecture him about what they're going to doing. Don't you think the shareholders and what we should do that? No, Bob, we're doing this. OK, Kent, your company. And so it's it's heavy. But point is, this is just one part. Hollywood is pointing at Disney and saying this thing's out of control. When you even have something like Hollywood's not going conservative and they're not getting no, not getting their act together. But what you do see is islands in the stream are saying they're nuts. Well, look at look at all of the money. They own the greatest stories that have been told in. I mean, America and now Disney is the source of the Star Wars franchise, the superheroes, you know, the greatest family cartoons. And they have destroyed each of them one by one. They keep buying them. They bought the entire Fox library. Right. Which is with a mountain of debt. Bob Iger signed the check. No, excuse me. Signed the papers for the mountain of debt, which is part of the problem. They assimilated all of Hulu. They owe Comcast an ungodly sum this year for Hulu that they're not going to be able to write that check. So they're teetering on this mountain of debt and obligations assembling, as you correctly point out, the greatest catalog in history. And what was the biggest movie moneymaker last year? By far. Of last year. Sound of Freedom. You know who owned it? Disney. And they refused to release it. Oh, yeah. They bought it in the catalog. Angel Studios. It was sitting there. They wouldn't do it. They finally made a deal with Angel Studios, and Angel Studios released it. I asked this before. What would be a reason for you not to show a movie that is pointing out that children are getting sex traffic like nothing? Where's the motive of buying it and not showing it to everybody? Why would you do that? Well, they bought it in a catalog, so it's not like they went out and bought that one. Yeah. But I think you could say one of two things. You know, there's a lot of people that don't think that that's so bad anymore that you can have children and use them for sex. The other is they just don't think. They think everybody thinks like them, and they don't think this is a problem, and so it's not going to do well. Yeah. At the same time, they're making the same kind of decision saying, no, this is what people want, and they're bombing because it's not what people want. Yeah, like Cinderella. Was it Cinderella with that actress? Snow White. Snow White, where she's like, that guy's a stalker. We're changing the story to make it. Why are you changing the story? What are you talking about? You were asleep and poisoned, young lady. Yeah. He came and kissed you, and now you're alive, but he's a graper. It's like you'd be dead. Yeah. Shane, thank you. So I'll just say one thing about what we see on the back end or the external part of it, but then there's also the internal part of it, the employees and the culture. So we're seeing the back end of it when the movie comes out. We know that we're promoted. And I'll say, well, what's it like? What the conversation's like? And they say a lot of times when they get on the Zoom, it's mandatory or obligatory to put your pronouns in your bio or how you identify. I'm like, what do you mean? They're like, well, you've never had to do that? I'm like, no, not a thing to do here. Nobody has. But they literally have to say like she, her, he, hey, the, them, whatever the hell it is, right? Insert joke here. He, hey. You know, what a gay horse is he, right? He, hey. But it's like, but that's how you change the situation. We only see it on the back end over here. But internally, can you imagine if any of us were on these Zooms and we're like, oh, do you identify? It was like, I don't know, dude, like what's happening right now? But a lot of the people will go along because if they're not in that world, they're an ally. And you know, the whole allies. So if you like this clip and you want to watch another one, click right here. And if you want to watch the entire podcast, click right here. All right.