Who is Josh D'Amaro and Why is He Disney's New CEO?

17:55Josh D'Amaro:100%. Think about how they launch IP from the parks, how they bring IP into the parks. When they're launching a new Galaxy's Edge in some country, Josh is talking to George Lucas. He's talking to J.J. Abrams. He's talking to the people who are developing this IP. So he has the relationships with talent, But he doesn't have the expertise and the gut to say this is the type of content that we should invest in. And I think that's important to point out here, Peter. Just because Disney picked another Parks guy and just because Parks is clearly the profit center of this company over the next 10 years, especially entertainment throughout theatrical and television and streaming goes through this transition period, does not mean that Disney works as a non-media company.

18:40Josh D'Amaro:The media is so important to it.

18:42Peter Kafka:And so they do need you need an important you need a person who understands media doesn't necessarily have to be Dana Walden. Right. There are a lot of people in Hollywood who have relationships with talent and are fancy themselves good at picking movies and TV shows. Right. There are other people available for that work if she doesn't stick around. And I will point out, and I always love pointing this out, that when Bob Iger initially was Disney CEO, the savvy take was he is not going to be Disney CEO for long because he doesn't have any creative capacity, because he is a suit. Yes, he, in theory, came up through talent because he was a weatherman.

19:19Peter Kafka:But really, he's a stuff suit. He'll never have the creative capacity that Michael Eisner, who he was replacing, was. And so he's a short term guy. He's not going to be having this job, obviously. And now he's considered this great, great talent whisperer. So it is possible that Josh DeMauro has that capacity and or can grow into that capacity.

19:39Josh D'Amaro:Absolutely. And I mean, if you look at Bob Iger, he strikes this very strong friendship that he loves to talk about with Steve Jobs circa 2006. Right. That leads to a lot of the Pixar stuff and kind of the early distribution deals on iTunes puts Disney ahead of the game. But also if you look at what he did, you know, he buys Lucasfilm and brings in Kathleen Kennedy. He buys Marvel and there's Kevin Feige. Like he has this team of directors that he works with who he says, you go and figure out what this IP is going to look like and I'm still the operator. I think if you also, again, going back to that comparison of what we see happening at Netflix, which I think is a structure Disney is likely to copy.

20:20Josh D'Amaro:down to the point that up until today, when we're recording this and the news was announced that Josh is coming in, there was still conversation about whether it would be a co-CEO between Josh and Dana. I think if you look at who Dana relies on, she also has someone like John Landgraaf, who's the head of FX. And that's akin to Bella Bajaria having a Casey Bloys coming in if they get Warner Brothers Discovery. This idea that one person is going to be the talent whisperer or the operational guru doesn't make sense in 2026 and certainly doesn't make sense for a company like Disney. And so I think that Josh DeMauro will continue to focus on turning this very untangible adoration for IP into tangible money at the parks level and the experiences level, but still rely on Dana and John Landgraf and others to make sure that the content is still keeping that attention long term.

21:15Peter Kafka:We'll be right back with Julia Alexander. But first, a word from a sponsor.

21:24Peter Kafka:And we're back. I want to go back to how this, keep going back to how this is a repeat again. Six years ago that Bob Iger said, I don't want to be a CEO of Disney anymore. I've always said I'm going to leave. I never left. But I've decided randomly weeks before the pandemic comes to America that I no longer want to run this company. Like we said, Bob Chapek did not work out for a bunch of reasons. One is he just may never have been the right person to run that company. Another is that Bob Iger stuck around not very far in the background and kept telling everyone what a terrible job Chapek was doing, which doesn't help.

22:01Peter Kafka:But the other problem was that Bob Iger created a bunch of problems for Bob Chapek. He had he had done this big pivot to streaming, laid out a ton of expenditures, did a bunch of things to ramp up production. You know, we're going to churn out a ton of Marvel stuff. We're going to churn out a ton of Star. We're going to have a Star Wars show on every week, et cetera. Bob Lager comes back after pushing Chapek out and goes back to immediately sort of fix. He's describing it as fixing the problems Bob Chapek created, but they're really Bob Iger's problems that he created that Bob Iger has then had to go to sort of unwind for the most part.

22:42Peter Kafka:Long-winded way of saying, has Bob Iger left Josh DeMauro a bunch of problems to solve or has he put Disney sort of at least on solid footing? Because the stock has not performed under Bob Iger. So how is the company itself doing?

22:58Josh D'Amaro:Yeah, the stock is an interesting question because if you go back the last 20 years, the stock hasn't moved. just as someone who is a Disney stockholder for a long time. Like it's not a great stock to necessarily have. That's not financial advice. I think what Bob Iger has left Josh Jamar in 2026 versus what he's left Bob Chapek in 2020 is a stark reality versus a optimistic hope. When we talked about streaming, you remember this, Peter, you covered this, you still cover it. streaming was like this reinvention of a business and of a behavior. You remember this? It was this idea that like, all of a sudden, you weren't just going to have a transition of customers, you're going to have a new customer, you were going to have a new type of content, a new type of monetization.

23:49Josh D'Amaro:And I think very quickly, within the first few years after the pandemic, once we saw the pull forward activity kind of cease, when people could start going back outside and not just sit in front of their television sets, what we started to see was that it was a business. You could bring sports over to an extent, it would bring some people over. You could create content that might juice some of the engagement that you were seeing. But overall, it wasn't creating new behaviors. It was just establishing old behaviors works in a different format. That's really hard to square with analysts on Wall Street when you've spent the last four or five years telling them that streaming is the future of your business, Which is why, by the way, we've seen Bob Iger and Jimmy Pataro and people like Brian Roberts at NBCUniversal really go back to saying, well, we still love the paid TV business.

24:37Josh D'Amaro:We still love the bundle. We still want to be in here because it's not just going to be streaming. Bob Chapek had this moment, the end of 2020 going to 2021, where he told investors and analysts during a very hyped up investor day that Disney was going to quadruple its streaming subscribers over the next three years. and I remember talking to a bunch of Disney executives and they went, why the hell would he say that? Like subscriber numbers don't mean anything. You can get subscribers, low quality, cheap subscribers pretty easily if you go to a bunch of -

25:08Peter Kafka:Well, that was the era, right? When companies are being rewarded or the theory was they'd be rewarded for doing what Netflix did, which is add as many subscribers as possible. That was a big thing. Again, when Iger kicked off Disney streaming thing was how many subscribers do they have? What does the number come from? It was very subscriber focused. That was the metric you needed to give Wall Street. Now it has moved on to actual profit and no one cares about subscribers. In fact, Netflix and everyone else no longer gives out subscriber numbers on the regular.

25:38Josh D'Amaro:Yes, this was the first quarter that Disney did not report subscribers. But to your point exactly, there was this idea that streaming was going to be defined by how many subscribers you had. You could spend whatever you want. It didn't really matter. there's a lot of I would argue similarities to what's happening in the AI industry right now and kind of this idea of just grow grow grow grow and we'll figure out revenue later and then it all came crashing down it all came crashing down after the great Netflix correction and all of a sudden Wall Street said okay well are you making money on this and are you making by the way not just money but 20 profit margin like cable money are you making cable money on this product and so that That was a period of time where Bob Chapek had to navigate truly outlandish expectations that he also set for himself, that Bob Iger left him with, but he set for himself.

26:28Josh D'Amaro:He was trying to transition the company organizationally into something that looked more like Google than it did an entertainment company. Something that I think David Ellison at Paramount, by the way, is going to also struggle with because it's really hard to turn an entertainment and media company into a tech company.

26:42Peter Kafka:But also this idea that if we just keep saying that it's a tech company and you keep saying that Steve Jobs was your mentor and that you let other people understand that Larry Ellison's your father. And so you're a tech genius. And obviously you're going to transform Paramount into a tech company. That's easy to do.

26:59Josh D'Amaro:But this idea that that's what Chapek had. There was an optimism. There was a hope that this was going to revolutionize everything. Now streaming is a manageable business, to your point. What DeMauro has is a stark reality of, oh, we're not going to compete with YouTube. We're not going to compete with Instagram as they come to TV sets. We're not going to compete with TikTok. We're going to invest in OpenAI. Hopefully some of these Sora edits that we're bringing to Disney Plus are going to engage people. We're going to hope that some kind of theatrical strategy, we just lean on the avatars and the marvels, makes sense.

27:35Josh D'Amaro:We're going to hope that some of this China activity from the theatrical side comes back. But we don't have the optimism that we once did that streaming is going to solve all of our woes in the cable business declining and wiping out billions of dollars in profit. What we do have is a fundamental reality about what we can do with the parks business and what people are willing to spend on. So I think there's a perfect time for Iger to step back because he comes in and says, I'm going to course correct my last successor. I'm going to pick a new guy. But also I'm leaving at a time when there's not this optimism that whoever comes in is going to solve the entertainment and media business.

28:14Josh D'Amaro:It's an expectation of the guy who comes in is going to get us through this transitional period.

28:18Peter Kafka:We'll be right back with Julia Alexander. But first, a word from a sponsor.

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29:21Peter Kafka:And we're back. Let's talk about the timing of Iger's departure. Long running joke, because it really wasn't a joke that Iger kept not leaving Disney for, it seems like decades. He would say, oh, my new contract has been extended, but that's the last time I'm doing it. And trust me, I'm going to leave. And then he never left. And even when he did leave, he still came back. And now he supposedly is leaving for good. And even that was still news last week when the journal basically said they're picking someone next week. And also Bob Iger really is going to leave and he's not even going to stick around basically until the end of the year.

29:52Peter Kafka:He's going to get out of here. Two great lines in that journal article. One is that Bob Iger has told multiple associates he would like to spend more of his time and energy on other things such as sailing his new and larger super yacht, the Aquarius. So that's just a great line when you say, what are you going to do instead of being a CEO? Well, I'm going to spend more time, not with my family, with my super yacht. It's great. I don't really need a comment for you on And I just think it's interesting. The other, I think, more interesting thing to me was Iger has told people close to him he's ready to move on from the grind of being CEO and was frustrated by conflicts at ABC over the brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel.

30:35Peter Kafka:What do you think that means? Do you think that means he didn't like dealing with the Trump administration and Brendan Carr and all the BS associated with that? Do you think that means there's some internal fight about how Kimmel was handled that frustrated him? I mean, he is the CEO, so I'm a little confused about why he'd be frustrated by conflicts at the network.

31:01Josh D'Amaro:I think it's twofold. I genuinely think the photo I keep thinking about, Peter, to describe how I'm looking at media and tech and kind of the state of business across the board in 2026 is the photo of all the tech CEOs at Trump's inauguration. It was like the capitulation photo before capitulation even happened. And it was that idea of they know that in this moment of AI disruption of major M &A activity that they need to bend the knee in a way they didn't have to before or they didn't feel like they had to before. I think if you're Bob Iger, you've done this for 15, 16, 17, 18 years. You're tired.

31:42Josh D'Amaro:Like, I don't want to do this. I don't want to have to pretend like I want to go to the Melania premiere because I want to get this next deal through. I don't want to pretend that I like Ron DeSantis and have to get this thing done so we can keep our tax break in Florida or whatever it might be. So I think that is a big part of it. I think he's over it. The amount of jokes I hear from Disney executives about Bob Iger basically waiting out the repairs on his super yacht until he was ready to retire. And once they were done, he was just going to go and do that. And that's all he really wanted is quite funny and quite true.

32:13Josh D'Amaro:But I also think I was talking to an executive yesterday about ABC and we were talking about the pros and cons of tomorrow and others. And I said, you know, there's this question about ABC. Like, what is it? Like, like the ESPN spinoff conversation happens all the time. And we kind of what's happening with Marvel and Lucasfilm. We kind of what's happening with Disney Plus and Hulu and Fubo. What's going on with ABC? And they made a really interesting point, which was, one, they had no insight. But two, this idea that Josh DeMauro does not have the rose-tinted glasses of ABC and ABC News that Bob Iger did.

32:48Josh D'Amaro:He did not come up as a weather boy on the channel. He did not come up from being president of ABC. And this question of when do you unload a major asset to invest in an asset of the future, whether that is a video game publisher, which people have speculated about, something like an EA before that went private, of course, or another asset entirely. Josh tomorrow is going to have less attachments to saying, OK, let's get rid of it. Let's let's change this. Let's figure this out. And I think that's also important. This moment, even more so than JPEG, is this transitional reality of streaming is not going to save us.

33:24Josh D'Amaro:Parks is going to get us through. But what do we do with our entertainment and media business? And so I think when Bob Iger says, I don't want to deal with this, it is a component enough, I do not want to deal with the Trump administration in the slightest. But also, I don't want to be the person that has to figure out layoffs and M &A and go through all this again. Like, I'm tired and I want to go sit on my yacht.

33:46Peter Kafka:Julia, this is great. You're such an expert on this in general, but you're also an expert on Disney because of all the media reporters I talk to all the time and many of them on this show. I don't think any of them have worked at Disney recently. And you did. You did a strategery for them. Just briefly, tell me about, well, don't tell me about the experience working there. What did you learn working at Disney that helps you think about the company today that someone else might not understand? Hmm.

34:18Josh D'Amaro:What can I say that will not violate an NDA? I, the main thing, to use a really bad analogy i didn't realize how hard it was to turn a company that's like a naval sized battleship around in a tiny little harbor right this idea of if if netflix you know five ten years ago wanted to change something wanted to pivot they could pretty easily you know they're getting much bigger they're clearly trying to buy wonder brothers discovery or that they're they are buying it. But it's easier for them as like a tugboat to turn around in a harbor and say, okay, we're going to pivot. We're going to go and do this.

34:58Josh D'Amaro:For a company like Disney to do any type of pivot, whether it is streaming, whatever it might be, AI, user-generated content, it's such an effort because they're just such a large enterprise. And I don't think I appreciated how complicated that is. And the way to your question, Peter, about how it informs my thinking about and my analysis of other companies to your point about David Ellison saying, look, oh, we're a tech company now. And my father's Larry Ellison and we're a tech company. Way easier to say, way easier to go in and say, we're going to be an engineer first, you know, innovative company when you're dealing with thousands, tens of thousands of employees who come from kind of this antiquated media business.

35:40Josh D'Amaro:And so I think that's the thing I think about with Disney, which is this idea of they know they need to change. They know they need to change faster than they're changing. And they also know that every minute that they're not changing their strategy, someone like Netflix or Instagram or TikTok is. And I don't think I appreciated how almost impossible it is for a company that size to do so in the time needed to ensure that that change reflects the immediacy of what needs to get done.

36:11Peter Kafka:Well, I'm glad that you left Disney so you can speak to me on my podcast now. Julia Alexander, you're awesome. You guys can read her over at Puck. She publishes all the time. Thanks, Julia.

36:23Josh D'Amaro:Thanks, Peter.

36:24Peter Kafka:Thanks again to Julia Alexander. She's excellent. Go read her stuff. Thanks again to Charlotte Silver for helping us get this one out to you quickly. Thanks to our sponsors and thanks to you guys. We have a fun episode next week. See you then.