It's strange that it's happening so fast. This feels to me like he got himself in trouble doing something the Board did not like and forced him out. I suspect there are a lot of reporters wondering what happened. We'll be reading more about this in the coming months.
It could be that he is worried about the stock market implications of Coronavirus and wants to "lock in" the incredible stock price appreciation that took place during his tenure as CEO. That is often how a CEO's performance is summarized after the fact, and "presided over a tripling of Disney's stock price" sounds better than "a 2.2x" or whatever. In any case, his desire to step down has been widely telegraphed in the press and directly to investors in presentations. He was supposed to retire a few years ago but kept being asked to stay by the board. Now that the Fox deal is done and Disney+ launched successfully, it's as good a time as any to retire.
Just watched the CNBC interview (~10 minutes) with the Bobs. Although sooner than expected, BI seems to just want to focus on the creative disciplines at Disney and not deal with all of the day to day ops from all of the businesses. BC plans on following the course Iger set Disney on with their current assets and work from there. Iger will still be leaving at the end of 2021. According to them, none of the recent Disney news/performances have had any impact on the timing of this decision.
This happened surprisingly fast. Replacing Iger with Chapek, unfortunately makes perfect sense, and has been whispered about for a couple of years now.
Nearly every decision Chapek has made in his past leadership roles at Disney has made them significantly more profitable. At the same time, nearly every decision he's made has made the customer experience for their end users worse. It should be interesting to see how this plays out.
Readit News
Nearly every decision Chapek has made in his past leadership roles at Disney has made them significantly more profitable. At the same time, nearly every decision he's made has made the customer experience for their end users worse. It should be interesting to see how this plays out.