Bob Iger said he hasn’t addressed when Disney will start advertising on X, formerly Twitter, again since he made the decision to pull back from the social media platform after owner Elon Musk amplified an antisemitic post.
“I have a lot of respect for Elon and what he’s accomplished. Not just you know, one business, but a few businesses. And we know Elon is larger than life in many respects, and that his name is very much tied to the companies he either founded or he owns, whether it’s Tesla or SpaceX, or now X. And by him taking the position that he took in quite a public manner, we just felt that the association with that position and Elon Musk and X was not necessarily a positive one for us. And we decided we would pull our advertising,” Iger said at the DealBook conference today during a Q&A.
Disney along with Comcast/NBCUniversal, Paramount Global, Warner Bros Discovery, Apple, Lionsgate and others pulled ads from X earlier this month. Musk endorsed an X/Twitter post in which a user wrote, “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The post pushed the “great replacement theory,” or the claim that Jewish people want to bring non-white undocumented people into western countries to reduce the influence of whites. The convicted killer in the Tree of Life synagogue shootings had embraced that theory.
After Musk’s post, progressive nonprofit Media Matter published a report showing company ads on X placed next to racist and incendiary comment. Musk sued the organization saying it had manipulated algorithms to create the images. He also ripped into advertisers who had jumped ship.
Iger said Disney entities from ABC News to ESPN are allowed to use X as a platform to communicate, but that’s it. Asked if he’s decided how long the ban would last, he said, “I haven’t. I haven’t really addressed it since the decision was made.”
The wide-ranging conversation with DealBook’s Andrew Ross Sorkin also touched on Disney’s ongoing legal battle with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and more sobering prospects for business in China going forward – for Disney and corporate America in general given strained relations between the two countries.
Iger said he’s optimistic about Shanghai Disney, which he opened during his first tenure as CEO (and plans to expand “relatively soon”). But “If you’re asking me whether I’m as optimistic as I once was about growing our business in China, the answer would be no. I think it’s pretty obvious that issues between our countries tensions have had an impact on business, not just Disney’s but on other companies as well.”
“I guess there’s to some extent, additional risk associated [with the theme park] but not all the capital that we put in is ours. We have a partner there. And so some of the risk is shared with a local entity. I’m not losing sleep over the risks that we’re taking there at this point. But again, I think I’m somewhat sobered about the prospects of our company and other companies long term.”
On Florida, Iger said, “the company, while I was gone, decided to take a position against the Don’t Say Gay bill that was moving through the Florida Legislature. I won’t comment about what I would have done or not done, but the company took that position against it. The governor got very, very angry at the company when it took that position and decided to punish the company by basically stripping its rights to a special district around Disney World that had been in place for decades
“The question wasn’t even about the [bill, later law]. It was about does a company have a right to free speech. And if it exercises its right to free speech, it should not face retribution.” As for the lawsuit Disney filed, DeSantis has said he’s against granting special privileges.
Iger said he’d like to talk with the governor but hasn’t. “I offered at some point through intermediaries, the ability to have a conversation with him, but he did not, he did not take me up on that offer.”
More to come…
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