Today, in CEO Public Shit-Talking News: Two former heads of Disney are once again going after each other in front of the eyes of the world, as former CEOs/current Bobs Iger and Chapek have both made public comments this week disparaging the other. Chapek (who took over from Iger when he stepped down from the big chair for the first time in 2020, before getting abruptly fired and replaced by his old boss in 2022) made what’s presumably the first move in this latest salvo, as he promotes the upcoming release of his new memoir Behind The Castle Walls: My Thirty Years At The Happiest Place On Earth by rolling out excerpts from the book where he accuses Iger of setting him up to fail.
“My abrupt dismissal hurt my reputation, leaving those close to me, outsiders and some within the kingdom trying to figure out what I did wrong,” Chapek writes in his book. “The answer, again, is nothing.” Among other things, Chapek repeatedly accuses Iger of sabotaging him, while also writing that the long-time CEO timed his first departure from Disney in February of 2020 specifically to get out ahead of getting blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on the company’s fortunes. Per Deadline, Chapek—who took a lot of flack for several of the moves made during his tenure, notably his handling of Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, which managed to somehow piss off both the left and the right, basically simultaneously—calls himself a “disruptor” in the book, saying that he was fired before he could see any of his big ideas through.
Iger, meanwhile, has gone for what essentially amounts to an elaborate subtweet, giving an interview to the Harvard Business Review on Thursday where he framed the conversation around the perils of picking a bad successor, hint hint. “We had a process back in 2019 and ’20 when we chose my successor,” Iger said, not mentioning Chapek by name. “Looking back, perhaps it wasn’t as thorough as we thought, in part because we thought we knew the person extremely well.” Iger then went on to read Chapek for filth in the most indirect way possible: “I don’t think people want fearless leaders, but they don’t want fearful leaders,” he noted. “They want somebody that’s going to show some vulnerability, but never show that they’re frightened. We didn’t ask ourselves those questions, though maybe it would have been premature to do so. This was before COVID hit, right before COVID hit, for instance.”
Regardless of who is, or isn’t, a “fearful leader” here, it’s amusing to note that both men are currently taking responsibility for Iger’s second hand-picked successor, Josh D’Amaro. Iger’s hand in his selection is obvious, but Chapek couldn’t help but stick his head in here, too, writing in the book that, “I consistently suggested the idea of promoting him. He had been a relative unknown in the corporate hierarchy before I singled him out.”
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